Climate Champions

15 Women Fighting for Your Future

Rachel Sarah, Chicago Review Press (MAR 14) Hardcover $16.99 (224pp) 978-1-64160-700-1, BIOGRAPHY

Rachel Sarah’s Climate Champions profiles fifteen women who are fighting against climate change from every avenue of science activism.

Covering journalists, professors, conservation biologists, and researchers—many of them from marginalized groups—and featuring sidebars about other trailblazers doing similar work, this book introduces big topics in accessible language. It breaks down concepts like “systemic change” using everyday metaphors—in that case, comparing it to the system one uses for cleaning their room, with chores that, if they were done in a different order, would represent a systemic change, just like those that governments should consider when aiming for developing more sustainable infrastructures. And in a chapter about prescribed burns and their importance to Indigenous people is a sidebar explaining the science behind “good fires” and how they are vital for clearing the brush for new growth.

Discussions of how race and identity impact climate work factor in, too—two of the subjects created online organizations concerned with being Black in the sciences. These women confront the social justice elements that are implicit in climate talks, with reminders that the countries and regions that experience the harshest effects of climate change are themselves doing the least to exacerbate the issue. And a focus is put on activism at young ages, as with a woman who created a petition to change the dress code at her middle school to inspire her classmates toward change. Such stories are vibrant and cognizant of the struggles that activists face along the way.

Listing resources including climate organizations and podcasts, Climate Champions is engaging and intersectional, introducing fifteen powerful women who are working toward a more sustainable planet.