Change Crisis

The 12 essays in Voices of Change, by 15 inspiring youth leading the climate change movement in Canada, explore the most challenging issues around climate change, from sustainability to activism. The contributors, from all across the nation, describe their own work developing successful initiatives that have positively brought about environmental change.

Grace Under Pressure: Leading Through Change and Crisis focuses on three things leaders need to do when change and adversity strike: take care of their people, take care of themselves, and prepare for the future. And they must do it all with a sense of grace—calmly, collectedly, and compassionately. This book provides a roadmap for leaders seeking to create community as they meet the coming challenges with dignity and grace.

In this personal, moving essay, youth activist Hannah Testa shares with listeners how she led a grassroots political campaign to successfully pass state legislation limiting single-use plastics and how she influenced global businesses to adopt more sustainable practices. Through her personal journey, listeners can learn how they, too, can follow in Hannah's footsteps and lower their carbon footprint by simply refusing single-use plastics.

Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics.

Scott Proposki's storytelling helps us understand beekeeping and the amazing metaphor he weaves together with business during an extraordinary time in history. Scott examines the critical art of thinking and stinging point, as learning questions and opens other people's minds, which can position you for excellence in understanding some crucial business strategies.

Climate change is the biggest existential crisis that humankind has faced. In the last 100 years, we have ruined the carbon cycle using fossil fuels, namely coal, petroleum, and natural gas, to build our civilization, not taking into account the catastrophic impacts climate change can cause. Even though our lives depend on it, most of us don't know about the causes and how we will be able to tackle this existential threat. This book gives you alternative answers on what steps governments, companies, and individuals need to take.

For decades, our world has understood that we are on the brink of an apocalypse—yet the only implemented solutions have been small and convenient, feel-good initiatives that avoid unpleasant truths about the root causes of our impending disaster. Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen argue that we must reconsider the origins of the consumption crisis and the challenges we face in creating a survivable future. Longstanding assumptions about economic growth and technological progress—the dream of a future of endless bounty—are no longer tenable.

Minding the Climate investigates this problem in the neuroscience of decision-making. Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD, points to the evolution of the human brain during eons of resource scarcity. The brain adapted to prioritize short-term survival over more uncertain long-term outcomes. But the resulting behavioral architecture is poorly suited to the present, when scarcity is a lesser concern and slow-moving challenges like environmental issues present the greatest danger.

In After Cooling, Eric Dean Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s — when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress — to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland.

In 2015, a group of young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel-based energy system.

Growing up in Iraq, Yasmin Ali regularly experienced power cuts - ironic for a country rich in oil and sunshine. Now as an engineer working in energy, Yasmin has a deep appreciation for what these resources mean for our lives. In Power Up she takes us on a journey across the globe to reveal the bigger picture, from solar panel farms shimmering in the desert to power stations hidden deep in the mountains. We discover where we get energy from, how it is moved and used around the world - and why we need to understand the whole system if we want to transition towards a clean, green future.

The introduction of new medicines has dramatically improved the quantity and quality of individual and public health, while contributing trillions of dollars to the global economy. In spite of these past successes - and indeed because of them - our ability to deliver new medicines may be quickly coming to an end. Moving from the 20th century to the present, A Prescription for Change reveals how changing business strategies combined with scientific hubris have altered the way new medicines are discovered, with dire implications for both health and the economy.

Great Adaptations is a call to action. It presses home the need for adaptations that are ecologically restorative and socially just. It examines how adaptation is framed, unpicks the contested notion of deep adaptation, explores the potential of transformative adaptation, and questions the legitimacy of the "reassuring stories" that still dominate mainstream climate discourse.

Every few weeks in British politics, a columnist will reach for the word ‘unprecedented’ as a cabinet minister resigns or yet another inquiry is called. We have become so accustomed to turmoil that it is impossible to take a breath and see where we are headed. In this magisterial history, respected broadcaster and journalist Steve Richards puts the recent chaos into context and takes a step back to explore ten critical moments that have shaped modern Britain.

Forty years ago, the park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey into the Alaskan Arctic, to the Noatak headwaters. He was astonished by the abundant wildlife, the strange landscape, and its otherworldly light—how the “frequent rain showers glow like lemonade poured out of the sky.” Taken with a new sense of wonder, he began to explore the North on several trips in the 1980s.

In Climate Hope, journalist David Geselbracht blends in-depth research, expert interviews, and on-the-ground reporting in multiple countries, revealing remarkable efforts to identify the causes and impacts of climate change—and devise crucial ways to address them. The scale of the challenge is clear in the range of fields he covers, from glaciology and climate science to law and diplomacy. But in drawing these approaches together, he shares stories of hope, awe, and wonder that encourage us to confront this long-term, world-warping phenomenon with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.

Chocolate is the center of a massive global industry worth billions of dollars annually, yet its future in our modern world is currently under threat. In Chocolate Crisis, Dale Walters discusses the problems posed by plant diseases, pests, and climate change, looking at what these mean for the survival of the cacao tree. Walters takes listeners to the origins of the cacao tree in the Amazon basin of South America, describing how ancient cultures used the beans produced by the plant, and follows the rise of chocolate as an international commodity over many centuries.

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

Whether planned or unexpected, change presents leaders with their toughest sustained challenges - regardless of the leader's seniority or the organization's size. For many leaders, change brings drama - and the replaying of familiar stories. In A Question of Leadership, Keith Leslie provides a wide range of illustrative case studies derived from both research and his firsthand experience in the public and private sectors as a former partner at both Deloitte and McKinsey.

Will I ever feel like "me" again? Am I on the right track? How will I reach my dreams and find happiness? Based on her comprehensive qualitative research, Suzy Ross identifies 13 phases of personal transformation - processes that form an upright figure eight - to guide you along your path toward wholeness. Listeners will learn the map by entering into the stories of two ordinary individuals who face life-changing experiences that bring them into and through the depths of crisis to emerge transformed and whole.