Climate Resilience
How We Keep Each Other Safe, Care for Our Communities, and Fight Back Against Climate Change
Kylie Flanagan’s ecological book Climate Resilience assembles diverse viewpoints on solving the climate crisis and on making communities more sustainable.
Drawing on interviews with thirty-nine climate justice leaders and centering marginalized voices, this book espouses a new vision of local environmental stewardship. Indeed, its subjects have worked in communities as diverse as Louisville, New Orleans, and California, supporting the notion that the innovations of front-line communities often go unrecognized. And it maps out different strategies for fighting climate change, covering techniques like organizing and pursuing urban cooling by planting more plants in concrete jungles.
The book’s chapter-length interviews begin with introductions to their subjects, who speak in direct terms to the audience about their environmental justice successes, failures, challenges, and hopes for the future. Each speaker proves to be a thoughtful and insightful guide, working as part of a greater whole. At an individual level, these speakers explain how to go about urban farming, being more energy efficient, or resisting fossil fuels.
These interviews are organized under thematic banners (people power, community cultural strategy, and economic regeneration among them), and each chapter ends with a resilience tool to put its lessons into action. In this way, the book teaches different approaches to addressing climate change, including saving seeds, pooling resources in collectives, and pursuing sophisticated grassroots and institutional strategies for shifting public opinion. And the book’s ending reemphasizes the importance of listening to a multiplicity of perspectives, supporting this with a litany of questions to ask oneself before embarking on one’s own climate campaign.
The instructive ecological book Climate Resilience reveals what people on the front lines in neighborhoods around the country are doing to address the climate crisis.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
