No Planet B
A Teen Vogue Guide to the Climate Crisis
If you haven’t read Teen Vogue lately, you might be surprised to learn that pieces about climate change are among its fashion and pop culture pages. Editor Lucy Diavolo collects thirty-one of these impassioned articles and interviews with young activists in No Planet B. The anthology articulates issues of environmental and social justice and demonstrates the increasing strength of youth-led climate change movements.
The first section covers the evidence and implications of climate change, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and how Indigenous communities and animals are coping in the melting Arctic. The writing is punchy, opinionated, and clear. Case studies, as with Ruth Hopkins’s report from the Lakota Sioux reservations in South Dakota, relay how damaging longer wildfire seasons and intensified snow seasons are on vulnerable, isolated populations.
Profiles of young climate activists and their work include “shy and serious” Greta Thunberg, who’s “famous for being ruthlessly frank with the global elite,” and Kentuckian Destine Grigsby, who has led Green New Deal protests at Senator Mitch McConnell’s offices. Other teenagers are seen filing lawsuits, organizing strikes, pressuring schools and corporations, and using social media and their growing demographic and economic powers for change.
The links between climate change and “class, race, and colonization” are highlighted in strong pieces describing environmental effects on marginalized people in Puerto Rico, Malawi, Southeast Asia, and the remote Inuit community of Nain. Kareeda Kabir’s poignant description of how climate change is causing malnutrition and erasing gains in the educational and economic status of Bangladeshi women is particularly wrenching.
Generation Z was “born into catastrophe,” inheriting a degraded planet that’s endangered by climate change, where poor and marginalized people bear the worst effects. The energy and steely-eyed determination of their activism, as documented in No Planet B, is a source of hope for the future of Planet A.
Reviewed by
Rachel Jagareski
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.
