If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?

Here’s the TL;DR:

• Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, which was based on users having control over their data
• Tools at that time began giving creators the power to decide what license they wanted to release their content under, including permissions about how it could be shared, used, or remixed
• Because the people who made platforms back then were users and creators themselves, they thought about the long term and wanted to be able to preserve people’s work
• After lots of corporate shuffling, Flickr ended up in the hands of a family-owned company, SmugMug, and they made the Flickr Foundation to preserve public photos for the next 100 years
• NASA’s images should only be on a service where they can be stored in full resolution, for the long term, dedicated to the public domain — which the other social media apps of today can’t do

The Photographic Record

First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.

Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)

With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.

In Focus

Flickr wasn't a social platform first — it was a photography platform first. That means it was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot. People started building communities around the then-new idea of using tags to help them find content by topics online — an idea that would directly influence the creation of hashtags on Twitter a few years later.

Another core idea of the time was a firm belief in open data: people should own and control their own work. Eventually, some experts (including a then-teenage Aaron Swartz, who we'd later talk about in the early days of Markdown) created a set of standards called Creative Commons licenses, now maintained by an organization of the same name. Flickr made it easy for users to describe what permissions people had for reusing or remixing any photos they posted. (I was helping out with a blogging platform back then, and I think we were the first tool to support this stuff. It felt like a big deal at the time!)

People's Flickr images started popping up in corporate PowerPoint presentations or commercial advertising almost immediately. A little sidebar: the incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators. That might be legal by most readings of the licenses, but if you have hundreds of billions of dollars and don't think you should at least have a conversation with the photographers whose work you're using, you're probably an asshole.

Archival Prints

Our close-knit community of people building the new era of web apps was keenly aware that our users were creating culture. This realization brought a huge amount of responsibility — not just in enabling users to express themselves, but in thinking about the long term for people's ownership of their works. Public institutions had just begun to use these platforms, which meant that the content being shared wasn't just a nice picture to look at: it might be socially or even historically significant.

What happened in the years that followed was… a lot of corporate machinations. Flickr got bought by Yahoo. Flickr's founders left Yahoo. Yahoo got bought by Verizon. You can imagine how all of that went; the details aren't all that important, except to say that by the time Instagram launched, Flickr had begun to fade into obscurity. People were focused on mobile phones instead of the desktop, on sharing square images with filters instead of full-resolution photography, and on connecting socially instead of caring about photos as art or a cultural record. Nobody would post the canonical historical photo of an event with a Valencia filter on it. Most of Flickr's users moved on, rarely checking their old accounts — until a family-owned photo service named SmugMug bought the service from Yahoo. A human-scale operation with some actual heart and a love of photography was a much better home for the platform than some random division of Verizon.

Commons Sense

In 2022, the new team at SmugMug that owned Flickr decided to focus on Flickr’s larger place in culture. Many major institutions around the world had chosen to archive their public photos on Flickr because of its superior support for high-resolution imagery, its unique ability to declare explicit legal licenses (including public domain licenses), and its long-term reputation for reliably hosting content without any of the harms or abuses that typical social networks had inflicted on users. Museums around the world had entire catalogs on the platform, and governments routinely used it to document their public events. When I had a photo taken at an official White House event with President Obama, his team sent me the final image afterward by sending me a Flickr link; when Zohran Mamdani met King Charles, the NYC Mayor’s Office shared those pictures on Flickr, too.

The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world. (You should absolutely donate to support the Flickr Foundation in their mission to preserve these vital public resources for many years in the future.)

It’s in this context that NASA has long been sharing its imagery on Flickr, for all of its missions — not just Artemis II. There’s even a special section for NASA on The Commons. And since everything is provided in incredibly high-resolution and has every single detail about the photo and how it was taken, it’s possible to combine the information about the photo with other data and create amazing resources like this beautiful timeline of the entire mission. You can see Hank Green’s wonderful narration of his inspiration and creative journey behind the timeline right here:

Why Not With Us?

Anybody who’s read my site for a while knows that I’m a huge proponent of owning your own website, and having your own content live there. Shouldn’t NASA, of all institutions, have their photos live on their own nasa.gov website? Well, yes! But.

One complication is that many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.

In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades. The SmugMug team has been very thoughtful in managing both their business and their technical infrastructure in order to sustain Flickr’s public archives for years to come. (Though, as mentioned, you should still donate to ensure they can keep doing so!)

What’s more painful is the more recent threats to public stewardship of this kind of content. The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

We’ll be glad to have archives like Flickr’s in the future, and people around the world will be glad for its place in archiving even much more mundane aspects of culture.

Taking off

I was honored to get to reflect on my long history with Flickr, and with online community, in an interview with my old friend Jessamyn West, for the Flickr Foundation’s blog. In a conversation that unspooled over a few months, I think we covered so many of the themes that resonated in what I’ve mentioned here, and what struck me most was how much I wanted a new generation of people on the internet to have their own version of the communities and experiences that we got to have when sites like Flickr were first being made. People still cherish those values!

The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades. Then, others who do some of the most ambitious and astounding things imaginable can build on that work to inspire us. And then, some more regular folks can build on top of that and help us waste a little bit of time just clicking around on something fun. That’s what the internet is supposed to be about!

This isn’t just about recounting old web lore — this is about explaining the internet we have right now. Hank’s timeline site is brand new, entertaining a whole new generation, and probably the majority of the audience who are looking at it weren’t even born when Flickr was first conceived. But the reason he can build that site is because of the values and the inventiveness of the team and community who created a platform like Flickr — and because those kinds of values are durable. They might not be as loud or flashy, but they are still everywhere, quietly enabling a lot of the things we enjoy most every day.

Public dollars helped make a fascinating community, then public dollars enabled a breathtaking journey into space, and then a public commons helped a creator make a novel way to explore that journey. Lots of people chose, over and over, to be generous with their genius. These are all gifts that a bunch of strangers gave each other, over hundreds of thousands of miles, and many years. Inspiration is all around us!

Guest article by Denise Baden

I am a professor of sustainable practice, a writer, and the founder of the Green Stories project. This has run 21 free writing competitions and led to numerous publications—some of which are featured here.

I am delighted to contribute a guest post of a top 20 list of fiction to inspire climate action. The Books List has previously published similar collections, including apocalyptic fiction, eco‑thrillers, and climate fiction. The dominant message running through most of these is stark: if we fail to act quickly on climate change, we face a dark and dangerous future. While this message is not wrong, there is a risk in relying so heavily on negativity. My research suggests that a more positive approach—one that shows what we can do—is often more effective in encouraging climate action. Fear can motivate some people, but it can just as easily lead to avoidance, denial, or the scapegoating of marginalised groups.

Another factor that limits the potential of much climate fiction to inspire positive action, is that most are targeted at those who are already aware of climate and risk ‘preaching to the converted.’

The books that follow are not only compelling reads; they also inspire actions and values that can move us closer to a sustainable future and further away from climate tipping points. I begin with four novels that aren’t explicitly cli-fi and which target mainstream readers. Following these are a series of novels and anthologies that I class as ‘thrutopian’: set in the future or near future and which map a pathway to a sustainable society. I go on to include fiction that helps us to see the world differently. What we read in our teens can have a disproportionate influence on our values as this is the age when we’re especially impressionable, so the next four novels all fit into the young adult category. We have to walk the talk so I finish with a children’s book noted for its sustainable production.

Stark by Ben Elton

Ben Elton rose to fame in the UK as a stand-up comic, taking swipes at the system, then turned his talents to writing. His first novel, Stark, is set in Australia and follows the hapless Colin “CD” Dryden as he falls for an eco‑activist and becomes entangled in a plot involving a group of techno‑utopians who genuinely believe there is a Planet B. In hindsight, the novel feels uncannily prescient. Elton satirises the more toxic aspects of capitalism and corporate greed, while also exposing our own complicity. In a series of short vignettes, he hints at how ordinary consumers are tied into environmental destruction through pensions, investments, and everyday purchasing decisions. One that stuck with me is a story about Dave who was a water birth but died within an hour. It turns out that Dave is a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. From that point on I made sure always to buy dolphin-friendly tuna! Equally energetic and entertaining is Gridlock, a thriller that takes aim at our obsession with cars, and This Other Eden, a hilarious romantic thriller that skewers the media. It was these novels that triggered my concern about our environment and changed my outlook forever, all while making me laugh.

Habitat Man by D.A. Baden

Habitat Man is written for readers who enjoy romantic comedies or cosy mysteries. Rather than leaning into the dystopian tropes often associated with climate fiction, it gently weaves sustainability into the story—functioning as a form of subtle product placement for green alternatives and nature‑friendly values.

The story follows Tim, who, on finding himself fifty, single, and stuck in a job he hates, embarks on a quest for love and meaning. Prompted by a life‑coaching session, he sets up the Green Garden Consultancy, offering advice on how to turn ordinary gardens into thriving habitats for wildlife—earning him the nickname “Habitat Man” from his friend Jo.

Jo plays the role of comedy sidekick, spurring Tim on, but she also has her own sideline: inventing a “random recipe generator”. This becomes an ultimate cookery challenge that goes viral, requiring participants to cook using only randomly selected ingredients, plus one from the joker column—which might be anything from nettles to edible insects.

Research suggests that this kind of gentle seeding of sustainable practices can be highly effective. One study found that 98% of readers reported more pro‑environmental attitudes one month after finishing the book, with 60% adopting at least one of the greener alternatives mentioned. Sustainability is embedded in key plot points: when Tim digs up a body in a garden, the storyline later leads to a natural burial scene, which inspired several readers to amend their wills to specify a natural burial themselves. In this way, the novel demonstrates how a light, engaging story can be a powerful catalyst for real‑world change.

Godstorm by Solitaire Townsend

Godstorm is set in an alternative history in which the Roman Empire never fell and is powered by oil—known as “Gaea’s Blood”. The author describes it as “a climate fiction book where climate change is never mentioned”. The reader is swept along by a brutal tale involving a gladiatrix‑turned‑governess and a kidnapped child. It’s not until the second half of the novel, when the action shifts from Londinium to the Amazon, that the allegorical dimensions become apparent, as illustrated by the following extracts:

“They don’t even teach you oil comes from the ancient death of living things. That’s why there’s so much here, under our forest. And every time you spark oil alight in those monstrous engines of yours, pure effula is released.”

“Effula you call it. Poison it is, unbalancing the sky itself. … Nasty name for a world‑killer. Not just a poison for a person, or for a whole city. It could kill off Eiocha, who you call Gaea.”

“Long ago, my people learnt how to harvest light and warmth from above rather than from below. Using our alchemy and geometry to capture Sol’s rays, not Gaea’s blood.”

“Our golden panels are an idea, another way, spread carefully amongst those who stand against the Empire. It’s why we go to war against oil. Their world‑killer isn’t even necessary.”

“Oil formed the bedrock of the Empire’s power.… And if there was an alternative, one that the Empire didn’t have a grip on? With another source of energy, why would anyone need to trade with the Empire at all?”

“The Empire would burn the oil, even if that burned them all.”

These passages closely mirror our current predicament. Transitioning to renewable energy makes obvious sense: it is cheaper, cleaner, and does not undermine our ability to flourish on this planet. Solar energy, in particular, is strikingly egalitarian—anyone can install panels and harness energy directly from the sun. Oil, by contrast, can be hoarded and strategically released to control prices, generating vast profits for fossil‑fuel corporations and conferring geopolitical power on oil‑rich regions. Such power and wealth enable the manipulation of markets, the funding of political parties, the spread of climate disinformation, and the shaping of government policy. The novel’s final paragraph operates as a covert call to action, asking readers to recognise this choice and decide where they stand.

People rarely seek information outside their own echo chambers, yet many readers drawn to an epic Roman tale might never question the stories promoted by those with vested interests in continued fossil‑fuel expansion. Fiction offers an alternative means of critique. The challenge lies in striking the right balance: too overt and readers disengage; too subtle and the message fails to land. Godstorm pitches it just right.

The Ice by Laline Paull

Laline Paull’s The Ice is a compelling fusion of eco‑thriller, political intrigue and psychological drama. Moving fluidly between the Arctic and the UK, the story offers a gripping exploration of friendship, ambition and betrayal. The Arctic itself becomes one of the novel’s most powerful characters – a place of vast silences, shifting light and delicate, dangerous beauty. Paull evokes this world with exquisite detail, weaving in tantalising glimpses of Inuit wildlife and culture.

In many thrillers, the villain is easy to spot. But the most compelling stories recognise that reality is more complex, revealing how ordinary human desires – for security, belonging and status – can lead us to deceive both ourselves and others. Ultimately, the battle against the “bad guys” becomes just as much a struggle with our own flaws and blind spots.

The turning point comes at the end and is worth waiting for. The moment where the protagonist faces the truth head-on was dramatic, moving and incredibly inspiring. I tore through this novel and put it down feeling fired up – ready to go out and set the world to rights.

I’d also like to give a shout out to her two other books, The Bees which was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Prize, and Pod, both of which inspire respect for the non-human world by adopting the perspective of a bee and a pod of dolphins respectively.

Any Human Power by Manda Scott

Manda is best known for her Boudican series, and here she turns her formidable storytelling skills to climate fiction. Any Human Power blends myth with modernity and is centred around generational and gender issues. As the title suggests, a key theme is power, and the route through begins with collective action using interactive games and social media to take on the vested interests behind much of the media. Later, more participatory democratic processes, such as citizens’ assemblies, are proposed as ways to curb the power of lobbyists and enable long-term sustainable decision-making by a more representative group of people. Manda categorises this novel as ‘thrutopian’ in that it provides an actionable and hopeful narrative that maps a path through our current “polycrisis” (climate, economic, and political) to a future we would be proud to leave for future generations.

Fairhaven by Steve Willis and Jan Lee

Described as a novel of climate optimism, Fairhaven was co‑written by an engineer and a novelist and won the 2023 Green Stories Novel Prize. Set in Malaysia, it opens with the childhood trauma of Grace Chan, who loses her beloved dog in a devastating flood. The novel then follows her journey over several decades as she advances as both a climate scientist and a global celebrity, ultimately becoming the first President of the Ocean State.

The novel functions as a practical roadmap, exploring how an island nation threatened by sea‑level rise might protect itself. It also examines the kinds of ambitious, large‑scale projects that, if implemented widely, could help avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

One of the novel’s most intriguing ideas is the granting of nation‑state status to the ocean itself, with the power to charge for maritime transit. The resulting revenues are used to fund regenerative projects, such as converting disused oil rigs into thriving, carbon‑capturing reef systems. This concept is not only imaginative but practical, and I am told it has already sparked real‑world discussions along these lines.

Visco by David Fell

This was a worthy winner of the 2020 Green Stories Novel Prize. It offers a positive vision of what a society grounded in values of care might look like, and—crucially—it shows a credible pathway for how such a society could come into being. Fell’s day job as a sustainability consultant means he understands how change happens in practice, lending the story authenticity and momentum.

Visco begins with a giant music festival on an island in the River Thames, intentionally designed to be inclusive of carers and those they care for. It’s so successful that few want to leave afterwards – so they don’t. What follows is the gradual emergence of a self‑sustaining living city. The evolution of this “carnival of care” becomes a radical social experiment that challenges the very foundations of capitalism.

The Philosopher and the Assassin by D.A. Baden

The Philosopher and the Assassin similarly addresses the system itself – our political, economic, and business models that are preventing us from reaching a flourishing, sustainable future. This is part campus novel, part moral philosophy, and part murder mystery. It follows Professor Iris Tate, who bases her moral philosophy course on an ethical dilemma revolving around a murder in a citizens’ assembly on climate. But what the students don’t know is that the ultimate dilemma is very real, and their conclusions will have far-reaching consequences. The innovative format will appeal to those who like education with their entertainment, and the sections on philosophy are written to engage beginners in the subject or those keen to know how abstract concepts can apply to real-life. By setting the whodunnit in a citizens’ assembly, a new kind of politics is demonstrated, while also showing climate policies from the perspective of a variety of characters, one of which is a murderer.

This novel comes in several incarnations as it was based on a script which won the Writing Climate Pitchfest in 2024 that has since been turned into a play Murder in the Citizens’ Jury based only on the whodunnit. For those who fancy a lighter, philosophy-free version, the whodunnit also exists as a fun novella called The Assassin.

No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet (Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Andrew Dana Hudson and others)

No More Fairy Tales is a wide‑ranging and inspirational anthology. Each story is distinctive in tone and genre, spanning family drama, romance, action, comedy, and tragedy. Some pieces revel in technical detail and speculative innovation, while others are lyrical and poetic. What unites them is that each centres on one or more climate solutions, policies or practices that could be transformative in the real world. These range from large‑scale interventions such as flooding deserts, to socio‑economic approaches including personal carbon allowances, a wellbeing index to replace GDP, and the sharing economy. Other stories focus on changes that can be enacted closer to home, such as eco‑friendly cleaning or wildlife gardening.

Paolo Bacigalupi, best known for his dystopian climate fiction, contributes an uncharacteristically hopeful family drama, imagining a sustainable society powered by renewables, featuring demand‑led electric buses and a wonderfully ambiguous AI character. Nancy Lord offers a charming romance between a Russian scientist and a US fisherman, homing unexpectedly in on whale poo as a carbon‑capture solution. Several stories explore multiple policies at once, demonstrating how they might operate in tandem. Seeing climate policy embedded within narrative makes it far easier to imagine how such ideas could work in practice.

The anthology emerged from a collaborative process that paired climate experts with experienced writers, resulting in 24 short stories that are both compelling to read and capable of inspiring change. While most were written especially for the collection, the eminent author Kim Stanley Robinson contributed three chapters from his epic novel The Ministry for the Future. The anthology also includes the most hopeful scenario from Andrew Dana Hudson’s Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, which explores how the wealth of the ultra‑rich might be mobilised to fund deep‑sea carbon capture and storage.

A further reason to include No More Fairy Tales among books that inspire climate action is that it goes one step further: at the end of every story, readers are directed to a webpage where they can learn how to advance the ideas that have inspired them.

The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow’s cli-fi novel is set in the future where climate change is wreaking havoc with out-of-control fires and sea-level rise. Cities are being rebuilt inland and immigration has become largely detached from ethnicity as wealthy coastal dwellers are forced to find refuge inland. What seems dystopian is softened by a hopeful focus on how people and institutions adapt. At the state level, an effective Green New Deal has been implemented with guaranteed jobs available to work on rebuilding sustainable carbon-neutral homes and renewable energy projects. Training in climate adaptation and resilience is available, and the worst excesses of capitalism/techno-feudalism have been suppressed, with community resilience and safety prioritised over the property rights of the wealthy. The friendship networks and love life of the central protagonist offer an enticing vision of a community built on solidarity and respect. Mealtimes are opportunities for people to hang out and chat and share delicious, low-carbon food described in loving detail – enough to turn anyone vegan!

This contrast between the dystopian and utopian is captured in this passage:

I was free. If Burbank caught fire and burned to the ground, I could go anywhere and start over, as long as there was a library, solar panels, and good people. The world was on fire, and the fires would burn every year for many years to come. This might be the best year for wildfires we’d have for the rest of my life. When things weren’t on fire, we’d be harrowed by plagues, scoured by storms, flooded and droughted.

And yet… And yet. I had arrived at a place of circulating abundance amid all of that tragedy and terror. Wherever I was, I could be happy, fed, surrounded by good people and hard work.

The plot is driven by the dilemma of the central protagonist – a young man whose progressive values stand in stark contrast to his old-school grandfather, who has just died, leaving him a house and a secret arsenal of guns. The Lost Cause stands out for taking the issue of raw power seriously, referencing the divisions of contemporary America between the values of collective action and solidarity against the climate deniers and reactionary libertarians. In the end, they cannot be ignored; a showdown results, and the question in the readers’ mind is: what will our hero do with the guns?

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Flight Behaviour also takes the issue of climate denial seriously. We get to know a rural farming community through the eyes of Dellarobia, a young wife and mother struggling under the weight of poverty. She is warm and bright but hemmed in by past choices and the fear of community judgment.

Kingsolver lingers on the small yet telling details: braving a visit to her in‑laws just to access a computer; her painful budgeting between bills and children’s clothes; even the guilty pleasure of a takeaway coffee. These moments ground us in the stark reality of her world.

Everything shifts when Dellarobia stumbles upon what appears to be a miracle: millions of monarch butterflies blazing like fire through a bleak Tennessee forest. This vision cracks open her sense of what is possible. While the novel’s pacing is slow to begin with, the arrival of scientists investigating the displaced butterflies accelerates the story as we see Dellarobia’s awakening to a broader, more complicated understanding of the world.

The novel doesn’t shy away from the emotional weight of environmental loss. We feel the grief that comes with recognising our own part in nature’s unravelling. At the same time, the novel offers sharp glimpses into flawed but recognisable perspectives: the earnest yet tone-deaf climate activist telling Dellarobia, a woman who can’t afford Christmas presents, to cut back on flying and use a reusable take-home carton when eating at a restaurant. Or her family’s stubborn refusal to accept evidence even as the consequences directly threaten their livelihoods.

In the interplay of these characters and their blind spots, Kingsolver invites us to examine our own. The result is a thoughtful, immersive exploration of belief, responsibility, and the fragile beauty of the world we share.

Defying Futility by Steve Willis and Jan Lee

Rather than warning readers through imagined catastrophe, Defying Futility reimagines sixteen real disasters—from the sinking of the Titanic to industrial tragedies such as Flixborough and Chernobyl, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Spanning diverse locations, cultures, and nearly a hundred years, these stories retell history as it might have unfolded if different choices had been made. They parallel the common disaster we face today: climate change, demonstrating how preparedness, cooperation, ethical leadership, and timely intervention can reduce harm. As counterfactual tales—stories that acknowledge real tragedy while refusing to accept it as inevitable—Defying Futility helps readers move from anxiety to agency.

Stories from the Microbial World (various authors)

The power of this unusual anthology is in opening readers’ eyes to their connection to the rich, unseen world around and within them. These 23 short stories invite readers into the fascinating world of microorganisms. Microbes live on our skin, keep ecosystems healthy, combat pollution, and transform waste into valuable resources. What makes this collection so rich is the diversity of the stories and styles: some dramatic, some fantasy, others whimsical and romantic.

Several stories speak to everyday practices that have environmental implications such as laundry, household cleaning, and showering. Washing at high temperatures with strong chemicals more often than necessary doesn’t just strip away the beneficial bacteria that keep our skin healthy; it can also damage hair and fabrics, increase carbon emissions, and drive up water and energy bills.

At a more spiritual level, many religious traditions speak of interconnectedness—of everything being part of a greater whole. These stories make that idea tangible, revealing the many ways we are linked to the world around us through the bacteria that live within us. When you realise that around half of the DNA in our bodies isn’t human, products that promise to “kill 99% of germs” begin to seem less benign. We are not separate from nature, and Stories from the Microbial World is a beautiful, imaginative reminder of that truth.

The Rewilding by Donna M Cameron

The Rewilding is a love song to our world and an urgent reminder of the stakes at play in our fight against climate change. It follows two characters flung together and on the run – a corporate whistleblower in hiding and an environmental activist willing to go to extremes for her cause. The pair are equally flawed, and their different outlooks on life lead inevitably to conflict as they’re flung together in risky circumstances. The book offers a high-octane adventure, balanced with romance and humour as the characters hurtle through present-day Australia in a car running on old cooking oil.

Cameron has said that she needed to write the book to work through her own overwhelming climate grief, and it was through creating the book that she wrote her way towards hope. “The act of writing The Rewilding made me realise that hope only arrives through action.” The book is full of positive facts and solutions – from practical possibilities in the world of construction, to choices about community-building and lifestyle.

Cameron has also written another eco-fiction novel: her debut, Beneath the Mother Tree, a murder mystery set on a subtropical island exploring the importance of human connection to landscape.

The Last Plastic Fork edited by Rananda Rich

The best bit of a story for me is often when the character has an epiphany and their way of viewing the world is transformed. This gem of an anthology is full of such moments. It originated from a Green Stories flash fiction competition where characters changed for the greener and includes nearly 50 short but wonderful stories covering themes such as food, transport, waste, and nature. Some are delightfully quirky like one about a bouncer who discovers a vial and tiny spoon on someone and assumes it’s drugs. Here’s an extract:

Now he’s heard it all.

“Bees like a rave, do they, son?”

The poor lad scrambles for his phone, pressing buttons in a frenzy. He turns the screen to Kev, and there it is on some eco website – the little potion bottle, labelled ‘bee revival kit’.

“If you see a bee on the ground, and you can’t get it to a flower, it might need sugar water! You can give it a boost and it might live.”

The thought moves Kev, and he’s caught off guard. There’s a lump in his throat, the thought of this lad feeding an ailing bumble some syrup.

The judges themselves said they were inspired to variously compost, take trains, see nature differently, and many others by these stories. It’s a perfect book for those who aren’t great readers, as the stories are so short. They’re a bit like snacks; you plan to just read one, but it’s so delightful and over so quickly, so you read another and another until you’ve read the whole book!

Dirt by Laura Baggaley

Dirt is an award-winning novel aimed at young adults, but I loved it too. It’s set in the future where all vehicles are electric, and most people cycle or use public transport. Re-use, upcycling and borrowing are the norm, and repair workshops and libraries of things are more prevalent than conventional shops. Houses have solar panels, heat pumps and water butts, resulting in communities that are resilient and almost self-sufficient. But it’s not all perfect and certainly not when it comes to food. Climate change has caused shortages as supply chains have failed. Each household has a square of land where they can grow only what the agri-chemical corporation tells them – monocrops, boosted by fertilisers and protected by pesticides. It’s profitable for the corporation, but the soil is increasingly depleted, and the food is limited. Then a teenage girl cycles into town, seemingly from nowhere. The girl, Avril, comes from a hidden valley where her extended family practises regenerative agriculture. Avril encounters town boy Sam and a romance begins. This is a delightful Romeo and Juliet story (without the tragic deaths!) that explores the difference between damaging growing practices and farming in harmony with nature. It’s a joyous story that juxtaposes the excitement of first love and the magic of compost!

Her next YA novel, Nourish looks to be just as good: an exciting and imaginative tale which mixes dystopian elements with positive examples of what we get right.

We Don’t Have Time for This by Brianna Craft

My research into how climate-themed fiction lands with readers shows that portraying relatable characters engaging in climate action that readers can emulate in a page-turning story is the most effective way to inspire climate action, and Brianna Craft’s We Don’t Have Time for This ticks all the boxes.

Using the popular enemies-to-lovers trope, the story centres on Isa Brown and Darius Freeman, two teenagers forced into a joint leadership role in their high school’s Environmental Justice Club after a tied election. Their personal clashes mirror deeper disagreements about how best to respond to the climate crisis—and what is at stake if they fail. Here, climate change is not some abstract concept or distant threat – wildfires, an impending natural gas pipeline, and precarious family livelihoods anchor the crisis in everyday life.

Craft foregrounds climate justice, showing how environmental harm disproportionately affects marginalised communities, and positions youth voices—particularly those often sidelined—as central to change. By blending romance, social justice, and community organising, Craft delivers an inspiring novel that encourages readers not only to care about the climate crisis, but to imagine themselves acting within it.

Green Rising by Wren James

Wren James’ young‑adult novel Green Rising is a gripping thriller with all the right ingredients: romance, superpowers, and a clear‑cut villain. It follows a group of teenagers who develop the extraordinary ability to grow plants from their skin. While the premise is fantastical, the novel is rooted in real‑world concerns, foregrounding practical climate solutions and exploring the power of collective action and civil disobedience in the face of corporate negligence.

Crucially, Green Rising also exposes the danger of “false” climate solutions—initiatives that divert attention and resources away from approaches that might genuinely work for the majority. In the novel, these are embodied by a supposedly green oil company CEO whose high‑profile environmental projects are revealed to be a smokescreen for siphoning climate funds into a private space venture.

The novel reminds us that the narratives we tell about the future matter. A vision in which humanity spreads outward while leaving damage behind rehearses a story of abandonment. By contrast, Green Rising insists on Earth as irreplaceable: a living system that demands care rather than conquest. At a moment when spaceflight is increasingly celebrated as a symbol of human ingenuity and progress, James’ novel offers a timely caution—that such dreams of escape risk becoming costly distractions from the urgent task of learning how to live well, justly, and sustainably on the planet we already call home.

I also want to recommend James’ excellent anthology: Future Hopes: Hopeful Stories in a Time of Climate Change. Aimed at children but a great read for all, it includes lots of actionable solutions from edible insects to guerrilla gardening.

Wildlands by Brogen Murphy

Set twenty-five years in the future, Wildlands imagines a Britain that has undergone a radical transformation. Much of Northern England and Southern Scotland has been turned into a vast rewilding project, where bison, lynx and wolves roam free. People can explore a ten-mile-wide buffer zone around the edge, but no humans are allowed into the heart of the Wildlands – until two sisters find themselves stranded right in the middle of it, with only a rucksack, a phone without signal, and each other.

At its core, Wildlands is a fast-paced survival adventure. But beneath that, is also a story of possibility. Having studied Zoology at the University of Cambridge and spent 15 years championing clean technology innovations, Murphy brings real-world science and technologies to their vision of a greener future. Wildlands paints a vivid picture of a future that feels not just imaginable, but achievable: a world where green energy, eco-design and plant-based diets are the norm, and where we have made space for nature to return — restoring lost species and allowing ecosystems to recover and reshape the landscape.

In a time when so many environmental narratives are rooted in fear, Wildlands gives readers the sense that such a future is still within our reach, if we can first imagine it.

The Wild Before by Piers Torday

I’ll finish with an example of an author who is walking the talk with respect to sustainability. Piers Torday’s award-winning Last Wild trilogy and the prequel, The Wild Before, use animal protagonists and adventure narratives to emotionally engage readers with environmental collapse and collective action. As well as being a page-turning read, The Wild Before pulls off the difficult trick of inspiring young readers with a sense of care for the environment without triggering paralysing climate anxiety.

Torday is also noted for campaigning on the environmental impact of publishing itself, and The Wild Before is frequently referenced as a “showcase attempt at publishing a sustainable book”. It was produced with specific design and material choices to reduce environmental harm, including:

• Recycled paper rather than virgin pulp
• Vegetable-based inks instead of petroleum-based inks
• No plastic lamination, varnishes or foils
• Recycled materials in binding and cover stock

Torday makes the most of his position as the first Chair of the Society of Authors Sustainability Network Steering Committee to campaign for the adoption of more sustainable practices across publishing. For example, he advocates for libraries and helped launch ‘Tree to Me: My Books Shouldn’t Cost the Earth’, a campaign under the UK Society of Authors that encourages authors to question their publishers about issues such as pulping of unsold books, paper sourcing etc. So it seems fitting to end this top 20 list of books to inspire climate action with a writer who is inspiring the authors themselves.