To celebrate Earth Day 2025, we’ve put together a reading list of books and journal articles which look at the history of the Earth, climate change, and much more across Earth Science and the Humanities.
Explaining the Earth: An Introduction to the Earth and its Systems by Paul E. Binns
Knowledge of the Earth sciences is an essential background for those wishing to understand current concerns about the Earth and its environments. This book provides an overview of these sciences. It is written with the general reader in mind and includes personal stories of the scientists as they made their discoveries.
Pre-order and find out more >
Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere by Nsah Mala and Nicki Hitchcott
How are francophone writers, visual artists and activists in the Global South responding to environmental issues? What can we learn from them about the relationship between colonialism and the global climate and environmental crises? This book analyses a range of francophone postcolonial textual responses to the numerous crises currently threatening the Earth and reflects on the role of writers and writing in saving our planet.
A Tectonic History of the Earth by Graham Park
Tectonic movements in the Earth’s crust, such as the assembly and break-up of continents, are related to the mantle-wide system of convection currents, where upward flows promote break-up and downward flows accompany subduction, collision and orogeny. Major tectonic episodes are linked to environmental changes such as ice ages and mass extinctions.
Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities,
edited by Daniel A. Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo, and Marco Malvestio
This is the first edited collection to explore what can be gained from bringing together Italian science fiction and the environmental humanities. Early-career and established scholars from varied fields provide cutting-edge analysis of a somewhat overlooked genre that has plenty to offer in terms of ecological and sociopolitical insights.
Featured in our Liverpool Science Fiction Studies Online digital collection.
Find out more and read a selection of Open Access chapters >
Geology and the Pioneers of Earth Science by Mike Leeder
Momentous changes, particularly in the 1960’s, transformed ‘geology’ into ‘earth science’. These developments and the scientists behind them have been neglected until now and are the subject of this book.
Find out more >
Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach
by Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann
This is a timely, comprehensive and thoroughly researched study of climate fiction from around the world, including novels, short stories, films and other formats. Informed by a sociological perspective, it will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars looking to enter and expand the field of climate fiction studies.
Planetary Geology: An Introduction (Third Edition) by Dominic Fortes & Claudio Vita-Finzi
This new edition reveals how the scope of geological enquiry has grown beyond the Solar System to encompass a myriad variegated exoplanets around other stars, some of which are thought to be tantalisingly Earth-like while others may be smothered in oceans of boiling lava or hundreds of kilometres of ice.
Find out more about this new edition >
Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Matthew Kelly
The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers and literary scholars, the volume offers new and original insights into familiar topics.
Featured in our Irish Studies Online digital collection.
From our journals…
McNeil Taylor, ‘Carrying the Earth to the Sky: Claire Denis’s Perverse Ecologies’
French Studies, Volume 77, Number 1
Daanish Mustafa, Perdita Matson, Erin Roberts, and Justin Sharpe, ‘Ecologies of sustainable development goals: a mid-term perspective’
International Development Planning Review, Volume 46, Number 2
Philomena Polefrone, ‘Ecology without Us’
Extrapolation, Volume 59, Number 3
Colin Steele, ‘An Exile on Planet Earth: Articles and Reflections’
The Bodleian Library Record, Volume 26, Number 2
Jane Hiddleston, ‘Transculturality and ecology in francophone North African poetry: Human/non-human and global/local communities’, Francosphères, Volume 13, Number 1
Jeffrey Newman, ‘Together In Hope: Implementing The Earth Charter’
Modern Believing, Volume 54, Number 4
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