Books: Non-Fiction

No Planet B: A Teen Vogue Guide to the Climate Crisis

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Lucy Diavolo. 2021. 224 pages.
A small volume made up of short student-friendly readings that offer lots of teaching possibilities.

Time Periods: 21st Century
Themes: Climate Justice

In her foreword to No Planet B, Lindsay Peoples Wagner, Teen Vogue’s editor-in-chief, writes that they hoped this book would embody “Teen Vogue’s motto of making young people feel seen and heard all over the world.”

This small volume, made up of short student-friendly readings, lives up to this aspiration. It is filled with the voices of young activists and artists, ages 10 to 25. Xiye Bastida, now a Fridays for Future activist, describes her first encounter with climate chaos, growing up 40 minutes west of Mexico City in San Pedro Tultepec, her community suffering from heavy rainfall and contamination — then moving to New York City and being hit by Hurricane Sandy: “This is happening everywhere. The climate crisis follows you.”

The readings  — interviews, reported articles, first-person testimonies — are each just a few pages long, and offer lots of teaching possibilities. An important theme of the book is how climate change is also a racial justice issue, an immigration issue, a labor issue, a feminist issue, an Indigenous issue, and more. [Description from Rethinking Schools.]