Green Libraries Week 2025
Sustainability and Climate theme
Following on from Book Week NI last week…
This week is #GreenLibrariesWeek with CILIP, The Library and Information Association.
The Education for Sustainable Development Forum will continue our book recommendations on this years theme – Sustainability and Climate.
Let us know your ‘Green’ book recommendations.
Monday: Helping our Planet by Jane Bingham
This practical, hands-on guide is filled with helpful checklists of actions to take and choices to make in your daily life. There are chapters on planet-friendly eating, shopping and travelling, and on ways to save energy and cut down on waste. There’s also clear advice on getting drastic about plastic, and taking better care of the natural world, and links to recommended websites with more information.
Tuesday: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Wednesday: Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is a River Alive? is at once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. Lit throughout by other minds and voices, it invites us radically to reimagine not only rivers but also life itself. At the centre of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has.
Thursday: What a Wonderful World by Leisa Stewart-Sharpe
Our world is wonderful – and it’s worth protecting. From the author of the children’s book Blue Planet II, What a Wonderful World takes you on a breathtaking tour of our planet – from towering mountaintops, through grasslands, jungles, rivers, deserts, polar wildernesses and into the blue ocean – to discover the incredible variety of life that calls it home. Along the way, read the stories of 35 inspiring Earth Shakers – children and adults, from tree-planters to scientists – who have taken action to protect it.
Plus, there are lots of practical tips and handy resources inside that give you the tools to make a positive change today.
Friday: The Magic of an Irish Rainforest: A Visual Journey by Eoghan Daltun
Magical images of Ireland’s temperate rainforests meet with powerful nature writing on an astonishing journey into the wild, from the award-winning author of An Irish Atlantic Rainforest.
In 2023, environmentalist and rewilder Eoghan Daltun travelled the length and breadth of Ireland, photographing areas of temperate rainforest, in a bid to illustrate their beauty and immense ecological value, and to document, in almost all cases, their state of decline.
The resulting collection of stunning images, combined with deeply illuminating nature writing, charts that exploration, beginning with the author’s own thriving wild rainforest, Bofickil, on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork, and taking us through the four provinces of Ireland – places such as Killarney National Park, Kerry; The Gearagh, Cork; The Burren, Clare; Old Head Wood, County Mayo; Glenveagh National Park, Donegal; Correl Glen and Cladagh Glen, County Fermanagh; and Wicklow’s beauty spot of Glendalough.
