Sustainability Books: Your Summer Reading List

It may seem quaint to release a list of sustainability books for the summer. After all, the appetite for sustainable investing has diminished. Yet the dilemma of the overheating planet still exists, as well as the vexing issues around a changing society—all predicaments that sustainable investing tries to address.

Books about sustainability help us make sense of the world, especially if they’re well-argued and well-imagined. So we asked sustainable-investing mavens, both inside and outside Morningstar, for reading suggestions. Here are their recommendations.

3 Great Sustainability Books: Corporate Strategy and Capitalism

• Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World by Alison Taylor. This 2024 book by the NYU ethics professor is a favorite of two Morningstar analysts. Says Will Kerwin, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar: “Higher Ground is a well-supported look into the tribulations of navigating corporate strategy in a world where ethics and sustainability are increasingly relevant and polarizing. Tons of case studies help show that the best strategy is committing to the places your business faces the most risk and can offer the most impact, regardless of where public opinion of certain buzzwords stands.” The book includes “plenty on what can go wrong when companies chase the latest fashionable set of values without fully thinking through the implications,” adds Lindsey Stewart, director of stewardship research and policy for Morningstar Sustainalytics.
• The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society by Joseph Stiglitz. This 2024 book by the Nobel Laureate considers how the conviction that people must be free has been co-opted, leading to companies feeling free to pollute, among other things. Says Andy Behar, CEO of shareholder advocate As You Sow: “The Road to Freedom presents a macroeconomic theory in which capitalism serves the many, not the few. It overturns Milton Friedman’s view that corporations must externalize costs, dump in the commons, and abuse their workforce. There is a much better way if we choose that path.”
• Sustainable Capitalism: Essential Work for the Anthropocene, edited by Inara Scott. Even as capitalism raised millions out of poverty, it also contributed to societal dilemmas, including climate change and slavery. “There’s a way to structure and execute capitalism in a way that leads to sustainable outcomes, because ultimately capitalism is supposed to be about stability of growth, revenue, and cash flow,” says Steve Liberatore, head of ESG/Impact for global fixed income at Nuveen, and a fan of the book. “Sustainability is a longer-term investment that’s needed to address longer-term risk.”

2 Great Sustainability Books: Climate Crisis

• Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment. Economist Lucas Chancel considers these intertwined issues. “It’s a concise yet complex examination of the intersection between social inequalities and climate change, and how both issues can be tackled collectively,” says Charity Blue, director of product management at Morningstar Sustainalytics.
• Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, by Katharine Hayhoe. A Canadian-born scientist and evangelical Christian living in Texas tells us how to talk about climate change. “More effective communication on climate is critical to changing people’s attitudes,” says Jon Hale, a sustainability consultant and former Morningstar analyst.

3 Great Sustainability Books: Other Nonfiction

• Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long-Term Performance, edited by Cary Krosinsky and Nick Robins. This oldie but goody, first published in 2008, sorts out the different investing approaches, in an essay collection curated by sustainable-investing lecturer Krosinsky and sustainable finance expert Robins. “You can dip in, read a chapter, and put it down for a while without losing the thread,” says Julie Gorte, senior vice president for sustainable investing at Impax Asset Management. Gorte herself contributed a piece on how investors became a force for sustainability.
• Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez. This 2019 book “opened my eyes to the conscious and unconscious biases affecting half of humanity,” says Susan Zhou, product manager, enterprise sustainability at Morningstar. “It’s especially relevant in an environment where ‘wokeness’ is being labeled as ‘cringe.’ ”
• Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth. In this quick, accessible read, the economist argues that society must shift from addictive growth and create economies that are regenerative and sustainable. “I constantly think back to her approach of reenvisioning economic growth to balance the requirements for human sustenance with the Earth’s capacity to provide,” says Alyssa Stankiewicz, associate director, parent research at Morningstar. “It’s an inspiring and realistic take on what a more sustainable future could look like.”

3 Great Sustainability Books: Fiction

• The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. This is a fast-paced novel about an assassin/fixer helping a shadowy water authority build developments for the rich as the heat index soars and rivers dry up. “This takes a dense topic—interstate water rights agreements—and crafts an unbelievably tense, taut thriller from it,” says Steven Berger, director of product management at Morningstar. “Published in 2015, The Water Knife’s near-future setting looms over our reality, where the states along the Colorado River prepare for another historic year of water supply shortages.”
• The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton. This work of science fiction, set in Florida when the waters rise, is “an interesting imagining of what happens when the oceans rise but the people do not have the resources or the will to relocate,” says Hilary Wiek, senior strategist, sustainable investing, Morningstar PitchBook.
• The Overstory by Richard Powers. This novel about nine Americans who fight the destruction of the forests, inspired by their life experiences with trees, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “The Overstory is a great, great book and will make you want to become a passionate tree advocate,” says Lisa Woll, a consultant and longtime sustainable investing executive.

More Sustainability Fiction

I loved the 2020 novel Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, whose protagonist Franny Stone follows the last Arctic terns on their final migration to Antarctica. A good summer read.

If you want a helping of climate solutions science with your fiction, you may enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Be forewarned, the 2020 novel is 576 pages long.

Finally, the great website Grist.org published the winners of its climate fiction contest Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors collection. They’re free to read here.

Happy reading!

Hannah Hummel contributed reporting to this story.