Honestly, you could read just about any of Terry Tempest Williams’s work for this challenge. If you love nature writing and haven’t yet discovered her, just take a scroll through her extensive catalog and start wherever suits your fancy. I’m recommending this one right now books America’s national parks are under attack thanks to budget cuts, understaffing, and a president who wants to privatize public lands. Published in 2016 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, The Hour of Land is a memoir of Williams’s experience in the parks, a history of the landscapes that have helped shape our national identity, and a call to action to defend them.

Everybody loves a good underdog story, and nothing in the natural world is quite as much of an underdog as bacteria. Sure, microbes can make us sick, but they also kind of make us who we are. Ed Yong’s ode to the microscopic organisms that live in, on, and all around is as warm and funny as it is educational. You’ve never had such a good time reading about potentially gross subject matter, I promise.

Fun animal facts aren’t just for kids. Katherine Rundell presents a collection of fascinating information about endangered animals that will both make you a ringer at trivia night and activate your sense of wonder. Awe can be a powerful gateway to activism, and understanding how truly special the creatures we share this planet with are is a great way to get inspired to help them survive.

If you’ve been looking for a way to talk about climate change without ruining family gatherings, this one’s for you. Hayhoe is a skilled communicator who argues that while facts and data are an important part of changing minds, it’s connection and shared values that really change hearts and inspire people to participate in activism. She draws on multidisciplinary research and extensive personal experience to offer a vision for how individual change can lead to collective action. There’s plenty of doom to be found elsewhere. Why not practice a little data-driven hope?

Another good antidote to the feeling that we’re doomed? Imagining what it would look like to be on the other side of the crisis. Here, climate scientist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson invites dozens of thinkers—writers, poets, farmers, policymakers, philosophers, artists, and activists—to picture “a transformed and replenished world” and what it took to get there. This is a creative and thoughtfully curated collection of inquiries and inspirations that will remind you there is always another angle, another question, another thing to try.