The Story of More

Hope Jahren followed Lab Girl with The Story of More, a shorter book aimed at people who want to understand climate change without having to wade through a textbook or a doom-scroll. Jahren is a research scientist, and the book uses data, but the writing stays personal and clear.

She organizes the book around the things humans consume more of than we used to. Food, energy, water, and the carbon that comes out the other end of all of it. Each section is short. The math is honest. The conclusions don’t soften the picture.

The last section turns to what individuals can do, with a clear-eyed acknowledgment that individual action is necessary but not sufficient. Jahren doesn’t lecture, which is part of why the book works.

For readers who liked David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth but want something less unrelenting, this is a calmer, more practical entry to the same subject.