Banned Famous Books About The Environment

Tens of thousands of books have been banned, and even burned, over the last century. PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans recorded 11,982 bans in the 2025/2026 school year. “This is the highest number of recorded bans in a single year since PEN America began tracking book bans in 2021,” its experts wrote.

The Harvard Graduate School of Education outlines the ways books are suppressed. They can be removed from libraries, blocked from publication, or banned nationwide. In the most extreme cases, they are burned or otherwise destroyed.

In the US, one common reason for banning books is their discussion of climate change and global warming, particularly books that acknowledge these phenomena as real and are critical of their causes and effects.

The National Center for Science Education described the threat to such books in Florida alone. It reported: “Kenneth R. Miller, coauthor of a popular high school biology textbook (and president of NCSE’s board of directors) told the Orlando Sentinel that the state department of education asked him to defend his textbook’s statements that human activity is responsible for recent climate change.”

Public skepticism plays a role, too. A University of Michigan study found that 15% of Americans deny climate change completely, and some of that denial reflects the views of powerful politicians. The study noted, “Influencers like Trump are creating their own echo chambers outside of X, which in many ways is even more concerning.”

The President is not the only senior politician with such views: 22% of the members of the 119th Congress do not believe in climate change.

We reviewed lists of books banned for their treatment of environmental themes. Our sources were PEN America, which focuses on the relationship between writing and human rights; the American Library Association, which represents libraries and librarians; the Sierra Club’s Banned Books Week series; research from Georgetown University; and the National Center for Science Education.

From these sources, our editors selected books that were banned for their content on climate change and global warming. To make the list, a book also had to be well known and well regarded, and most were written by celebrated authors. John Steinbeck won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. Dr. Seuss may be the greatest children’s author of all time. Canadian author Margaret Atwood has won two Booker Prizes and, still active today, has written 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, and two graphic novels.

Book Title	Author	Environmental Theme
The Lorax	Dr. Seuss	Forest conservation and corporate greed
The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Totalitarian response to societal ecological collapse
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States	Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz	Indigenous land rights and environmental justice
Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World	Ashley Herring Blake	Surviving extreme climate disasters
The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	Dust Bowl migration and the role of politics in a ruined environment