It's rare when a book has a big effect on me. There was "Dune" in my adolescence, then for sheer adventure there was "Shibumi" and "Noble House" in my twenties, while in non-fiction I also discovered "The Specialist" by someone calling himself Gayle Rivers, some of the sweatiest reading in my life. Later I discovered Theodore Roszak's "Flicker," a wry metamystery which asks if our new audiocultural subculture may be fundamentally evil. (The novel gives the year 2014 as some sort of diabolical target -- I guess we'll find out, huh?)
But now I've just gotten done with Bill McKibben's "Eaarth" (note spelling). It is the most jolting of ecological books. Basically, the Earth I was born on in 1960 is gone, possibly forever. The latest data indicates that we could all switch to solar and wind and bicycles and all that good thing tomorrow and a cascade of effects could still go on boosting atmospheric carbon and overall warming. We have really and truly kicked ourselves out of Eden. We can manage it, level it off, but it will never be quite the same. How, afterall, do you "reglaciate" a mountain range? (The usual "reglaciation" is the cycle of Ice Ages, and we've just sabotaged the onset of what would have been the immediate next Ice Age.) Key to all this is the oceans, which are not absorbing (and keeping) CO2 as much anymore as they did in the past, and if they should ever reach a point where they actually CONTRIBUTE more CO2 than they're taking on, that would be one hellacious turnaround indeed.
McKibben himself is weirdly optimistic, probably because a) he already has a solar-powered Vermont hideaway and b) he's a successful activist. Me, I need at least one extra book to help round out reading this. An adequate one is "The Great Reset" by Richard Florida.