I started reading "A Half-Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys over lunch. The premise is that human are slowly climbing out of eco-catastrophe, when aliens make contact. The aliens believe that technological species either entirely leave their planets for space, or die.

They have seen four other graveyards where technological species fucked their planet up and all died, and are all 'we finally made it in time', only to make their first contact with a human heavily invested in building a better society on Earth and fixing the planet, who was all 'we are finally making progress and you want us to leave!?'

While your standard futuristic nation-states and corporate oligarchies exist, the protagonist belongs to an ecological movement that organizes around consensus decision making and use of technology to aid that and do their best to weigh human survival and comfort and technology with the broader ecological impact.

ooooh

The protagonist is a water quality engineer who ended up as lead diplomat, because the first anyone noticed was 'something weird is leaking into Chesapeake Bay and triggering all our water quality sensors'...

...and ended up being the point woman because she brought her infant with her to check it out because she was in the 'I am going to not sleep and cry constantly' stage of infancy, and the aliens saw motherhood as proof of good intentions and status.

Oh, this definitely appeals to me.

Folks from NASA and the corporations have just showed up, and the protagonist also has accepted she can't pass this off even though the local networks are down so she's flying on her own brainpower, not the advice of the community.

And there's lots of cultural shit going on with the aliens, despite the aliens having seen enough Earth radio broadcasts to be English speakers. Like them technically being two species (their planetary system had two habitable worlds) and there being some cultural weirdness.

But it feels like the prevailing attitude (outside of the corporate team, which just arrived) is 'no one wants to fuck this up, but everyone is bringing their own baggage into the situation'.

(You also get some crunchy gender stuff, in that the protagonist is married to a trans woman, and they are co-parenting with a trans man and cis man...

... and the protagonist was all 'given how much the aliens put on biological motherhood, maybe we should be coy about gender' and one of the other adults was all 'yeah, I put out the pronoun pins because Atheo has pretty strong trauma about being misgendered thanks to his asshole family and the aliens will just have to deal'.

this sounds interesting

Yeah. It does seem to be in conversation with Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, because the aliens in both show up to save humanity from themselves and can be pretty paternalistic about it...

... , but in Butler's work, humanity fucks itself over in nuclear war, so it might be more ambiguous than 'humanity is digging itself out of one mess, but there may be future messes'.