Over the holidays, while traveling out of state to visit family, I left my outsize houseplant collection in the hands of our pet sitter, a wildly talented cat whisperer but a less-than-expert caretaker of calathea. I feared the worst: that I would return to a home full of ex-flora, the floor covered in brown leaves, the terracotta pots empty and gaping where green life once flourished.

My fear led to more than a couple bona fide nightmares that week, but much to my relief, my babes all semi-survived, and I am slowly nursing them back to their former glory.

This deep love I feel for plants—and indeed for all kinds of more-than-human life—may seem strange to some. After all, a pothos can’t hug you back.

But such love is an increasingly common thread in contemporary nature writing. While one might argue (persuasively!) that love is what inspired the very first nature writers, the genre has engendered an increasingly complex way of thinking (and feeling) about nature in recent years.

For many, “love” for the natural world is no longer defined solely by one’s appreciation for it, but rather, by how one’s self and community has been defined and shaped by it, by a desire to protect and grieve for it, by an understanding that humans actually aren’t separate from nature at all—but in kinship with it.

To read a number of nature-themed books forthcoming in the first half of 2024 is to be reminded of just how far and deep this love goes for many. Here is a list of some of my favorite titles out this year.

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Erika Howsare, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors
(Catapult, January 2)

Deer, writes Erika Howsare, “occupy a middle zone between…domestication and wildness.” Unlike dogs, the colloquial best friends of man, they’re far from tame, but yet they live among people in suburbs and rural areas alike. They certainly live near Howsare, who opens her meditation on the connection between humans and deer with a story about observing a doe nursing her fawns.

From there she asks hard questions about how human development and ways of thinking about nature often determine whether deer live or die, and how they do both. Here, deer come to symbolize “the way we live with nature now” and perhaps how we will live with it in the future. But more than symbol, the deer is also depicted as our neighbor, our kin, the object of “a sacred bond.”

Miriam Darlington, Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World
(Tin House, February 20)

In this charming book, Miriam Darlinton spends a year exploring the world of otters, speaking with scientists, writers, conservationists, and others—people who truly love these aquatic mammals. She learns about new scientific discoveries as well as the animals’ cultural importance, tracing myriad ways in which otter life is tightly connected to the world of humans.

Trish O’Kane, Birding to Change the World
(Ecco, February 27)

An investigative journalist, Trish O’Kane never thought much about the natural world. But then Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home in New Orleans, and she was left wondering how to move forward. The path she found was chirping and fluttering with birds. The city’s feathered residents cheered her spirit and gave her hope for the future.

After a move to the Midwest, she finds a flock of likeminded neighbors who come together to save a local park, a green space where human and avian parents both watch and raise their young. This is a love letter to birds—and to the people who love them.

Jessica J. Lee, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
(Catapult, March 12)

In fourteen essays filled with personal stories and social history, the award-winning memoirist and nature writer explores what it means to perceive of some plants as “out of place” in a world where imperialism and international travel have brought countless seeds (and people) to new homes, thousands of miles from where they originated. Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings—by people and by plants—to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration.

Daniel Lewis, Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future
(Avid Reader Press, March 12)

Recent studies reveal that groups of trees live almost like families, protecting and caring for each other. There is much to ponder about their existence beyond their stately presence. In Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis travels the world to meet a dozen unique specimens with the aim to learn more about how trees live and communicate—and what their connected lives might tell us about how we live ours.

Brimming with awe for the overstory, the book is also a reminder that life unlike our own is not only mysterious—it’s precious.

Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life
(W.W. Norton, April 2)

In this memoir-esque ode to the more-than-human world, the author asks hard questions about the present and the future: What does humanity owe other species, when our existence threatens theirs? What might our relationship to plants and animals look like if we were to better understand—and respect—their cognitive abilities, especially those so unlike our own?

“Our old home is gone,” Millet writes, in a lament about how the climate crisis has altered the planet. So, how do we celebrate and love what is left? In turns heartbreaking and inspiring, We Loved It All reminds us to hold every being dear at a time when we all need love more than ever.

J Drew Lanham, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves
(Hub City Press, April 2)

This book stands out on the list because it contains poetry—a kind of environmental writing sometimes overlooked by fans of the genre. The poems (and the prose) collected here are rooted in lived experience and keen observation of the natural world. Throughout, the award-winning Sparrow Envy author and certified wildlife biologist finds profound connections between that which threatens wildlife and centuries-long systemic racism, charting a map from our brutal past, to our meta-crisis present, toward a hopeful and more equitable future for all living beings. It’s a deeply personal book that evokes joy and reflection by a writer whose generosity of spirit emanates from the page.

Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
(Harper, May 7)

Poets have long understood the intelligence of plants, and now scientists are catching up. In this fascinating journey through contemporary botanical research, Zoë Schlanger explores how new studies are exploding old scientific understandings surrounding what plants are capable of and how they experience the world.

Here, plants are revealed to be beings of great talent and creativity, with the abilities to store memories and trick animals and humans who venture too close for their liking. They are, in other words, complex beings who need us far less than we need them.

Craig Foster, Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World
(HarperOne, May 14)

In this touching memoir, Craig Foster leaves his exhausting life in the city for the slower pace of his place of birth, the Cape of Good Hope, where he takes daily dives into the sea. The ritual renews his sense of self and deepens his feelings of connection to the plants and animals around him. As the book unfolds, we watch his admiration grow into a way of living and thinking that’s more aligned with the natural world.

Amy Stewart, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession
(Random House, June 11)

In turns funny and poignant, The Tree Collectors is an empathetic look at the world of people who spend their lives in pursuit of priceless trees. Amy Stewart’s characteristic wit is on full display as she speaks with tree collectors from around the world. Such conversations reveal more than the ins and outs of an uncommon hobby, however; they show that the desire to collect trees stems from a desire to connect with others and envision a future in which trees and humans alike can thrive on a healed planet.

Adding to the book’s charm are Stewart’s own watercolors of the people she meets along the way.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
(W.W. Norton, June 25)

At the dawn of the pandemic, with so many outdoor public spaces closed, The Lonely City author dreamed of wild escape and began to restore an eighteenth-century garden in Suffolk. Surrounded by centuries-old walls and overgrown with rare plants, the ancient garden became a private Eden—a privilege not lost on the author. Indeed, the garden inspired deep study into the history of land ownership and domesticating plants, an exploration of the “cost of building paradise.”

We see Laing’s research entwined with vignettes of her own restoration work, during which she ponders how to build “versions of Eden that weren’t founded on exclusion and exploitation.” Instead, she seeks ways of caring for the natural world that offers refuge to plants, animals, and humans alike.

According to a 2020 poll by Bosch, a full 51 percent of Americans self-identify as “obsessed” with ice. As I write in my new book Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, the American ice trade was by the mid nineteenth century the largest of its kind in the world. Nowhere else on earth were people consuming as much ice as people were in the United States.

Writers from abroad were astounded by the sheer amount of ice that could be found in the country. When Charles Dickens visited the young republic in 1842, he gawked at the American “icehouses [filled] to the very throat” and “the mounds of ices” that Americans ate in hot weather. (Interestingly, ice doesn’t appear much in the English novelist’s work, either as an element or as metaphor.

Perhaps that’s because, after this first visit, he wrote American Notes for General Circulation and the spent twenty years wanting nothing to do with Americans—not because of their obsession with ice, but because of what he saw as their obsession with money.)

The French writer Jules Verne was famously intrigued by American culture, and it seems he was particularly taken by the country’s ice. He visited America only once, but Americans and the North American continent make appearances throughout his writing, including The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, an 1864 novel in two parts. It tells the story of Captain John Hatteras, who is convinced that the North Pole is free of ice and therefore passable by ship (it wasn’t passable in Verne’s day, but just as the writer predicted the invention of the helicopter, the jukebox, and the electric submarine, he also unfortunately prognosticated an ice-free Arctic). On their way, the captain and crew dock at “the island of New America,” where the men build a “snow house” to stay the winter—an abode likely inspired by North American indigenous building techniques and the many ice houses Verne saw on his visit.

Verne further establishes the wondrous capacity of ice by having one of the crew, a Doctor Clawbonny, start a fire by crafting an “ice lens” that refracts and focuses the rays of the sun.

But it was in the writing the renowned American authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that suggest the country has been in the grip of this obsession for some time.

Consider, for example, twenty-eight-year-old Henry David Thoreau, who waxed rhapsodic about ice in Walden:  “The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent,” he wrote. And later: “Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever?”

Thoreau loved ice, but he wasn’t always fond of the men who harvested it. On one unusually cold night during the winter of 1846, the writer stood outside his log cabin and glowered at the cadre of ice-harvesters full of “jest and sport,” who were chiseling at and hauling away frozen chunks of Walden Pond. He had come here to escape the bustling life of Concord, and the noise was interrupting his respite. Thoreau approached the ice-cutters, but the men didn’t stop working. Instead, they joked that he might like to help them cut the ice in a “pitsaw fashion,” which, in the parlance of the day, meant that he would be standing underwater and freezing to death. Burn.

The Walden ice men weren’t just witty; they were strong and brave and able to crack frozen lakes into hundreds of blocks of ice for profit. Their boss was the man who launched the American ice trade, a wealthy Bostonian named Frederic “the Ice King” Tudor. In 1806, Tudor may or may not have been the first person to land on the idea to sell ice from New England lakes and rivers to people in warm climates around the world—but he was definitely the first person to figure out how to do it.

By the 1820s, the cubes that clinked in glasses of iced tea in Charleston, the ice that cooled hospitalized patients in Savannah; the ice that formed ice cream in the White House during the hottest months of summer—all of it from New England.  Ice was so unusual (and expensive) in the South that locals called it “white gold.”

Ice continued to obsess America. By the end of the nineteenth century, frozen water had become on par with coal in terms of importance. In an 1895 essay entitled “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” published in the North American Review (a journal founded, by the way, by Frederic “the Ice King” Tudor’s older brother William), Mark Twain muses on what sets the United States apart from other nations. He considers a range of temperaments and morals, but ultimately decides that “the national devotion to ice-water” is the country’s most distinctive trait.

“When [Americans] have been a month in Europe we lose our craving for [ice],” he continues, “and we finally tell the hotel folk that they needn’t provide it any more. Yet we hardly touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for it. The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized yet.”

Here Twain’s characteristic wit reads like a gibe, but he found ice just as wondrous as Thoreau and Verne did—albeit ice from a different source.  By the 1890s, the American innovative spirit that gave the world the cotton gin and the telephone, also produced the world’s first ice plants, large factories that could yield thousands of blocks of ice per day—barely enough to keep up with the people’s growing desire for cold.

This new technology rendered the natural ice-cutting industry all but obsolete, because ice from plants contained fewer impurities than natural ice and was therefore much clearer, cleaner, and healthier to consume. Ice plants froze toys and fruits inside their ice blocks to demonstrate such clarity, a marketing ploy that caught Twain’s attention. On a visit to such a plant in New Orleans, the writer stood in front of a block and marveled at how the frozen objects “could be seen as through plate glass.”

It wasn’t just the ice industry that inspired writers, however. Ice as it was found in nature wielded its own kind of rousing power, as did the fortitude of the brave people who attempted to navigate it, whether by choice or not. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) contains one of the most remarked upon ice-related conceits in American literature. It follows Eliza Harris, an enslaved woman seeking freedom (who was based on a real woman) as she crossed the Ohio River with her infant in her arms. Stowe’s description of Eliza’s leap through the perilous, icy water is, well, chilling:

It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters. Owing to the peculiar form of the shore on the Kentucky side, the land bending far out into the water, the ice had been lodged and detained in great quantities, and the narrow channel which swept round the bend was full of ice, piled one cake over another, thus forming a temporary barrier to the descending ice, which lodged, and formed a great, undulating raft, filling up the whole river, and extending almost to the Kentucky shore.

The ice, which touches the shores of Kentucky and Ohio, serves as a metaphoric reminder that the North wasn’t so different from the South, in at least one, significant legal sense. Though Ohio was a free state, the Fugitive Slave Act required all citizens—even those in the north—to help return the enslaved to their masters. Even after risking her life and the life of her babe, Eliza still wasn’t safe from capture. This passage, among so many in the novel, lends the novel its explosive, persuasive power.

Ice serves as a very different kind of metaphor in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 short story “The Ice Palace.” It’s set in a palace constructed entirely of ice based on the one built in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1887 (which I also write about in my book.) The story stars Sally Carrol Happer, a young woman from Georgia, who’s engaged to Harry Bellamy, a young man from an unnamed “Northern city.”

After complaining about her always-warm, never-changing Georgian environment, Harry takes her to a winter carnival, where they enter a palace made entirely of ice. Happer is not fond of the cold and begins to worry that she might be stuck for the rest of her life with a man who seems to treasure it.

Suddenly, the lights in the palace go out, and Sally gets separated from Harry. Fear overtakes her. She feels a “deep terror far greater than any fear of being lost.” In this palace surrounded by ice, she feels forced, if a bit melodramatically, to contemplate the “dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure. It was an icy breath of death; it was rolling down low across the land to clutch at her.” Sally was eventually found, but the couple’s engagement didn’t last.

Ice is everywhere in American literature. When we expand our notion of “America” to “the Americas,” we can include the most famous literary sentence ever to mention ice, that strange, startling line that begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

It’s the kind of first line that burrows deep in the brain. Its structure is so unusual, so surprising, it moved at least one critic to consider a new way of looking at time. In some ways, the line is perhaps as miraculous to readers today as the sight of ice was to Colonel Buendía. In the small South American town of Macondo in an age before electric refrigeration, what would look more magical than sparkling cold ice?

As Helen Rosner once wrote in The New Yorker, “outside of frigid climes, ice is always a miracle.” It might also be America’s most literary element.

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Amy Brady’s Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks–a Cool History of a Hot Commodity is available now from Putnam.

April 22nd is Earth Day, a 51-year-old holiday that celebrates the modern environmentalist movement. In those five decades, the movement has evolved in a few key ways. For one, climate change has become a central focus (though overdevelopment, habitat loss, extinction, and plastic pollution remain important causes as well). Second, the movement has become somewhat more diverse, though it has a long way to go in this area. Perhaps the movement’s biggest evolution is in the number of people who’ve joined it. More activists than ever before are marching in the streets, donating their time and money, and yes, publishing books on the subject.

This month, to celebrate Earth Day and environmentalism more generally, here are five of my favorite books hitting shelves. A standout is J. Drew Lanham’s collection of prose and poetry, which explores what it’s like to be a birdwatcher as a Black man. Others on this list examine economic drivers of climate change and how we might reimagine our economies to be more just. Some zoom in on specific sites of climate-related catastrophe, while others zoom out to look at how human-caused climate change fits in the planet’s 4.6 billion-year-old history. Each of these books is moving and thought-provoking on their own. But when read together, they offer a multifaceted understanding of climate change—and the climate movement—that hopefully will inspire more people to join the cause and fight for a safer, more just, and more sustainable planet.

J. Drew Lanham, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts
(Hub City Press)

In this dazzling collection of poetry and prose, renowned nature writer J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, explores assumptions that so many white birdwatchers take for granted. For example, he questions whether birdwatching can be a form of escapism for him, a Black man, when the wild spaces he visits are never truly safe spaces. The book is also a love letter to the birds themselves. His pages sing, hum, and buzz with the sounds of birds and other wildlife, making this one of the most compelling works of nature writing in recent memory.

Kate Aronoff, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back
(Bold Type Books)

Kate Aronoff, a staff writer for The New Republic, has written some of the most engaging pieces of climate journalism in recent memory. With Overheated, she draws on her experience as a journalist to present a damning critique of modern-day political policy and economic structures that fuel climate change. Specifically, she shows how politicians and corporations have bowed to the fossil-fuel industry, allowing profit-driven capitalism to shape their decision making. What Aronoff uncovers is worse than what even her most climate savvy readers might expect, but she doesn’t end her book there. She also provides a plan for resisting the oil and gas industry’s influence and creating a more just and sustainable future.

Tyler J. Kelley, Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America’s Waterways
(Avid Reader Press)

Americans have long tried to shape and control rivers for crop irrigation, hydroelectric power, transportation, and drinking water. But as climate change grows worse—and our rivers higher and stronger as a result of that change—our infrastructures of control like dams and floodgates are starting to collapse. In Holding Back the River, journalist Tyler J. Kelley travels the country to speak with people whose lives and livelihoods are dependent upon these crumbling structures, to show just how tenuous humanity’s relationship with rivers has become.

Andrew H. Knoll, A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
(Custom House)

This narrative history of Earth spans 4.6 billion years, but it reads at the pace of a thriller. Written by a Harvard geologist, A Brief History of Earth provides valuable context for our current ecological crisis in prose that’s great fun to read. The book compares human-caused climate change to climatic changes throughout our planet’s history, showing how and why our current moment is like no other.

Earlier this month, I had the great pleasure of asking seven novelists who write about climate change and environmental problems—Omar El Akkad, John Lanchester, Lydia Millet, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Madeleine Watts, and Diane Wilson—to tell me more about their work. We discussed what inspired them to write about these matters, what role they see novels playing in public discourse on climate, and whether they see writing about the climate crisis as a kind of activism, among other things. The transcript was divided into two parts. You can read part one here. This is part two.

–Amy Brady

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Each of your novels balances the personal stories of your characters with the larger story—or stories—of what’s happening to the planet. What do you hope readers take away from the connections you create between these two scales?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Maybe better cognitive mapping for their own lives? Or a sense of kinship with the rest of the biosphere. Realization that the biosphere is our extended body, and we are co-extensive with it. The fact that 50 percent of the DNA in your body is not human DNA is the stunning new scientific fact of our time, in this regard. But it seems to be a story that has to be told over and over. Sense of self is very tied to individual consciousness. But it’s bigger than that, so this is a story to tell.

Omar El Akkad: My hope is that I can alter, in even the smallest way, this ruinous attachment to the culture of More. Western society, arguably for centuries but certainly in the post-war age, has revolved around the political and commercial notion that we must constantly have more, consume more, be satisfied only by more. And I suspect if we (and when I say “we,” I mean the dominant culture of capitalism into which almost all of us, willingly or not, are in one way or another conscripted) are to survive the coming century, we will have to make the very painful adjustment to a culture of Less, a culture that cares even in the slightest about those coming generations who will have to pay off our ever-ballooning mortgage of endless consumption and convenience.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: Our biological lives are, for sure, way more expansive and interconnected than we think, and it’s important that our stories expand beyond the human. The human individual consciousness has been the baseline vantage point of most modern Western literature, and it’s quite limited. I believe this narrow view—what Amitav Ghosh has described in his mirror-breaking book The Great Derangement as the “individual moral adventure”—is an extension of the self-focused, short-sighted mindset that has led to the climate crisis.

It’s all about us—but that “us” cannot be the whole story, because that “us” is mostly the strata of human society that has benefited from centuries of converting lives and habitats to some form of stake in the artificial game of capital accumulation. The resulting ecology of narratives would be a diminished one.

It’s why I feel that there’s an urgent need for more people everywhere to not only see the larger climate story, but also tell it. I hope my novel, among others, can help readers make some connection with a larger view—across cultures, cities, histories, and also species, environments, and modes of existence. I’m trying to expand my own cellular view as I write.

Lydia Millet: Yes! Empathy beyond and among cultures and species. A negative capability that goes beyond us to them and sees them as us. And also not us. And beautifully so. An embrace of the not-us into the us. And a going-forth of the us into the all.

Diane Wilson: I hope that readers will see how the language and cultural framework we bring to understanding the environmental challenges we face also shapes the issue itself. To me, the phrase “climate change,” perpetuates a Western cultural myth of scientific objectivity that is disconnected from spirit, upholding an understanding of the world that is human-centric. To see these issues from an indigenous point of view means understanding our environmental challenges as a failure of relationship, of neglecting or commodifying our relatives. Literature, especially fiction, provides an opportunity for other voices to be recognized. In my novel, the seeds are also one of the characters, reminding humans of the ancient pact, or Original Instructions, in which humans and other beings co-created the world and took care of each other. As Crystal Echo Hawk has said, “Change the future, change the story.”

John Lanchester: As Pitchaya says, Ghosh’s The Great Derangement is a key text here—the project of seeing beyond the individual perspective and the individual story is vital. It’s also, from a story-teller’s point of view, one of the hardest things to do, and therefore the most interesting. The fundamental issues are, as your question suggests, all about connection. Or to put it another way, about resisting the forces and voices which suggest that we aren’t all connected. I love the line of Crystal Echo Hawk’s that Diane quotes, I hadn’t come across it before.

Madeleine Watts: I’m not sure that I have much more to add! I mentioned Ghosh before, and I am more than happy to bring him up again—to fully represent the challenge of climate change we have to dismantle the point of view the realist novel has acclimated us to, that of the individual or the family, on a small scale. Finding ways to represent what Daisy Hildyard calls “the second body” are key—the ways in which our lives are both specific and individual, but interconnected, part of animal systems, microbial systems, fungal systems, and part of broader systems, of electricity production, resource extraction. I find this quote from her particularly helpful: “Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world.”

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Did writing about environmental damage and/or climate change alter in any way how you see the world?

Diane Wilson: Writing the novel helped me understand how difficult it is to change the way we understand the world around us, especially when that world view is upheld and reinforced by Western science, schools, etc. But when I broke down the overwhelming scope of the environmental issues into a single seed variety like corn, or the plants in my garden, it became easier to absorb, to understand the patterns, and to deflect the marketing messages that perpetuate the issues. Living in Minnesota, a corn state, we are targeted by industrial seed companies advertising slogans that they are responsible for “feeding the world,” for example.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I pay more attention to the weather. Also to my garden, the Sierra, the news, etc.

Omar El Akkad: I’m not sure my writing alters how I see the world, but the research that goes into the writing certainly does. It’s impossible, I think, to go visit the sinking land of southern Louisiana, an utterly beautiful place that is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of a football field every half hour, and not feel a profound sense of grief. It’s impossible to visit southern Florida, where king tides now regularly flood the cities and yet real estate hustlers continue to peddle multimillion-dollar mansions designed to float in high water, and not feel a profound sense of rage. You can’t draw the map without studying the territory, and the territory changes you.

Madeleine Watts: I started paying attention. To the news, yes, but also nature. I started growing plants, and gardening. I learned the names of plants and trees and flowers and birds and insects I’d previously not even registered. I notice the weather, and write it down each day.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: One change is my greater awareness of ways stories can be nefariously distorted and weaponized. For me, studying and writing about climate change also means having more exposure to the false narratives around it. The level of deceit is incredible.

Some aren’t so obvious. A lot of people may not be aware that the seemingly well-intended notion of a carbon footprint was propagated by British Petroleum in order to shift responsibility from the fossil fuel industry to everyday consumers. Others are blatant. Just recently, with the widespread power failure in Texas after a likely climate change-induced polar vortex event, market-dominating oil and natural gas interests tried to deflect blame to less ubiquitous wind power. It would almost be comical if so many lives hadn’t suffered or, worse, ended.

I do hope and believe the stream of misinformation and misdirects will eventually fail. Good, truthful storytelling is too powerful for it.

Lydia Millet: Mis- and disinformation. False stories abound. Deflection stories abound.

John Lanchester: Yes, definitely. It moved it from the back of my mind to the front of my mind. Once it’s there, I find, like many people, that barely a day goes by without my noticing something connected to it. My novel imagines a much colder Britain, because the Gulf Stream no longer helps keep the island warm—and lo, this week there was news that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (a big part of the Gulf Stream) is at its weakest in a thousand years.

The other thing I found out only this week was the fact mentioned by Pitchaya, that BP invented the idea of the climate footprint. I think the deliberate manufacturing of ignorance and falsehood around the climate—the manufacturing of nescience—will come to be seen as one of the great generational crimes.

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In many parts of the world—and especially in the United States—climate change is a highly politicized topic. As novelists who address it in your fiction, do you see yourselves as taking a political stance? Is your novel(s) a form of activism?

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: As one writes any novel, one is making decisions about point of view, subject, language, and setting—among many other considerations—that are inherently political. So, yes, I’ve taken a stance by having written my novel, and so have writers who have avoided politicized topics like climate change.

Does that mean that climate change-related novels are by nature a form of activism? I think it can be, especially in bringing awareness to climate justice issues and how lives are unequally affected across a connected world, but it’s hard for most authors to expect their novels to have a reliable effect. We don’t usually write outright propaganda with a clear call to mass action. With how quickly the observed anthropocene impact is exceeding scientific forecasts, do we have enough time on the clock to count on climate activism via our novels? Are tens of thousands of words and subtle character arcs our best way to say, “Put out this carbon-spewing fire now?”

I believe that, as writers, we can also play stronger persuasive roles beyond the formal limits of our work. We can join with other writers, editors, booksellers, librarians, science and policy experts, and, most importantly, readers in leading visible, vocal activism that can bring greater attention to the climate crisis and environmental justice. We can influence how fast the publishing industry as a whole moves toward greater sustainability. We can actually yell, “Put out this carbon-spewing fire now!” and expect results.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Agree with Pitchaya here, about doing more than just writing novels, to mobilize public opinion and get the word out faster. Also agree with this: all novels are political interventions. Sometimes they pretend not to be, but this just means their politics is status quo. Maybe there is art for art’s sake, but in the novel in particular, not so much. So, best to know that and put that knowledge to use. Subtlety would be nice, but not always.

Diane Wilson: In choosing to write a novel based around indigenous seeds, my hope was to sidestep the overly politicized discussion of GMO seeds, which has become such a heated, divisive argument. Instead, I wanted to provide context for understanding how our relationship with seeds has evolved over time, and what those changes mean for human beings and the planet. Through the characters actions, we gain insight into the criteria they used for making their choices and how those criteria reflect their respective cultural values. I crossed into more direct political activism in a lengthy Afterword that speaks to the current, dire status of seeds globally and includes a call to action and resources for getting involved. When I read and present, the conversation often moves beyond a discussion of the novel’s characters and themes into real world engagement, which is exactly what I hoped the novel would accomplish.

Omar El Akkad: Politics intrudes on my writing, not the other way around. All writers are in one way or another engaged in the work of investigating what it means to be human, and it’s impossible to do that without addressing the systems we’ve designed to order our societies and the people we’ve put in charge of those systems. When politicians—or, in the case of the United States, entire political parties—take a plainly counterfactual position on something as existential as the future of our planet because their corporate benefactors demand it, then my writing on the future of our planet by definition becomes political. I have no say in the matter.

John Lanchester: I’m in full agreement with my colleagues. Personally, I would love it if writing novels was entirely the same thing as activist engagement, but part of the reason I would love it is that it would let me off having to do anything else.

Madeleine Watts: I agree with what everybody’s said. Everything is political, and so is my book. But writing a book isn’t the same thing as climate activism—that vital work is being done by the people working day and night to halt the construction of coal mines by the Great Barrier Reef, and advocating (and hopefully implementing) policies like the Green New Deal.

Lydia Millet: They said it all when they said it. I have little more to offer on this point.

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Given everything you’ve learned and know about climate change, ecological imbalance, environmental damage, and related humanitarian crises, are you optimistic for what the future might bring? 

Kim Stanley Robinson: That doesn’t matter. Optimism and pessimism are attitudes from an older time. Maybe Gramsci can rescue that binary, with his quote from—Rolland?—anyway, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.  In other words, your mood doesn’t matter, you still have to face up to the facts and deal.

Madeleine Watts: I find this a tricky question. I find hope a really tricky proposition. I’m 30, and have been aware of climate change since kindergarten. Everybody my age grew up with a sense that something was awry in the climate, with nature in general, but we were told we shouldn’t worry—we should be hopeful—because it would probably be sorted out by the time we had to worry about it. Now we’re adults, now we’re experiencing the consequences. And nothing has changed. The adults never figured it out. It has produced a greater sense of anxiety, a greater sense of panic and disillusionment and fatigue than I think has yet been reckoned with. I’m wary of hope because I think it can also lead to complacency—“I don’t have to think about it, somebody else is on it, somebody else will figure it out.” Diane’s point about process sums up my feelings best—focusing on the outcome isn’t always the best perspective to take.

Diane Wilson: I tend to focus on process rather than outcome, especially in the face of such vast challenges. Planting a garden, harvesting seeds, teaching youth to share their stories, inspires me to keep working and writing. Walking outside on a late winter morning and hearing the songs of migrating birds fills my heart with gratitude and appreciation, which helps me remain strong in this work. It’s the lesson from Standing Rock: focus on the beauty and sacred nature of our water, land, and seeds as we protect what we love.

Omar El Akkad: Diane’s point about process rather than outcome is more true and profound than anything I could say.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: I can’t help but feel anxious, though. Rationally, our future is not looking very good. So little has been done. Not enough action is agreed for the future. Time is running out. The people least responsible and who have benefited the least will likely suffer most. I feel sorrow and anger instead of pessimism, which to me requires resignation. I don’t think I’m resigned, as I’m still personally trying. It’s possibly a survival instinct. Fight or flight—and Mars isn’t looking very hospitable. This is it.

If that doesn’t work, then maybe I’ll have no choice but to be optimistic—not for humanity and the species and environments we will have lost—but for whatever lifeforms and maybe civilizations that could evolve sometime after our failure. Some other story will emerge. New beings and creatures will take their turn on the earth. May they not destroy the world with the dark broth of our bones.

Lydia Millet: It’s true that we get hung up on hope. I say move beyond hope or the lack of it. Hope is an affect. Put it aside, as we put aside our old toys. Much as we may have loved them once. Move into the space beyond the therapeutic and the personal. Into action. Economics, policy, and law.

John Lanchester: I think we have a moral obligation to be hopeful, because if we aren’t, we will give in to despair, and then we won’t act. The scientists aren’t saying that it’s all over for us: they’re saying we need to act, collectively, right now. So that’s what we have to do. Hope is a tool, an important one.

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Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. His next novel, What Strange Paradise, is forthcoming from Knopf in July.

John Lanchester is the author of novels, a memoir, non-fiction and journalism. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books (where he is a Contributing Editor), Granta, The Observer, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The New Yorker. He also regularly writes on food and technology for Esquire. His most recent novel, The Wall, depicted a future ersatz Britain in a world devastated by climate change. His short story collection, Reality and Other Stories, is forthcoming next month.

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections, often about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. Her latest novel, A Children’s Bible, was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and one of the New York Times Book Review’s Top 10 Books of 2020.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the internationally bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and Shaman.  In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His latest novel is called Ministry for the Future.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, which was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The novel, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK), has been hailed as “ambitious and sweeping” (Esquire) and “a remarkable debut” (Financial Times) with a narrative that “recreates the experience of living in Thailand’s aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles” (Washington Post). It has also been named a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Casa delle Letterature Bridge Book Award, and the Edward Stanford Award.

Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne, but she has been based in New York since 2013. She is a writer of fiction, essays and journalism. Her writing has been published in The Believer, The White Review, Lithub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Guernica, Meanjin and The Lifted Brow, among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was published by Pushkin Press (UK/ANZ) in March 2020, and in January 2021 by Catapult (US).

Diane Wilson (Dakota) is a writer, speaker, and editor, who has published two award-winning books, as well as essays in numerous publications. Her new novel, The Seed Keeper, will be published by Milkweed Editions in March, 2021. Her memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (Borealis Books) won a 2006 Minnesota Book Award and was selected for the 2012 One Minneapolis One Read program. Her 2011 nonfiction book, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life (Borealis Books) was awarded the 2012 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado.

This year marks the sixth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement, an international accord that marks the first time nearly every nation on Earth promised to tackle the climate crisis. The goals set by that agreement, however, have not been met.

As the climate crisis worsens, more novelists than ever before are writing about climate change, environmental destruction, extinction, and related issues. Whereas climate change and science more generally has long been the domain of science-fiction writers, now those subjects are explored by writers of all kinds.

I had the great pleasure of asking seven novelists who write about climate change and environmental problems—Omar El Akkad, John Lanchester, Lydia Millet, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Madeleine Watts, and Diane Wilson—to tell me more about their work. We discussed what inspired them to write about these matters, what role they see novels playing in public discourse on climate, and whether they see writing about the climate crisis as a kind of activism. We also discussed their writerly processes for tackling such an enormous issue and how optimistic they are for the future. The transcript has been slightly edited for clarity and divided into two parts. This is part one.

–Amy Brady

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What inspired you to write about environmental problems and/or climate change in your fiction? Was it a person? An event? Perhaps something you read?

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: Climate issues were on my mind well before I began writing more developed fiction. I have a degree in environmental sciences and policy, but after college I decided that I would be trying my luck in the cultural carnival that was New York City instead of spending my days collecting water samples or drafting policy memos elsewhere.

Years later, what I’d learned from my studies re-emerged in my narrative explorations as I began writing fiction centered on Bangkok. Living through the 2010 floods in Thailand, followed by Hurricane Sandy smashing into NYC in 2012, made me worry even more about the most vulnerable people and places. I think I can consider my novel as partly the product of years of persistent climate anxiety. How could my imagination keep out humanity’s most pressing existential concern?

For me, I can’t write around a climate crisis. Writing fiction, instead, becomes my imaginative consideration of how we’re systematically linked by the most mysterious complexities in one vast narrative—to different effects, depending on where we live and who we are in that society. To follow my characters—from past to future, in their lives and memories—I needed to myself appreciate the urgency of globally entangled climate change rather than ignore or deny it.

Kim Stanley Robinson: While writing my Mars books in the early 90s, I was aware I was writing a kind of climate fiction in that terraforming Mars would involve pumping up its frozen atmosphere, etc.  In those books some characters spoke of people “terraforming Earth” as well as Mars, and so I knew I was treating Mars as a kind of distorted mirror, or comparative study. After that I went to Antarctica, and all the scientists there spoke of climate change, and that began a long process of trying to include it in my science fiction. I struggled to find a form for that and I still do, but I recall the discovery of an “abrupt climate change” in the Greenland ice core data for the Younger Dryas, as being the stimulus for my Green Earth trilogy. Since then I’ve kept coming at it from different angles.

Lydia Millet: Pitchaya, similar arc with me. I did a master’s in environmental economics and policy, then insisted on living in New York when my first novel was published despite the fact that the jobs in my academic “field” were mostly in DC. So I ended up writing grants for a while before I took off to the southwest US, where I now work for a conservation group (still writing and editing, but not grants).

My first love and fear and crisis as a writer has for a long time been species extinction, which has a large Venn overlap with climate but also exists distinctly from it. I still feel strongly that extinction falls out of the discussion too often when we talk and write about climate, and that there’s a real risk, as human cultures grapple with the threat of climate catastrophe, that we’ll embrace our sense of human supremacy too single-mindedly in our desperation to find solutions. And end up steamrolling other lifeforms as we flail. So I tend to try to write about climate from that fear, the fear of the loss of others and otherness.

Diane Wilson: Twenty years ago I started volunteering with a little half-acre garden that was growing out a collection of rare, old, indigenous seeds. I was drawn not only as a gardener but also as a writer, after realizing that these seeds also carried stories: corn that survived the Cherokee Trail of Tears, traditional tobacco that was 800 years old, stories of the weather and land on which they grew. After getting involved with a walk to commemorate the Dakota who were removed from Minnesota in 1863, I heard a story about the women who protected their seeds by hiding them in their pockets and sewing them in the hems of their skirts. Even when families were hungry, they protected these seeds for future generations.

Over the years as I continued to work with Native seeds and foods, I began to understand much more deeply how that story reflected a relationship with the earth that was vastly different from that expressed through modern-day farming. That understanding brought a realization that every generation has to take responsibility for these seeds, and by extension, for the earth itself. Writing the novel was my way of elevating the story of these Dakota women, and raising questions about the consequences of our evolving relationship with seeds and plants.

Omar El Akkad: I come from a part of the world that is slowly growing uninhabitable. The Arabian Gulf, where I spent my childhood, will one day be too hot for most people to make any kind of life there. Possibly this will happen during my lifetime, and this act of witness, of watching as the compartment in which I’ve stored my formative memories smolders, is the primary reason environmental change works its way into almost every piece of fiction I write. I think one of the functions of literature is to study consequences—the consequences of what we do to ourselves and what we do to one another. By that metric, it’s impossible to write honestly in this moment, as we stand on the precipice of what could be the most cataclysmic century of human existence, and not engage with the consequences of what we’ve done and continue to do to this planet.

John Lanchester: A dream, of all unlikely things. In early 2016 I began having a recurring dream about a figure standing on a wall with the land on one side and the sea on the other. I started by wondering who he was and then realized that was the wrong question—instead I should be asking what had happened to the world, because it was clearly not the same as the world we currently live in. It was a world after catastrophic climate change. I think what happened is that I was deeply preoccupied by climate change on a subconscious level, while also not knowing what to do about it, in my work. So my subconscious cooked up the novel for me. It was a strange process—dream to image to world to character to story—completely unlike how I’ve written anything else, and I fully expect it not to happen again.

Madeleine Watts: My impulse to write about the environment came from a slightly different direction. I didn’t set out to write a book about climate change per se, but I found as I wrote that vivid descriptions of place and nature kept coming through. In my own life I was becoming increasingly preoccupied by reading about environmental problems, both news stories and books. After finishing a draft of my novel I happened to read The Great Derangement by the writer Amitav Ghosh, which, among other things, calls on contemporary writers to find different forms, structures and narratives to address climate change in our writing, the most serious problem facing us. I radically rearranged the novel after reading Ghosh’s book, and started to thread in all my doom-laden news-reading and environmental book-learning into the novel itself.

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Climate change and environmental degradation are enormous in scale and caused by systemic problems like racism, xenophobia, and greed. All of this seems too big to capture vividly on the page. And yet each of you did just that. Please describe your writerly approach or process for giving these planet-sized problems a narrative shape. 

Kim Stanley Robinson: Science fiction provides the method. In particular, the placement of the story in a possible future, with an implied history running back to our time; and secondly, a focus on the planet itself as a character, or actant, or actor in an actor-network. Thirdly, an emphasis on science and technology, and scientists. Science fiction has always had these tools ready to bring to bear, and so it’s particularly well-suited as a genre to writing about climate change.  In fact I would say most climate fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction, also, that any time science fiction gets particularly interesting to the culture at large, they give it a new name so they don’t have to admit to having anything to do with such a disreputable art form. This is so old-fashioned an attitude as to be funny, but since it still exists, it’s not that funny.

Lydia Millet: Stan, I love that you bring that up. I think science fiction has so often been prescient in a way so-called literary fiction has not—and has preferred to envision its stories systemically and philosophically, while fiction that’s deemed to be literary, particularly in the US, has stubbornly situated itself inside the myopically humanist, domestic, and personal. Thus avoiding a wider-scope imagining of, for example, social and economic arrangements beyond, say, market capitalism.

I’m thinking of old books, even, from H.G. Wells on: one of my personal favorites is Karel Capek’s War With the Newts, which I guess is more allegorical than sci-fi but brilliantly and hilariously describes a population explosion/world domination scenario involving intelligent, increasingly bipedal salamanders. More recently, your own work or maybe that of writers like Vernor Vinge, who also doesn’t shy away from vast canvasses.

The painstaking world-building that Stan does, or indeed that Vernor Vinge does very differently, is hyper-intellectual by comparison to much of general or domestic fiction. That intellectual and imaginative labor is deeply appreciated by readers—an appreciation that’s borne out by the large and sophisticated audiences these books command—yet still, in publishing culture, marketing categories keep books in separate compartments, where the general and the genre are segregated.

As we come to confront the life-support matter of climate change in fiction—and, I hope, species extinction—it would behoove us all to collapse those categories.

Omar El Akkad: I’m not sure if I’ve ever succeeded in this approach, or if it is in any sense the best one, but I tend to move as much as I am able in the direction of smallness. Having spent some of my life as a journalist covering war, I’ve experienced the terrible power of human indifference in the face of mass suffering, this idea that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths a statistic. As I do when I’m writing about love or rage or any other mechanic of being human, I try to filter everything through individual characters’ experiences. A couple of weeks ago, here in Oregon, we were hit by a pretty vicious ice storm, and were left without power and water for more than a week. It was a freak thing but in its own way a harbinger of what climate change will likely render a normal occurrence in my children’s lifetime. And yet during those miserable few days, at least for me, climate change did not exist. The only thing that existed was that very small human desperation to keep one’s family safe, to stave off cold and hunger and suffering. Emotionally and psychologically, it was the same place I retreated to when the wildfires tore through our county last year, and probably where I’ll go the next time this kind of carnage strikes. So I suppose it’s not surprising that my characters should go there too.

John Lanchester: +1 to what Stan and Lydia said.

A peculiar thing about this moment, for writers, is that the big subjects are all structural and systematic. And yet we are hard-wired, as humans, to like stories that are about individuals, about heroes and villains and journeys and all that. SF has been tackling these tensions forever, since it doesn’t subscribe to what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”—the idea that everything is just the way it has to be, and the writer’s job is just to reflect that status quo back at itself.

Madeleine Watts: John, it’s funny that you bring up Mark Fisher and “capitalist realism,” because reading Fisher was a momentous experience for me, producing the kinds of perspective-shifts I think you only get from very special writers a few times in your life. I knew what I was writing wasn’t science fiction, but I was interested in the fact that it has so often been science fiction which has best addressed issues of climate change. I borrowed from a couple of approaches – the essayistic digressions of writers like Sebald, the fragmentation of writers like Jenny Offill, and a lot of the creative non-fiction I was reading, by writers like Eduardo Galeano or Charles Bowden.

I used a lot of research and old reporting skills to represent real climactic events which had happened, in the case of my book, in 2013. Every “extreme” event which might ordinarily be construed as veering towards the science fictional is based completely in fact, and skews surreal only in my arrangement of the facts. It was important to me to make sure every fire or flood or heatwave I was writing about was not only verifiably real, but historical. I think writing the book under the last administration while so many climate denialists were being given a platform made the truth of those events feel very urgent to me as I wrote.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: In writing Bangkok Wakes to Rain, it helped to have been bookish since my youth about the city and its history. By the time I started, I had ready knowledge of a particular place and its transformation through time, but there was a lot that I could cover. I had no idea where to begin or end, especially when I started to additionally consider a future in which climate change has taken a toll.

Yet it was my imagination of a Bangkok reshaped by a worsened climate crisis that helped me to think about how centuries-old histories connected to current political dysfunction and reckless growth, paving way for a precarious future ahead. I saw how new problems took the shape of past ones, ad infinitum, and the way lives confront and move with powerful forces. I let myself wander freely between the personal and the systemic. It became clear to me that no one character or story would be enough. I needed many more across the lifespan of a city, so I let them come and go. I watched them do their best to feel more whole in the midst of upheavals and uprooting, and I jotted down what I saw. It’s almost voyeurism. Then when I needed a wider view, I zoomed out.

I feel that freedom of narrative motion is important when trying to capture something as unimaginably far-reaching as climate change. I can’t tell the entire story, but I think readers can feel the larger shape of the story through my novel’s movements across places and time.

*

Is there something a novel can show us about climate change or environmental damage that’s different than what a scientific study can show us?

Lydia Millet: Our brains organize consciousness in terms of story. So story always matters, and matters a lot. The trick now, I suspect, is to pull away from the stories we’ve told for so long that hinge on the struggles and ultimate triumph of the self. Into a different form of narrative that reaches beyond the self to tell stories of the collective. And returns us to ideas of community and the communal.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I think so. It can give readers a bit of fictional time travel and telepathy, such that the readers experience what climate change will feel like. The thick texture of narrative is designed to create that Coleridgean “willed suspension of disbelief” and then the text is experienced as a kind of dream or hallucination, which can be vivid and emotional. Having felt it in advance of its full arrival, possibly this will create changes in behavior now. Scientific studies create changes in a different way.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: To me, the difference is that science is mostly a search for observable truth. This search is advanced by conversations between scientists, usually through papers and conferences where findings are presented and debated in their own specialty language. Perhaps that conversational murmur, like the one about the science of climate change, is overheard by the larger culture, and some might ask, “What difference does it make?”

I think novelists, poets, filmmakers, and others play a very important translational role. For me, storytellers help translate climate science into imaginative possibilities hinted by what’s observationally verifiable. In part, we create, as Stan had said, a kind of advanced preview, and I think we also help to elucidate meaning. People can be compelled by art to ask moral questions about what has been allowed to happen to our world and what might come next. They may come to understand why climate truth makes existential difference to many lives—human and non-human. Good fiction, which can only be meaningful if it is truthful, makes already real climate science even more real by helping to show why it matters so much.

Diane Wilson: I agree with Lydia’s point that story always matters. Years ago, I learned a terrific lesson from a flamenco dancer and choreographer who understood that her audience was often overwhelmed by the gravity of the day’s headlines, the stress of their lives, and felt burdened by guilt and shame over issues like the environment. Instead, she found ways to appeal to their imaginations, layering difficult stories with images that were also beautiful. She knew that a good story can bypass our defenses, deepen our understanding of complex issues, and create empathy.

As we grapple with scientific evidence that points to catastrophic climate change, it’s not hard to feel almost paralyzed, especially as we’re also dealing with a pandemic, the recent attempted coup, and the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In the discussion of climate change, too often we forget to emphasize the beauty and life-giving joy of clean water, healthy seeds, breathable air. We neglect the stories of what it means to be a good relative to the plants and animals and soil and water that give us life. We forget that our real work is to protect what we love. Through story, a novel can carry us through the challenges that we face and remind us of what truly matters.

Omar El Akkad: I’m not sure there’s a medium as well-suited as the novel for mimicking the lies we tell ourselves in order to get through the day. My wife is a clean-energy chemist; a lot of her work is related to solar energy and building better batteries. The general structure of her research, which of course I am oversimplifying, is very much in keeping with the scientific method—a hypothesis, followed by an experiment, followed by a conclusion that informs what changes should be made to the original hypothesis. It’s a productive and scientifically honest way of doing things, and perhaps if everyone lived their lives in keeping with this method, we would have by now become one of those God-species that shows up on the occasional Star Trek episode to serve as a deus ex machina. But we don’t live this way, and a lot of the time we live in the exact opposite way—we decide on conclusions and then wrestle hopelessly with the world to make the evidence fit whatever we’ve already decided to believe. It’s destructive and flawed but it’s also deeply human and while the rigor and authority of scientific research can’t meet us in this place, the workings of literature, this very graceful art of guided lying, can.

John Lanchester: Obviously we all think so, otherwise we wouldn’t be bothering to write novels about it. The prospect of cataclysmic, irreversible, planetary change is inherently difficult, borderline impossible, to get our heads around. La Rochefoucauld wrote, “neither death nor the sun can be looked at directly.” Climate change is like that too. But unless we face the truth of it, we won’t be able to start addressing it, at the necessary scale and with the necessary urgency. That’s why writers, artists in general, have a special role in relation to climate change: to make people see clearly what’s ahead if we don’t alter course. As Omar says, what can do this better than a novel? Description and visualization are easy to underrate as political forces and means to change.

Madeleine Watts: It’s true, we all clearly think so. A scientific study can tell us what is happening, and what likely will happen. But there are other ways we are experiencing climate change—social, psychological, cultural, emotional—which a scientific study doesn’t help us understand. Climate change is also produced by human history, by imperialism and colonialism, and a novel has the ability to roam across all that territory, to collect it up and represent it back to us.

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How important is it to get the science right in your novels? Or is this something you even think about when writing?

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: Yes, science definitely feeds the storytelling imagination. In many ways, scientists begin their investigation with an initial fantasy—a what-if? What if you stick this genetic sequence in this other creature? What happens if you ram these particles into each other? Many writers begin a work with similar what-ifs. What if someone woke up as a cockroach? What if a woman’s daughter returns from the dead? It’s all about finding out what happens.

With writers, we don’t have the onus of peer-reviewable experimentation. When it comes to science, we can cherry-pick a part that fascinates us and test hypotheses in our own heads to their most ridiculous conclusion however we’d like. As I was writing my novel, I did some cursory research just to see if the events I’d depicted were maybe within some range of possibility. The scary part was that whenever I felt like I may have gone too far with a climate scenario, some news article would pop up to say that we could be headed in its very direction.

Lydia Millet: My own novels and short stories are probably less dependent on getting any particular science right than on investigating the place where knowledge and wisdom meet. Or fail to meet. How we’ve fallen away from wisdom even as we accumulate large masses of knowledge. What that falling away could mean, for us and for the rest of what lives. And how we might move from knowledge toward wisdom.

Omar El Akkad: I couldn’t agree more with what Lydia says about the place where knowledge and wisdom meet, or don’t. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten the science fully right in any of my fiction, both because the level of rigor and detail required to do so isn’t something a writer of my limited talent can keep from overwhelming the emotional and narrative mechanics of the story, but also because novels are static in time. The science changes but books, once written, stay the same. With a topic as rapidly evolving as climate change, I don’t try to stay true to the current science, but rather do right by it. In broad strokes, we know full well what we are doing to the planet, and we have known for decades. My stories are rooted in this knowing, but from there they branch off in all kinds of invented directions.

Madeleine Watts: Like Lydia and Omar, I’m not sure my novel is that dependent on the science. There are two big leaps forward into what “will” happen in the future in the book, one concerning an inland sea, and one concerning sea level rise, and I did make an effort to get the science correct. I tried to do right by what I knew and understood, but climate science is always changing, and I can only hope that what I’ve represented is as truthful as it can be to the moment it was written in.

Kim Stanley Robinson: It depends on what kind of novel I’m writing. If I want to write about Galileo getting taken by time travelers to the year 3000, getting the science right becomes kind of a relative thing—although knowing the surfaces of the four Jovian moons is really helpful to writing that story. For stories closer to now and more realistic, getting the science right helps to create the “effect of the real” that is important for allowing the novel to work for the reader as a fully experienced dream-state. Also, science keeps bringing us new stories to tell, and that’s very valuable. There are many stories that have been told so many times they’re worn out, being variations on a theme that already goes in one ear and out the other. New stories? Gold. So science is a kind of gold mine for story-tellers.

John Lanchester: Agree with Stan here about “it depends.” The tools needed to make a novel feel satisfyingly true vary wildly from story to story; it’s part of the magic of fiction that readers sense so quickly and completely the conditions and rules of a particular imaginative world. Nobody reading N.K. Jesmin is going to demand more physics and geology, and nobody reading Vernor Vinge ever complains that there aren’t enough wizards. In the case of climate change, I think Lydia and Omar are right that readers are looking for wisdom rather than knowledge. In my own case I tried hard to think about the question, “what would it be like,” and to keep that in my head all the time, to make the world I was imagining feel real. In respect of science, the task was therefore not to seem too intrusive, too distracting, or too wrong—if you posit something about a post-catastrophe world which the science has already disproved, it puts the reader off.

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Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. His next novel, What Strange Paradise, is forthcoming from Knopf in July.

John Lanchester is the author of novels, a memoir, non-fiction and journalism. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books (where he is a Contributing Editor), Granta, The Observer, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The New Yorker. He also regularly writes on food and technology for Esquire. His most recent novel, The Wall, depicted a future ersatz Britain in a world devastated by climate change. His short story collection, Reality and Other Stories, is forthcoming next month.

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections, often about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. Her latest novel, A Children’s Bible, was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and one of the New York Times Book Review’s Top 10 Books of 2020.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the internationally bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and Shaman.  In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and UC San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His latest novel is called Ministry for the Future.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, which was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The novel, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK), has been hailed as “ambitious and sweeping” (Esquire) and “a remarkable debut” (Financial Times) with a narrative that “recreates the experience of living in Thailand’s aqueous climate so viscerally that you can feel the water rising around your ankles” (Washington Post). It has also been named a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Casa delle Letterature Bridge Book Award, and the Edward Stanford Award.

Madeleine Watts grew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne, but she has been based in New York since 2013. She is a writer of fiction, essays and journalism. Her writing has been published in The Believer, The White Review, Lithub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Guernica, Meanjin and The Lifted Brow, among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was published by Pushkin Press (UK/ANZ) in March 2020, and in January 2021 by Catapult (US).

Diane Wilson (Dakota) is a writer, speaker, and editor, who has published two award-winning books, as well as essays in numerous publications. Her new novel, The Seed Keeper, will be published by Milkweed Editions in March, 2021. Her memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (Borealis Books) won a 2006 Minnesota Book Award and was selected for the 2012 One Minneapolis One Read program. Her 2011 nonfiction book, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life (Borealis Books) was awarded the 2012 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado.

In the wake of the polar vortex that froze Texas’s power grid—a phenomenon possibly strengthened by climate change—the UN Secretary-General warned that 2021 will be a “crucial year in the fight against climate change.” The world’s nations are collectively “way off target,” he continued, in terms of meeting the 1.5 degree limit established by the Paris Agreement. If we sail past that limit, the planet’s most vulnerable populations will experience even greater threats to their lives and livelihoods than they already are. “We have a moral obligation to do better.”

While international policy-makers wrestle with how to enact change, journalists, novelists, and other writers continue to give narrative shape to the climate crisis. Their books help illuminate how we got into this mess, and what we can do to get out of it. This month, five books are hitting shelves that provide philosophical, scientific, historical, and artistic context for better understanding the crisis and the related issue of conservation.

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Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
(W.W. Norton & Company)

Written by an acclaimed environmental journalist, Beloved Beasts takes readers on a 150-year journey through the history of wildlife conservation. Nijhuis balances her storytelling to include highlights from well-known conservation figures like Rachel Carson as well as contributions by lesser-known taxidermists and 19th-century naturalists. The movement’s most notable organizations, like the Audubon Society, are also explored. Lavishly researched, Beloved Beasts is a compassionate look at what humans have done—and need to do next—to protect the natural world.

Nathaniel Popkin, To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis
(New Door Books)

In To Reach the Spring, Popkin writes “I believe it is our moral duty to leave the earth in better condition than how we found it and we have demonstrably failed.” But he insists there’s hope for the future. Combining memoir, moral philosophy, and lessons from the field of psychology, Popkin lays out a thoughtful path “to reach the spring,” a future in which humanity has reassessed and corrected its relationship with the planet. This book, published on a micro press out of Philadelphia, is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read in a year about why humans are so resistant to making the social changes needed to mitigate the worst of climate change.

Kazim Ali, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
(Milkweed Editions)

A child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali encompasses many identities. He was born in London, lived as a boy in Manitoba, then moved to the United States. Today he navigates life as a queer, Muslim man who often feels out of place. But that feeling started to evaporate when, one day, his mind turned to memories of Jenpeg, the small Manitoban town he once lived near. In Northern Light, Ali returns to the town, which is located near a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, surrounded by boreal forests. He finds the place embroiled in political chicanery and facing environmental destruction. As he learns more about the history of the community—and how he might join their fight—he senses he might finally have found a home. This lyrical memoir is a balm for the soul.

Rémy Marion (trans. David Warriner), On Being a Bear: Face to Face with our Wild Sibling
(Greystone Books)

Fans of Jane Goodall’s work will thrill to Marion’s On Being a Bear, adeptly translated from the French by David Warriner. The book is the result of Marion’s four decades spent observing bears in the wild. He reveals exciting insights into bear behavior and tells stories about his own surprising encounters with the animals. A writer as well as a photographer and documentary filmmaker, Marion captures the bears with cinematic detail. This is a work of nature writing not to be missed.

Diane Wilson, The Seed Keeper
(Milkweed Editions)

Named a “Most Anticipated Book of 2021” by Literary Hub, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other outlets, The Seed Keeper is a deeply moving novel about a Dakhóta woman farmer who must confront the realities of climate change, capitalism, and the legacy of colonialism. Diane Wilson, who is of Mdewakanton descent, expertly weaves history and fiction to show how colonialism has long been a driver of environmental destruction. But the novel is also celebratory, a powerful and compelling ode to the resilience and wisdom of Indigenous cultures.

Even though it’s officially behind us, 2020 continues to offer surprises. Among them? It’s tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record. That’s surprising, because 2020 didn’t experience a major El Niño event, which had a significant effect on global temperatures four years ago. No, last year got hot for a much scarier reason: humans.

Our carbon emissions—which actually dropped briefly in the spring when the pandemic first began to rage—warmed the planet mostly on their own. Even scarier, the Arctic was one of the hottest places on Earth. At one point, the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, marking the first time in recorded history that the Arctic Circle’s temperature surpassed three digits.

These facts should be enough to move international leaders to action. But if facts alone could achieve real change in the world, we would have already seen that change. Where mere statistics fall short, stories can help. They give narrative shape to facts so that readers can see—can really grasp—how climate change is forever altering the planet. This month, several books are hitting shelves that, through vivid storytelling and beautiful prose (and poetry!), make clear the urgency of the climate crisis. These are five of my favorites.

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Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible
(W. W. Norton & Company)

Out this month in paperback, A Children’s Bible is perhaps Lydia Millet’s best novel to date. It follows a group of adult friends and their children on a seaside vacation that’s rendered tragic when a ferocious hurricane makes landfall near their cabin. As the adults grow indifferent toward their increasingly dire circumstances, the children become caretakers and strategists. They devise a plan to survive, even as the electricity goes out, the land floods, the food runs short, and danger looms everywhere. The novel, which was a finalist for a 2020 National Book Award, is a pointed damnation of how little the older generations have done to combat climate change and an ode to the passion of young activists.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World
(Counterpoint)

“After a time,” writes Kathleen Dean Moore in her splendid nonfiction book Earth’s Wild Music, “loving the world became more complicated, and rejoicing got harder.” That’s because, she continues, the world is “slipping away.” In her latest, the award-winning nature writer collects new and selected essays about the calls, howls, and shrieks of the natural world. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the many ways in which a nature lover can celebrate and advocate for the beauty of Earth, even as it faces widespread, human-caused destruction.

Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
(Crown)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns with Under a White Sky, an examination of the complex solutions humanity has come up with to correct the ecological damage we’ve already inflicted. Kolbert travels around the world, from New Orleans to Australia, to speak with biologists, engineers, and other experts about their fascinating—and sometimes terrifying—experiments involving geoengineering, gene editing, flood control, and other things. Shot through with dark humor (because even at our worst, humans are still pretty funny), Under a White Sky reveals that human ingenuity has never been perfect, but that it’s probably more necessary now than ever before.

Kathryn Smith, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod
(Milkweed Editions)

Brimming with both anxiety and hope, Kathryn Smith’s Jake Adam York Prize–winning poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod, captures what it’s like to live during a time of accelerated climate change. It opens with a poem about the small things we do to steel ourselves against despair. In another entitled “Spell to Turn the World Around,” the narrator collects injured birds, vows to use less water, and drives to the grave site of a firefighter who died on his way to extinguish wildfires. Smith’s vivid and deeply moving poetry raises questions about how to live ethically and with optimism in the face of so much loss.

Betina González and translated by Heather Cleary, American Delirium
(Henry Holt & Co.)

American Delirium is Argentinian writer Betina González’s bewitching English debut, deftly translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary. The novel isn’t explicitly about climate change, but it speaks to how global warming has rendered the natural world strange to us. Set in the Midwest, it features a deer population that attacks humans, a group of retirees who form the region’s first offense against the animals, and a Caribbean taxidermist working at a local natural history museum who figures out why the deer have grown violent. With piercing insight and prose that evokes the literary flair of César Aira, American Delirium is a surreal exploration of environmental imbalance.

Good riddance, 2020. It was a bad year for many reasons, but there were also glimmers of hope. One such glimmer was a new invention by a young Indian engineer named Vidyut Mohan, who devised a portable machine that incinerates agricultural waste, turning it into fertilizer that can be used by farmers. It eliminates the need for farmers to burn waste in their fields, a practice that worsens air quality and contributes to climate change. Better yet? The machine doesn’t release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. For this groundbreaking invention, Mohan was awarded one of the United Nations’ Young Champions of the Earth Awards, which are given to ambitious environmental innovators under thirty.

Stories like this remind us that many people of all backgrounds have continued to work hard to combat the climate crisis, even during the worst year in recent memory. More of these kinds of stories can be found in this month’s list of great climate reads. Written by activists, scientists, poets, and novelists, books about climate change continue to educate and inspire. Here are my favorites out in January.

Winona LaDuke, To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers
(Columbia University Press)

Written by a two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate, To Be A Water Protector parses the elements needed to form a green economy while exploring lessons from environmental activists working outside Canada and the United States. The book also includes LaDuke’s letters to the CEO of Enbridge, one of Canada’s largest energy companies, in which she presents him with an invoice for the company’s climate-related damages. The book is further informed by LaDuke’s nearly 40 years of grassroots activism related to climate change and Indigenous rights, as well as her role as co-founder of Honor the Earth, an environmental organization that advocates for Native Americans and participated in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Michael E. Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
(PublicAffairs)

As one of the world’s most renowned climate scientists, Michael E. Mann has been sounding the alarm on climate change since at least the early 2000s. In The New Climate War, he focuses not on climate science specifically but on the decades-long misinformation campaign waged by fossil-fuel companies and right-wing magnates to deflect blame and delay climate action. The book carefully debunks false arguments while showing how they gained traction in mainstream media. Crucially, it also outlines a detailed plan for how governments and industry giants can combat misinformation, bad policy, and climate doom-ism, to make real change.

Joshua Phillip Johnson, The Forever Sea
(DAW Books)

This is the first of a new environmental fantasy trilogy staring a character named Kindred Greyreach, a hearthfire keeper and mage who uses magic to keep her ship afloat above a vast stretch of grasses called the Forever Sea. The plot unfolds after Kindred learns that her grandmother, a famous floating ship captain called The Marchless, goes missing in the grassy depths. Kindred goes searching for her, and on her journey learns how to navigate a world on the edge of environmental catastrophe—while finding hope for a promising future. The novel opens up new spaces for fantasy and environmental concerns to meet while offering a thrilling story about a protagonist you can’t help but root for.

Julie Carrick Dalton, Waiting for the Night Song
(Forge Books)

This gorgeous novel is Dalton’s debut, but it reads like the work of an experienced writer at the top of her game. (And, indeed, Dalton is a writer with lots of experience: as a journalist, she’s written more than a thousand articles for The Boston Globe, the Hollywood Reporter, and other outlets.) Waiting for the Night Song is a mystery about two childhood friends, now adults, who return home to confront a dark secret that’s haunted them since. One of the friends, Cadie Kessler, is now a forestry expert who must face her past while protecting the forest and the people she loves from wildfires, drought, and a growing economic crisis. The novel demonstrates just how tightly entwined human stories are with the natural world.

Robert Hass, Summer Snow: New Poems
(Ecco Press)

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet Robert Hass returns with an entirely new collection of poems. Summer Snow brims with reverence and tenderness for the natural world. “Nature Notes in the Morning” is particularly powerful with its observations of a landscape that evoke significant memories for the viewer. This poem—like so many others in the collection—drives home the necessity of reveling in small details, while  appreciating the natural world in all its complexity.

This year marks the five-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement, but the world is not on track to meet the agreement’s goal to keep planetary warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Some global leaders—like those in the UK—are meeting this month to discuss what actions can be taken in the immediate future. But with COVID-19 still gripping the planet, larger conversations involving leaders from other nations are on hold until at least late 2021.

In the meantime, writers, journalists, novelists, and poets are working to keep the climate crisis front and center in a year that experienced so many other crises. Why prioritize climate? Because, as Mary Heglar put it so succinctly in Rolling Stone, climate change is a “threat multiplier.” Its effects don’t happen in a vacuum—they exacerbate all of our other problems, from racial injustice to economic inequality. We can’t tackle any of our systemic issues if we’re not working on climate change.

This month, I’m listing five books hitting shelves in December that, together, help show the range of climate change’s impacts, what we can do as individuals to help mitigate those impacts, and why we should also take time to pause and reflect on the sorrow that consumes so many of us who see what’s happening to Earth and grieve for all that’s already been lost.

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Rebecca Prince-Ruiz and Joanna Atherfold Finn, Plastic Free: The Inspiring Story of a Global Environmental Movement and Why It Matters
(Columbia University Press)

Even for those of us who care deeply about environmental problems, it’s sometimes hard to know how to help. Prince-Ruiz models one way forward in Plastic Free, the story of how she challenged herself and a small group of people to go plastic free for an entire month. Since then, the Plastic Free July movement has grown to a community of more than 250 million in more than 170 countries. The book explores how her campaign effectively reached so many people, how research shows what happens to our plastic waste, and how and why we need to reduce the massive size of Earth’s plastic problem. Including inspiring interviews with experts and activists, Plastic Free provides small, practical steps to take toward making big change.

Catherine Hernandez, Crosshairs
(Atria Books)

Climate change isn’t the central concern of Hernandez’s dystopian novel, Crosshairs, but rather a driving force for other large-scale systemic problems like white supremacy. The book is set in a near future, when an authoritarian regime forces communities of color, the LGBTQ, and the disabled into labor camps. A resistance forms, including a hero named Kay (born Keith) who describes himself as a “Queer Femme Jamaican Filipino man.” A fierce and thrilling story follows as Kay joins other resisters to plan an uprising. Crosshairs makes clear that crises rarely occur in isolation, and that the climate crisis in particular exacerbates all others.

Judith Schalansky trans. by Jackie Smith, An Inventory of Losses
(New Directions)

An Inventory of Losses is another book whose focus isn’t directly on climate change. But its themes of loss and grief speak profoundly to so many of us concerned with the fate of the planet. Each of the book’s twelve chapters explores the history and meaning of an object, place, or animal that no longer exists except in memory or fragmented form: the seven books of Mani, the love songs of Sappho, the sunken islands of Tuanaki. Most moving is the chapter on the Caspian tiger, which roamed much of the Middle East and Central Asia before going extinct in the early 2000s. Written in German by Judith Schalansky and adeptly translated into English by Jackie Smith, An Inventory of Losses reminds readers why we need to protect what we have now—before it’s too late.

Ed. by Douglas W. Smith, Daniel R. Stahler, and Daniel R. Macnulty, Yellowstone Wolves: Science and Discovery in the World’s First National Park
(University of Chicago Press)

This year marks the 25th anniversary of one of the largest and most successful conservation efforts in modern history: the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. This gorgeous book explains why wolves were eradicated from the park when it opened nearly 70 years ago, and how their reintroduction fundamentally changed the park’s ecosystems for the better. Edited by the people responsible for studying and managing the wolf reintroduction project—and with a forward by Jane Goodall—Yellowstone Wolves is a must-read for anyone interested in wildlife or conservation. The text is accompanied by stunning, full-color photographs and an online documentary by Bob Landis, perhaps best known for his work with National Geographic.

John Kinsella, Insomnia
(W. W. Norton & Company)

Written by John Kinsella, professor of literature and environment at Curtin University and author of more than 30 books, Insomnia is an urgent and powerful poetry collection. In experimental verse, Kinsella angrily protests humanity’s simultaneous destruction of nature and denial of imagination. The collection vibrates with anger and sorrow, but also empathy. It’s a reminder of the power of poetry to focus our attention and galvanize us to action.

Media coverage of both presidential candidates’ climate plans (or, lack of a plan, in Trump’s case) has focused mostly on how those plans will affect jobs and the economy. Journalists ask: Will Biden’s plan to eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies crater the energy-sector job market? Will Trump’s do-nothing approach save jobs in an industry that’s dwindling anyway? Such questions overlook the enormous toll that climate change has had on lives beyond the economy. It’s impacting people’s traditions, cultures, and general well-being. Lives—not just jobs—are lost every year because of climate-fueled wildfires, hurricanes, heat, air-pollution, and flooding. And scientists agree that more loss is coming.

We need a larger, more compassionate narrative. So this month, I list five books about climate change that help shift the narrative in that direction. Some of these books attempt to reimagine humanity’s relationship with the world—or in the case of Earth Keeper, remind readers that healthier relationships already exist among Indigenous communities. Others focus on solutions for mitigating the worst of climate change, celebrate the landscapes hit hardest by it, or revere the activists who protest the destruction of our planet. Taken together, these books reframe climate change as a humanitarian crisis, not merely an economic one.

Scott Momaday, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land
(Harper)

Scott Momaday, a Kiowa writer, has dedicated much of his work to preserving Indigenous stories and culture. Earth Keeper is a profound continuation of that work. Dedicated to “the remembered earth,” the book is an ode to oral storytelling, a collection of brief, first-person tales about the author’s life on reservations in the American Southwest and the generations of ancestors—and colonizers—who protect and reap the land, respectively. Reoccurring characters, such as Dragonfly, appear throughout, to both illustrate and guide Momaday’s musings on the landscape. Together, the stories project a sense of awe and honor for the planet, as well as a warning—we must all be keepers of the earth before it’s too late.

Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, and Dan Richards, Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places
(W. W. Norton & Company)

Written by one of our greatest living nature writers, Robert Macfarlane (Underland), travel writer Dan Richards (Outpost), and artist Stanley Donwood (who created artwork for Radiohead’s records), the transcendent Ghostways is made up of two novellas about two of England’s eeriest places. In Ness, the writers take us to famed Orford Ness, a sandspit on the Suffolk coast, where secret military tests were conducted during both World Wars. Structured like a prose poem, Ness brims with images of plants and animals reclaiming crumbling military structures that drive home just how at odds humanity’s actions have been with forces of nature. Then, in Holloway, the writers take us to a well-known “hollowed way,” a path worn into rock by centuries of “foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll & rain-run.” Legend has it that voices of the long-dead can still be heard by those who walk the path today. Holloway entwines themes of loss and memory to express how time can never erase completely the marks that humans leave on the world.

Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist, A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow
(PublicAffairs)

Out this month in paperback, A Bright Future looks at how countries other than the United States have transitioned to clean energy without sacrificing their economies or personal amenities. Real-life examples are drawn from Korea, France, Sweden, and elsewhere to demonstrate that wide-spread change is possible but takes courage on behalf of national leaders and policy-makers. The writing flows easily, only rarely bogged down by technical detail. But the authors have done their homework. The book is heavily footnoted with research and bibliographical references, which offer further sources for readers who want to learn more about international responses to climate change.

Cynan Jones, Stillicide
(Catapult)

With Stillicide, Welsh author Cynan Jones (Cove, The Dig) delivers a riveting and elegantly layered novel about the climate crisis and activists fighting for justice. It’s set in a near future where water is commodified and delivered to cities by a train that’s increasingly at risk of terrorist attack. Life in the city grows more chaotic when word spreads that a new development project will displace more people than originally promised. Several stories of impacted people intertwine, including those of a lovelorn nurse, a dying woman and her radicalized husband, and a bee-keeping professor. The prose is sparse but vivid, lending the novel an epic feel—fitting for a story about humanity’s biggest threat.

Ed. by Gary Paul Nabhan, The Nature of Desert Nature: Meditations on the Nature of Deserts
(University of Arizona Press)

Edited by Gary Paul Nabhan, an internationally acclaimed environmental writer and agricultural ecologist, The Nature of Desert Nature comprises reflections on arid spaces by some of the world’s finest writers, including Homero Aridjis, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Francisco Cantú. The collection upends notions of what a desert can be by observing both the landscape’s beauty and ugliness, its biology as well as its cultural resonance. Most importantly, the book conveys the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder when thinking about the natural world.