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Our stories about environmental catastrophe were set in distant futures. The desolate endlessness was the backdrop to our stories. The RoadOr the hopeless, cutthroat scrounging for scraps in the Parable of a Sower. However, this kind of distant storytelling feels like it was created for a time when the repercussions on changing climates and the inequity associated with natural-resource use were far away. It must have been nice.
Ecological disaster and long-term fallout are no longer rare or surprising, and they’re not limited to specific parts of the planet. One-third of Americans stated they These were affectedextreme weather events in the last two years, and 2022 has already seen Feuerflooding. Those are climate change’s most obvious consequences, but its daily effects are subtle, creeping into our everyday lives. They’re showing up as Rising food pricesSpring is a wild affair Windstorms. Our changing planet is putting stress on our relationships and limiting our options in the short- and long-term.
And that’s showing up in fiction. An increasing number writers are incorporating climate changes into their domestic dramas, or comedy of errors, because they see it as an inevitable part of their lives today or in the future. Environmental degradation isn’t the main thrust of these novels, like it may have been in classic climate fiction.
This shift is in part a sign of our growing disdain for preachy stories about climatic doom. It’s also just an example of fiction reflecting our reality. The new environmental novel can make the stakes for future choices and their impact on ordinary people and scenarios seem clear. When survival is at stake, books can help to answer the fundamental human question of how to care for each other.
The books below aren’t About climate change—they’re about immigration, corporate malfeasance, and tourism; they focus on families, neighbors, and friends. The anxieties of the warming age, whether they are simmering in the background or erupting on the page, make their way in.
Vigil HarborJulia Glass
Ten-ish years from now, in a stifling New England town fixated on its own past, an ecoterrorist attack forces members of the community—including recent divorcées and immigrants whose status is threatened—to confront how unstable their lives are. Glass has called Vigil Harbor, which follows a wide cast through the lead-up to and aftereffects of the incident, “a near future in which the volume has been turned up.” Using the attack as a prism, she shows how small-scale domestic issues, such as unhappy boomerang kids and the fate of immigrant-run landscaping companies, could be even more pressurized in that loud future. Glass uses the hum of an ecosystem collapsing to highlight each strand. This is to show how stress can make situations more stressful and how it can make people insular and selfish.
Prodigal SummerBarbara Kingsolver –
Flight Behavior, Kingsolver’s book explicitly about the collapse of butterfly migration, might seem like a more obvious choice for a climate novel, but Prodigal SummerFirst. It’s more subtle, telling three interwoven stories about a rural Appalachian town where disorder is seeping into nature: Poachers are moving in on coyote pups, neighbors are battling over pesticides, and a young widow is trying to hold on to her in-laws’ family farm. Kingsolver was a biologist before becoming a novelist. She has a knack for showing how people become deeply rooted in their surroundings. Kingsolver identifies the small, but important, issues that can divide or pull communities together. She puts the signal before noise and points out how people who pay attention the natural world notice it changing before it is too late.
The Water KnifePaolo Bacigalupi
The Water KnifeFollow Angel Velasquez as he attempts to find a water source in the Southwest. It might feel a bit too much like traditional, far-future cli-fi if it weren’t for the current, rapidly aridifying conditions across the world and the ways western states are locked in political and logistical battles over water as the country’s biggest reservoirs shrink. It’s a feat to make natural-resource laws interesting, much less thrilling, but Bacigalupi cleverly lets wonky water policy, and particularly 1922’s Colorado River Compact, become the main drama of the story. Water is a scarce commodity. It quickly defines who lives and who dies. The tension is about money and power, too: As Velasquez goes deeper into a violent battle over water rights, and the compact, the one thing keeping everyone civil, falls apart, the novel shows how the laws and practices we consider fixed don’t hold up in a world that’s getting hotter and drier.
Salvage the BonesBy Jesmyn Wade
It’s hard to show climate disaster on a personal scale, because those kinds of catastrophes tend to happen either very fast or very slowly. In Salvage the Bones, Ward drills into one family’s story to outline the broad, unequal consequences of long-term environmental injustice, and the short-term trauma of destructive winds and water. Her tightly woven narrative follows the Batiste family during the 12 days preceding and after Hurricane Katrina. Ward experienced the storm as a Batiste, and her vivid details of disaster such as the rain hitting the roof and the way animals scream before a storm, show both the fear they feel and the fierceness with which they try to protect themselves and their homes. As they prepare for landfall and then ride it out, Ward demonstrates that human drama doesn’t stop for weather—the main character, teenage Esch, is hiding a new pregnancy—but it bends to it.
How beautiful were we?, by Imbolo Mubue
You can probably guess how well things turn out when Pexton, a foreign-oil company, comes to the fictional West African village of Kosawa and promises the residents “civilization” and “prosperity” for use of the oil under their land. The beginning of How beautiful were we?The local river is already contaminated and children are suffering. But that’s just the start: Mbue takes a too-familiar story about the degradation of energy extraction, corrupt government, and vulnerable communities and stretches it out over four decades, watching the characters change as the crisis drags on. Instead of a simple David and Goliath fight, the novel illustrates how different people respond to the circumstances they grew up in, who stays and who goes, and the tension between protecting yourself and fighting for what’s right.
When I die, I will fall back downJoe Wilkins,.
The first legal wolf hunt in Montana’s eastern territory is underway. Wendell Newman, a ranch hand, is entangled in a manhunt by an anti-government fringe group. Climate issues are being raised in divisive debates about how we use public land and manage fragile wild animals. Charismatic fauna, like wolves, often inflame those battles because they’re seen as both livestock-killing villains and vital parts of the ecosystem. The book depicts a violent conflict that is echoed by other species. Recent standoffsWilkins uses the battle for public land to show how climate politics is intertwined with identity politics. Wendell, who has complicated sympathies for both the rebels and the regulators, has to face up to his family’s history of abuse as he picks a side.
10:04Ben Lerner
How can you create the life you want? How much power might you have over what’s to come, anyway? These are the core questions of 10:04, Lerner’s autofictional novel, which takes place in New York, bracketed by Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy. The narrator, an author trying to figure out his second novel, is struggling. He’s wrestling with a potentially fatal medical diagnosis; deciding whether to be a sperm donor for his best friend; and wondering whether any of that is worth thinking about as the city is inundated by storms. Lerner’s writing spirals back on itself, retracing its own plotlines and perseverating on the same points. At turns sarcastic and overly earnest, his knotty storytelling style mimics the feeling of trying to make decisions when there’s no clear answer and you’re not sure how the coming years—or the Earth—will turn out. It’s almost like living right now.
How Strange is a SeasonMegan Mayhew Bergman.
The short stories in Bergman’s collection each create their own kind of weather, like the swampy South Carolina plantation of “Indigo Run” and the stifling chill of a human-scale New York terrarium in “Workhorse.” Nearly all of the interludes touch on climate as they follow women trying to make their way through systems in which they’re complicit but not completely in charge. In “A Taste for Lionfish,” Lily is sent to stormy coastal North Carolina to persuade the locals to start eating invasive species as part of a job for a conservation nonprofit. “You’re trying to tell these poor folks how to fix a rich folks’ problem,” one of the locals tells Lily, as Bergman confronts an ugly truism of environmentalism: Some earnest outsider probably isn’t going to come in and serve up the easy solution, and those most affected are usually the least to blame.
Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam
We’re not quite sure what the apocalypse is in Leave the World BehindWe don’t know but we do know. Something Amanda and Clay, two uptight Brooklynites who are on vacation with their children, have seen it all. They’ve been cut off from all kinds of communication, and things become even weirder when their Airbnb hosts turn up, forcing them to cope with the crisis together. Alam feels the most unsettling of all the strange, unexplainable feelings. When it becomes clear that they’re in some kind of crisis, the characters, essentially, do nothing. They putter and bicker and talk behind one another’s backs, seeding suspicions and distrust. Alam shows how one crisis can quickly disrupt our lives and how fragile the social norms which hold us together may be when that happens.
Here Comes The SunBy Nicole Dennis-Benn
In Here Comes The SunDolores, her two daughters, Margot, a young hotel worker, and Thandi (a teenage artist), are stuck in a resort community of Jamaicans, trying to get out of the extractive tourist industry. Their ability to find alternatives is limited because Margot, a white hotel magnate threatens to take their home and build a new resort. Dolores sold Margot into sex work as a teenager, and she’s trapped in that work as she tries to pay for Thandi to go to school; meanwhile the oppressive drought is making other ways of earning a living, such as farming and fishing, unstable. Dennis-Benn doesn’t let anyone off easy or tie the story up neatly, and she uses the unbearable conditions as a narrative metaphor for increasing pressure. She forces the reader think about the choices people make in times of limited resources. The only commodity they might trade is themselves.
The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea
As his body shuts down with cancer, Big Angel, the titular character of Urrea’s sprawling family story, calls a final birthday party for himself, to hash out his family’s regrets and try to bestow some wisdom. Nothing goes according to plan. Urrea’s language is rhythmic and lively, and his details make a tale of impending death, gang violence, and family trauma charming and hilarious. He effortlessly switches between gallows humor, and genuine humanity. Drought is a reality in Southern California, and a metaphor for fighting against the elements. Big Angel often recalls his childhood in La Paz (Baja California Sur), contrasting the vibrant landscape of that area, where his family fished, raised animals, and the dry-out shopping malls in San Diego. Big Angel attempts to make amends with his sparring family members, but he shows them that it is possible to be happy in the face and of destruction.
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