Even if you’re not often reading about the climate crisis, I’ve got one for you: Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope (2021). It not only includes many reasons to remain hopeful—Amazing Human Intellect, Resilience of Nature, Power of Young People, and the Indomitable Human Spirit—but truly inspires readers. Its subtitle—A Survival Guide for Trying Times—is fitting, but doesn’t capture Goodall’s indomitable spirit.

“That is why I travel around the world—trying to wake people up, make them aware of the danger, yet at the same time assure everyone there is a window of time when our actions can start healing the harm that we have inflicted. Using our brains, counting on the resilience of nature.”


Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods (2022) is cleverly divided into three parts—Roots, Trunk, and Canopy—which explore the past, present, and future of conservation efforts in the lumber industry. She also cleverly paces her narrative, using short chapters and a sense of urgency (sometimes excitement intertwines with tragedy as poaching scenes gradually reveal the truth of how trees have been cut and felled illegally). There are so many unexpected aspects of this read for me; I learned the term “charismatic megafauna” (it’s harder to convince people to care about trees than elephants) and that there’s a particular kind of maple so coveted for guitar soundboards that Greenpeace flew industry executives to an Alaskan forest to witness the trees having been poached for that purpose.


Corban Addison’s Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial (2022) grabs hold and doesn’t let go. With a preface by, One wonders if John Grisham (who contributes the preface) shared all his best narrative secrets with Addison; in fact, it’s their other shared profession that binds the two men—litigating not writing. Addison admits he employs the tools of fiction; when he introduces the key family members whose farms are bordered by hog farms, readers have full novelistic scenes. “Some stories really are wilder than the fancies of the imagination,” he says: “This is one of them.” What makes it even more satisfying is an Erin-Brockovich-styled pursuit of justice: a sense that the impossible might be willed into being possible after all. As one person says, well into the story: “Most of these folks never considered that they could complain, or that complaining would do them any good.” This makes it doubly satisfying. For the studious, an index with extensive endnotes and sourcing. For the curious, an informed and riveting story.


A House Between Earth and the Moon (2022) by Rebecca Scherm is another look at this question of how one defines “invasive species”, a concept humans direct outwardly but this novel redirects. Readers meet Alex first, a marine biologist dedicated to solutions for the climate crisis and to improving things for future generations, of his own family too. “Green algae had been around for at least one billion years to Homo sapiens’ piddly two hundred thousand, and it was algae, Alex was certain, that would save the from themselves.” Just as solutions must be holistic and complex, the narrative also broadens to include other characters who are resolving other problems (some with connections to Alex). The bulk of the novel is preoccupied with workplace and everyday concerns, but often confronted in space: “For ten weeks, their only information about life at home, on Earth, had come from watching their planet from above.”


Nicholas Herring’s Some Hellish (2022) won this year’s Writers’ Trust Award for English-Language Fiction (recently renamed the Atwood-Gibson Award). That’s why I read it, not expecting it to fit with this subject. “Everything that lives is marked by what hunts it.” It’s a character-driven piece that spirals through time and Atlantic Canadian settings, fuelled by the kind of awareness that follows a near-death experience…chaotic and precise, at the same time. The novel’s voice left me breathless and sometimes scenes did too. Those of you who have the same dogged criterion for breaking spoiler-silence that I do—you know who you are, and what that subject is—tread carefully; I’m glad that I didn’t know (and that I freshly trusted, after each of those scenes, that would be the last of it) because I wouldn’t have read it, and it’s amazing, so that would have been my loss.

“‘There used to be twelve types of fish here. Now there’s one. The lake is all gone. Herring too. Fishing’ll be dead in about a decade. And what’s else, you know, I have no peace in me, at all. I mean, none, no peace. And I just feel like every day, every goddamn day of my life it’s been kill or be killed. Kill or be killed. And it just doesn’t have to be this way, eh, does it?’ said Herring.”

In my effort to avoid spoilers in blurbs and jacket descriptions, I’ve even gotten shy about book covers—it took me awhile to notice what was awry with Bruce Holsinger’s The Displacements (2022). Fitting, because the characters in the novel are all about avoidance—building lives in Florida, oblivious to the climate crisis. Early on, as a hurricane approaches, one man observes that the “southern Keys might get a hit, but not us” because then “she’ll be out in the Gulf” and be—the other man completes his sentence: “Mexico’s problem.” But the hurricane has its own itinerary: “She moves like a drunken butcher, flaying skyscrapers, eviscerating offices and conference rooms and lobbies. Tall buildings twist and buckle. The guts of civilization swarm and fly: desks, chairs, tables, carpets, lights, plants, computers, printers, books, and papers by the billions, landing in the rivered streets, pulped through the sewer channels, chewed by the winds.” It’s a character-driven pageturner that reminds me of Stephen King’s The Stand.


J.D. Kurtness’s Aquariums (2019; Trans. Pablo Strauss, 2022) is a tightly knit collection of scenes, dramatically crossing time and space, posing questions about conflict and balance, fear and survival, and perspective. The language is often simple, but the concept that simmers beneath is rich and rewarding: “Thousands of footsteps over several hundred generations have polished a path in the rock.” Kurtness casts a spotlight across the pathway but largely leaves readers to navigate independently. One character muses on a microscope: “I can’t imagine a more precious possession. It can enlarge up to eight hundred times. It turns out that just about anything is fascinating if you just cut off a slice and place it on a glass tray.” The same could be said of Kurtness’s storytelling: unexpectedly intricate and resonant. Expect enthusiasm for tardigrades, a glimpse of the 1815 Mount Tambora volcano, an understanding of pigmented xeroderma, and a car named Hannibal…but the plot revolving around one character’s doctoral thesis on reproducing the coral reef in Belize is what really stands out for me. “The aquarium is now part of Project GIZMO (Grand International Zoos Main Objective, named of course, after the adorable gremlin). It’s an international network of artificial ecosystems, a contemporary Noah’s Ark, designed to save endangered species.”


Erin Swan’s Walk the Vanished Earth (2022) will appeal to readers of Glass and Strout (see below) as well as Peter Orner—writers who enjoy subtle and full-out links between different characters’ stories, with a focus on relationships rather than plot. The sections here are too long to feel like short stories, and the characters’ segments repeat (but not so frequently that it feels like a polyphonic novel or an ensemble cast) so it does actually feel like a novel, and the themes that reverberate throughout emphasise that sense too. Even though sometimes, in this kind of situation, I am impatient with the futuristic segments, here they were among my favourites, particularly those which unfold on Mars, where tales of Earth are like legends. (But the following passage is in the future on Earth.)

“They walk, they hunt, they eat, they walk again. They sleep under the stars. Sometimes they build a fire. Sometimes they don’t. The weather holds. They pass no people, only vacant houses and gas stations, strip malls with signs faded and fallen. Their muscles ache, but it’s pleasant, a slow burn. Rarely they speak. Often they sing.”

When it was new, I read Julia Glass’s Three Junes—it wasn’t so common, then, to have characters reappear in an author’s later novels. Afterwards, I followed her linked stories less reliably (not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because I wanted them to last, in an Elizabeth-Strout-ish way), but realising that Vigil Harbor (2022) dips into the future, I couldn’t resist. It doesn’t feel much different than her other fiction (except for Mike, who studies “not so much the health of ocean life as its descent into terminal illness”) in this story about a town like “a shrine to a bygone era.” But even in characters’ memories, readers are reminded that every generation has its challenges: “Was I simply afraid of letting my child go out into the risky world? And it’s always been risky; how obvious is that?” One of the future characters in Bruce Holsinger’s novel (above) says that stories let readers “know how we found it within ourselves to alter our relentlessly apocalyptic narrative from within.” Glass’s novel offers readers something like that: “Time to face the sun from a different angle.”

In contrast, some of Gary Saunders’ Earth Keeping (2022) looks to the past a collection of essays (some very short, some previously published in periodicals and newspapers) about relationships—between people and the land and trees, and between creatures (two- or four-legged, feathered and furred) inhabiting a changing environment. He’s particularly passionate about and informed on trees, and there’s a lovely blurb by Annie Proulx which includes this observation: “Each vignette is a reminder of the richness and meaning contained in our everyday interactions with the natural world”, calling it “charming” and “readable”. Saunders’ view of the world is detailed and matter-of-fact and rich: “In time, the bog loses its central pond and becomes a forest. From the air, the swirling patterns of bog reclamation—moss-green, tan-tea-brown, indigo—resemble watered silk.” (From “Tough Little Trees of the Fringe”) This is the first of his books I’ve read, but I would happily read more.

There’s been a lot of good reading on this theme, and related themes. I discussed Gaia Vince’s Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World (2022) in the context of my Here and Elsewhere post about migration already.

And novels like Paul Sunga’s Because of Nothing at All and Emily Saso’s Nine Dash Line fit here too—stories about how tensions escalate for individuals facing the immediate realities of a climate apocalypse in countries whose present-day realities circle around matters of survival. As does Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck (2017) which I just read over the holidays.

Right now, I’m reading a new collection, The World As We Knew It, edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen (oh my, the opening piece by Lydia Millet is amazing: when I read it in a library copy, I knew I wanted to have my own, so I could share sections of it more readily).

And a collection from twenty years ago, edited by Derrick Jensen, Listening to the Land which includes Linda Hogan and Susan Griffin, among others. Anyone who’d care to join is welcome.

Which of these have you read? What would you add to my list?