The more that I read now about the climate emergency, the more references I find within my other reading. Here, in Deirdre McNamer’s Aviary (2021), an unexpectedly lyrical rumination:

“She prayed for the groaning, hectically gorgeous, steaming world, which seemed, more and more often, to lurch and shudder on its planetary path, as if trying to correct its course—buildings tumbled then, oceans surged, hurricanes annihilated, wars and diseases erupted—before it resumed its ponderous spin, heavy under new layers of the innocent dead.”

Aviary, by the way, is an engaging and smart novel about the residents of Pheasant Run, elderly and deeply engaged in the ordinary events of their to-this-point-long lives. Because I love books set in residences and buildings, that consider multiple perspectives, it burrowed into my stack.

And I was really excited to learn that Becky Chambers has a new book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021). It’s preoccupied with questions of vocation and how we create and sustain meaning under difficult circumstances. But there is also a scene that brought my reading project into focus, in which Dex listens to files of cricket recordings from the pre-Transition times “taken by people who thought—with good cause—that the sounds of the world they knew might disappear forever”, sounds of the “living meadow.”

What are the odds that, if I tell you Stephen Collis’ A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) is poetry about the climate crisis, you will seek out a copy? Surely the idea of it being poetry, something people joke about never reading, is enough of a deterrent on its own. But the times in my life when I’ve read the most poetry have been times preoccupied by grieving, and I was reminded of that, as I read this collection. He writes about the future perfect tense and how we conceive of what’s to come. Later, he writes about the future imperfect “revolution or catastrophe / oscillating and wild”. He asks whether saying “small rain” is better than “drizzle” (he thinks so). He marvels at the figure which illustrates Hutton’s theory of rain. He writes about time and meaning, about tweeting and trees. If your bookshelves are stuffed with science and philosophy, but not books about the climate crisis, this might be a more welcome addition to your shelves than the latest Elizabeth Kolbert or Maude Barlowe.

The Atlas of Disappearing Places by Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros considers Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. The main title sounds lyrical, poetic; the subtitle seems like it burst out of a spreadsheet. Which actually sums up the book fairly. There are some artsy bits, enjoyed with a cup of tea on mornings when it was too wet to walk (like the illustration of the leatherback turtle) and there are a lot of science-y bits, absorbed at the table with both feet firmly planted and the light slanted to catch the details in the charts and maps. All the maps are painted with water-based inks, so impermanent that a rain would wash them away completely. That produced a rush of philosophizing in my thoughts. But the amount of data relayed in these pieces would be overwhelming if one were to sit and read cover-to-cover. One of my favourite sections is “Ise, Japan: Tradition for the Future” which discusses Shintoism and the vulnerability of the shrines in that religion. There’s a succinct and sweeping history in a few paragraphs, an accompanying map that reveals how many of the major and minor sites are projected to be underwater and how other UNESCO World Heritage Sites could be affected as well. Each segment also presents a common term (in this case “nature”) and considers its meaning, in and beyond this context. Back to the cup of tea for this part of things.

Rachel Pastan’s In the Field (2021) is inspired by the life of Barbara McClintock, although her mid-20th-century geneticist is a creature of her own imagination. A 1992 New York Times obituary piqued her interest, but she “wanted to have the freedom to make Kate Croft the person I needed her to be,” so she spoke to very few people who actually knew McClintock. Her passion for science and her pursuit of study is quietly inspiring. Even the boldest moments of realization are restrained: “Whatever had been happening—what had been flicking the switch on and off—had stopped.” Beneath the regiment and experimentation, however, lingers a larger question: “To understand what controlled how an organism became itself.” This is not necessarily an immediate match for this theme, but Kate’s willingness to observe, and the value she places on evidence, is the kind of story many crave right now.

The K. in her name is for a great-great aunt, a “childless adventurer who knew all the birds”—so it’s unsurprising that the poems in Teresa K. Miller’s Borderline Fortune (2021) stand in relief against the landscape where habitat is increasingly eroded. The epigraphs for the four parts are drawn from Anne Sexton, Lucie Brock-Broido, Lucille Clifton and Rebecca Solnit: reader familiar with these names will find themselves at home in this collection. Miller asks the hard questions in fresh ways: “What am I if not a meadow, a rat / tunneling through the scraps, a pair / of starlings quarreling over too much seed.” Her evocation of loss straddles the personal and universal: “Plain vanilla ice cream, worn-in flannel, white-crowned sparrow.” And her exploration of grief is immediate and wide-ranging:

There was no resurrection. Nothing to do
but throw away the old tree and move on.

We mark and fuss over the particulars,
but absence begins the lowest rung.

Lisa Wells’ Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World (2021) has the most gorgeous cover. And, then, I saw the rest of Lisa Ericson’s paintings. I have so many favourites that it mocks the idea of favouriting. I loved the cover more than I loved the insides, but I can see how a slightly different life experience would have made me warm, more readily, to her way of searching for meaning. She succinctly and clearly presents herself as a seeker, and one fundamental element we share is curiosity. “Whether we languish or thrive depends on this, on tending and being tended by others.” Her friend Aisha has her favourite part of an Allen Ginsberg poem tattooed on her thigh (the last two lines below):

Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction,

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
“pilgrimage” “wisdom” “paths to action”

Roma Tearne’s The White City (2017) is on my stack because I loved The Swimmer, which was longlisted for the Women’s Fiction Prize in 2011. Here, the tone is similar: saturated with loneliness and a sense of relentless striving. But Tearne sustains this in such a way that I find hypnotic rather than burdensome. The snow began to fall and never stopped: one blizzard after the next. But it’s not ordinary snow—there is no seasonality to its arrival and accumulation. (Hold out: there’s melting to come.) It’s not a dystopia because there is little talk of the society, only of one family’s loves and losses, but there are glimmers of new adaptations to survive, from the world beyond this handful of people, like the way that “bookshops had slowly become things of the past” so that only elderly people “who had lived in one place all their lives had books” now. Many luxuries and comforts are missing but all fade in importance in comparison to the beloved people who are missing. More than anything, this is a chronicle of suspended existence, survival in a state of desolation. A climate crisis novel about a devastating change in circumstance which reflects a state of mourning and devastation.

“And all the while, the city continued to become embalmed in the whiteness, huge flakes of snow swirling and tumbling endlessly through the rising wind. It filled our mouths and our noses. It took our breath away. Very soon others would be casualties of what was happening.”

The premise of Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising (2020) prompted me to add this YA novel to my stack: powerful ancient forces respond to the discovery of an energy source, cheap and abundant, an alternative to fossil fuels. Johnny (Joanna) “almost burned herself out when she was ten or eleven, working hundred-hour weeks, never sleeping, publishing paper after paper and combining them with press conferences and lecture tours” and as an older teenager, this prodigy makes an amazing discovery. For as long as Nick/y can remember, she’s always been smart, but now his friend is not only clever, but “the holder of knowledge that no-one else had.” Ultimately, the environment is less important to the story than the connection between Johnny and Nicky and the resolution of the conflict that arises: “Until now I hadn’t truly realized how much was arrayed against us: that thousands of us had spent thousands of years throwing armies, sorcerers, intrigue, bargains, entire mountain ranges against them, and now it was down to two people.” The resolution revolves around knowledge and it’s this bookish angle that held my interest: “Anyway, he’s got a private library that you kind of have to see to believe,’ she said.”

The Arbornaut by Meg Lowman (2021) is such a chunky volume, I wondered if I’d have the patience for it, after the rush of story in Premee Mohamed’s novel. But she describes her geeky childhood pursuit of classifying the plants in her environment (there’s even a photo of her Musk Mallow file card with sample, from 1963, from her roadside collection) in such a way that I wanted to keep company with her, as she emerged from ditches and leeways and rose to the heights of global canopies. Beginning in Elmira, upper-New-York state, (an area that I know a little, which added to my enjoyment of her account), including her admiration of women like Rachel Carson whose work was in the United States, I was not expecting the book to travel to so many diverse and contrasting environments. Her down-to-earth tone makes the chronicle a joy and her passion for her pursuit is contagious. If you’re the kind of reader who hears a marvellous story about adventurers and wonders whether their underwear bunched up, you’ll appreciate Lowman’s vulnerability and attention-to detail. If you’re the kind of reader who thinks they’re not interested in climate change, but enjoys a solid biography, this one’s for you too, this story of “a life discovering the eighth continent in the trees above us.”

Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring (2021) landed on my stack thanks to the NYT podcast. Shifting primarily between three family members’ perspectives, the voices are distinct from the beginning. “Listen, it might take a pair of fists, three balls, and a bucket of luck to make a life in redwood country, but you get a chance like this, you take it.” And the stakes are high. Chapters are usually short, often scenic: that suggests a quick read. But the attention-to-detail, regarding language and theme particularly, slows the curious reader. A reticent husband? “She’d felt him turning it around [something he wanted to tell her] and around in his mind all week, like a piece of wood he was deciding how to carve.” A fallen tree? “Once she’s down, Lyle comes along, saws off her branches, then bucks her to truck lengths. Slices up a three-hundred-footer just like he’s cutting a carrot.” As tensions emerge, slowly, in small moments and off-hand comments, the prose seems to become even more dense. About extractivism: “Cut you with one hand and bandage you with the other, she’d said, handing Colleen her change.” About the rural-urban divide: “….it was screwing a tourist out of a city dollar. Too rich to sweat for a living, too dumb to dig their own hole to shit in.” At first, I thought she reminded me of Annie Proulx, but that was more for the trees; over time, I thought more of Annie Dillard (The Living, in particular).

Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s White Skin, Black Fuel: on the Danger of Fossil Fascism (2021) would reward readers with more than an acquaintance with European politics. The brief sections which allude to American politics were particularly provocative, even though I have only slightly more understanding of their politics than European countries (where I have to stop to contemplate the names of city capitals let alone national leaders). The premise is simple: “If nothing else, the anti-climate politics of the far right should shatter any remaining illusion that fossil fuels can be relinquished through some kind of smooth, reasoned transition with everyone on board.” Even without the ample footnotes, references and statistics, I can agree with the idea that polarisation and confrontation are causing chaos all around us. So although I did not properly absorb the specifics about the rise in power of right-wing factions and parties, and the connection to climate policy, this volume helped me understand the dimensions of what I have yet to explore, yet alone understand.

Current, Climate, The Poetry of Rita Wong is an excellent way to wade into her work. The introduction by Nicholas Bradley (2021) is written clearly and requires attention but avoids the jargon relied upon by the academics he quotes. (I didn’t count, but at the gut-level, my disengagement increases proportionately as the use of the word ‘poetics’ outnumbers ‘poets’ or ‘poems’.) In short, his position is that Wong’s poetry belongs to a “new paradigm of ecological writing.” Having read some of these poems in their original collections, I enjoyed “re-discovering” them here, with handwritten notes, references, and quotations. And the afterword, just three pages, articulates her current position, which has evolved as the climate crisis has intensified. Incarcerated for work undertaken as a land protector, alongside many indigenous people (she names individuals and communities in her work and the acknowledgements of this collection too.

Alexandra Morton’s Not on My Watch (2021) is—as you might guess from its subtitle, How a Renegade Whale Biologist Took on Governments and Industry to Save Wild Salmon—more about salmon than whales. At first, I thought that might mean the bulk of my interest would reside in the first chapters of the book but, just as was the case for her, I became increasingly invested in her broadening curiosity and concern (some of the lengthier citations, later in the book as her experience and information deepened, were wasted on my not-so-science-y thinking). What draws her work to a wide readership is her capacity to recognize and acquaint readers with the questions that underpin her exploration. Her capacity to self-assess for instance: “Scientists who go to learn about animals in the remote regions of our planet also meet Indigenous people. While the peoples and cultures that evolved over thousands of years in one place are adapted to their home environment, the scientist is, in many ways, an introduced species.” Her logical determination in weighing solutions: “Doing nothing requires thousands of decisions to look the other way, withdraw your hand, clench the change in your pocket, scoff, duck, lie and feed the very thing that is killing him.” And her focus on action: “Investing in hope is a waste of energy. Better to do what you can to stop what’s going on.” Inspiring and informative.

There are other books that I wanted to say more about, like Dave Goulson’s Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021), which is surprisingly readable. I learned more about glyphosate and robotic bees than I wanted to, and it made me want to know still more about grasshoppers and glow-worms.

And Emily Brewes’ The Doomsday Book of Fairy Tales (2021), a debut novel I’ll have more to say about in February, that reminded me of Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest and The Grimoire of Kensington Market by Lauren B. Davis.

And The Kissing Bug by Daisy Hernández which landed on my TBR in conjunction with my article about writers confronting the climate crisis; ultimately, it didn’t fit with the article, but this narrative about a little-known but startlingly prevalent infectious disease twines personal and political commentary in clear, powerful prose.

Quite often, while reading one of these, I would think of another reader, for whom I thought this book would be a great match: I’m curious to hear which of these sounds most interesting to YOU?

And what would you add to this list? (The other three posts are here: Spring 2021, Summer 2021, Autumn 2021).