Environmental Literature

Emergency is a novel about the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. Our narrator is at home during lockdown, where she ponders both past and present. She remembers her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She recalls a kestrel hunt, helping a farmer save a renegade bull, and days playing with her best friend, Clare. In her village, neighbors argue, keep secrets, care for one another, and try to hold down jobs. Fox cubs fight in the woods, plants compete for space, a quarry slowly falls apart, and we see a three-legged deer who likes cake.

When a black snake threatens to destroy the Earth and poison her people’s water, one young water protector takes a stand to defend Earth’s most sacred resource.

In the summer of 1976, Duane Oshun finds himself stranded in a remote Montana town beset by a series of strange and menacing events. He takes a job as a logger and builds a cabin on an isolated road near a reclusive neighbor—a hermit named Ted Kaczynski. The two men are captivated by the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, but Kaczynski’s violent grievances against modern society soon threaten the lives of all those around him.

A Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct.

We only have ten years to save the planet. What if this belief was taken seriously by others not from our world? How would they help to save Mankind? Would they even bother? Brett Martin is about to find out as he finds himself sucked into a dystopian nightmare in which there are few easy ways out. The Gardeners are here and they have come to prune our planet. As the stakes are raised impossibly high, Martin struggles to come to terms with his new reality and the dawn of a new age.

Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.

The sixth "mass extinction event" in the history of planet Earth is currently under way, with over two hundred species dying off every day. The cause of this seismic event is also the source of the single biggest threat to human life: our own inventions. But for all our talk about sea levels and biotechnology, do we really know what our future will actually look like? Will our immune systems be attacked by so-called super bugs, always evolving, and more easily spread than ever? Will the disappearance of numerous species cripple the biosphere?

In 2019, 70-year-old Signe sets sail alone on a hazardous voyage across the ocean in a sailboat. On board, a cargo that can change lives. Signe is haunted by memories of the love of her life, whom she’ll meet again soon. In 2041, David and his young daughter, Lou, flee from a drought-stricken Southern Europe that has been ravaged by thirst and war. Separated from the rest of their family and desperate to find them, they discover an ancient sailboat in a dried-out garden, miles away from the nearest shore. Signe’s sailboat.

Galina, a promising young geologist from Moscow, is falling in love with her pilot, Snow Crane, on an expedition for minerals in Siberia. As their helicopter hovers over what should be a stretch of uninhabited forest, they see a small hut and a garden—and, the following day, when they hike from their field camp to the hut, they find a family.

For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us.

Mr. Fish and his friends have noticed something strange in their ocean - a big, big mess! How did it get there? What can they do about it? The closer they look, the more they see where the mess came from...and they'll have to work together to get rid of it.

Inspired by environmental activism, Tiger Work blends fiction, essay and poetry to make a powerful and very personal appeal for change. If we continue to live as we do now, Ben Okri argues in this evocative collection, there will be no world left for us to fix. He imagines messages, sent to us from beyond the end, from those who saw it coming—from Africa, Europe, the Americas and the rest of the world—exhorting us to change now. This is a collection comprising two poems and six prose pieces—three short stories, an essay, a letter, and an interview.

After setting fire to the Forever Sea and leaving the surface world behind, Kindred Greyreach dives below to find a Seafloor populated by roving bands of scavengers. Among them, Kindred discovers a familiar face working to save the Sea from the continued spread of the Greys and the ravages of the world above. But when Kindred finds herself at odds with them, she and her friends will have to use every power available to them—including their link to the surface world—to forestall disaster.

River Rules is a small-town environmental suspense novel with a deep heart and powerful conscience. What the housing bubble didn’t break in Bridgeville - a small New England community blessed by the Connecticut River - greed, double-dealing, and rapid-fire change just might. Peter Russo, a part-time farmer and full-time rambler with his rescue dog, has a knack for conflict, and a burning desire to protect Bridgeville’s land and water from exploitation.

"Bring back the lynx? Over my dead body!" A mutter passed through the crowd of environmental protestors, and Rory stepped forward. "Your hunting has destroyed our hills and left them treeless wastes, devoid of wildlife. It’s time that changed." Lord Purdey’s lip curled in a sneer. "Listen, you lentil-eating cat lover, Scotland is owned by me and men like me. If we want to kill anything that moves and bulldoze your beloved hills flat, we will."

King of the mountain - that’s Arnold Markowitz. His mountaintop home is a peaceful stretch of land covered with orchards, wild flowers, and towering trees. But there isn’t much room left for beauty these days as a land-development corporation is intent on surrounding his paradise with a sprawling shopping mall. With Markowitz taking on the powers that be, this classic tale takes unexpected twists and turns.

When Louise Root, a new client of Cecil Younger, is found murdered, the private investigator finds himself in the middle of an environmental law violation that has deadly repercussions. Cecil finds he is unable to leave behind Root, especially after her ex-lover Hannah asks him for help. On top of it all, Global Mining, the company that runs the gold mine where Root's body was found, hires Younger to get the dirt on an environmentalist who has a connection to the victim. In the midst of all this, Cecil's personal life is fraying.

This gripping, deeply thoughtful book considers the future of civilization in the light of what we know about climate change and related threats. David Orr, an award-winning, internationally recognized leader in the field of sustainability and environmental education, pulls no punches: Even with the Paris Agreement of 2015, Earth systems will not reach a new equilibrium for centuries.

The American Adrenaline Narrative considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Kristin J. Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after the first Earth Day in 1970, a time frame selected as a watershed moment for the contemporary American environmental movement.

The night the sky fell, Jack and Nora Abernathy’s daughter vanished in the woods. And Mia’s disappearance broke her parents’ already fragile marriage. Unable to solve her own daughter’s case, Nora lost herself in her work as a homicide detective. Jack became a shell of a man; his promising career as a biologist crumbling alongside the meteor strikes that altered weather patterns and caused a massive drought. It isn’t until five years later that the rains finally return to nourish Seattle.