| The Road by Cormac McCarthy |
Top 10 books of eco-fiction
As the climate crisis grows ever clearer, the best fiction can help realign our conception of nature
12 February 2020
As our real-world ecosystem further devolves, we’ll soon move into the pining-for-our-ex-phase of the relationship – watching the BBC’s Planet Earth documentaries like old wedding videos after a nasty divorce. But books can reconfigure our conception of nature for the better.
My new novel, Greenwood, begins in 2038 on a remote island off the Pacific coast of British Columbia, where wealthy tourists flock from all corners of the dust-choked globe to visit the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral – one of the world’s last remaining forests. The story then travels back through time, telling the story of a family inextricably linked to the trees, from a biologist to a carpenter to an eco-warrior to a blind timber tycoon, describing how we went from fearing and mythologising our forests, to extracting enormous wealth from them, to fencing them off as luxury retreats.
Here are 10 great novels that have taken on this overwhelming story.
1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The mother of all eco-fictions, a book that chronicles a man-made climate disaster before we knew what to call it. The dispossessed, hungry, and homeless migrate through baking dust in search of better lives, only to be turned back by callously protectionist locals. Sound familiar? It’s also a heartbreaking testament to the fact that eco-fiction need not be speculative. And even the most hard-hearted readers will be softened by Steinbeck’s eternally revolutionary idea: “Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”
2. The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin
A prescient novella about an interstellar logging colony, written by perhaps our greatest practitioner of “literary sci-fi”. Published in 1972, Le Guin’s book asserted that colonialism, extractivism, and environmental despoliation are endemic to humankind, and we surely haven’t proved her wrong in the years since. Concerning her novella’s similarities to the blockbuster film Avatar, which Le Guin described as “a high-budget, highly successful film” that “completely reverses the book’s moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution”, she wrote: “I’m glad I have nothing at all to do with it”.
3. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
In her bold and strange novel, Watkins disassembles the mythology of the American west, paying particular attention to its brutal expansionism and unquestioned promise of personal reinvention. The story concerns a young couple trying to navigate post-apocalyptic California, where severe drought has baked the once fertile landscape into sandstorms and squalor. Peopled by wandering cults and water dowsers, Gold Fame Citrus shows us that perhaps the notions of “Shangri-La” and “Man-Made Hell on Earth” are two sides of the same ideological coin.
4. The Drowned World by JG Ballard
Published in 1962, and only Ballard’s second book, The Drowned World ought to be recognised as one of the pioneering works of climate fiction. By 2145, global warming has made slush of the ice caps (we knew this would happen, Exxon!), the seas have risen, and tropical swamps and jungles now dominate most of the Earth’s surface. A group of surveyors are sent from Greenland to soggy, flooded London to determine whether the southern world can someday be reclaimed. Writing during the era we believed most fervently that the world was ours to mould and shape, Ballard warned us that it wasn’t.
5. The Overstory by Richard Powers
Not the apocalypse so much as the prequel to it. Armed with more tree-related research than you can stack in your woodshed, Powers decentralises humans from his story to great effect, demonstrating how wanton deforestation and the reckless disregard for the complexity of natural systems have landed us in the mess we’re in. If you don’t come away from this novel with a deeper appreciation for trees, then you’re probably the CEO of a leading forestry company.
6. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
This brilliant National Book award-winning novel concerns the plight of Esch, a poor and pregnant 15-year-old, living with her family in Bois Sauvage, a mostly black Mississippi bayou town sitting smack dab in the path of hurricane Katrina. Set during the 12-day lead-up to landfall (plus a few days of aftermath), this mythic tragedy demonstrates what it means when the most vulnerable (and immobile) of us are struck by disaster. No novel draws a better link between personal traumas and climate traumas. In the storm’s wake, Esch muses: “Suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.”
| The Road |
7. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Though the exact cause of the calamity that necessitates all kinds of scrabbling barbarism remains unclear, its human ramifications are described with ruthless specificity. In an interview, McCarthy later claimed that he imagined the disaster as the aftermath of a comet strike, but I don’t buy it. This is eco-fiction through and through. And now that I’m a father, I can’t help but read The Road as an ode to parenting in a fallen world; to sighting the disaster that you hope your children won’t have to face, but know deep-down they will and must. Regularly I have my own Road-type conversations with my sons: “Why do we buy gas if it’s destroying our planet, Dad?” “Because I need to get to work.” “Then why don’t you work somewhere closer to our house?” and on it goes. I mean really, what’s the best way to tell a child that this wondrous world they’ve just come to know is hurtling towards ruin?
8. American War by Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad tapped into his experience as a journalist in Afghanistan and the Middle East to prophesy a whole new history for the US, including the second civil war of 2074, which was just as barbaric as the first. The conflict was kicked off when the northern states outlawed fossil fuels after Florida was flooded with seawater, and, naturally, the southerners revolted, and the country again tore in half. A harrowing reminder that our old wounds can flare up in times of greatest turmoil.
The best eco-fiction doesn’t present our reckless alteration of the natural ecological order as a single apocalyptic event, with us playing the resident despoilers and the Earth our helpless victim. Instead it reminds us of our profound and inescapable interconnection with the natural world. Clade, Australian novelist James Bradley’s ingenious novel, tells the story of many generations of one family, all played out on a stage that is being incrementally destroyed by climate change, though few of the characters notice. Clade reminds us that world indeed won’t end with a bang, but with a long series of breakdowns, extinctions, die-offs, fires, floods, droughts, blights, and dust storms, during which our human lives will carry on just as messily as ever. And perhaps our greatest sin of all will be our failure to notice.
10. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
In rural Tennessee during an unrelenting period of unseasonable rain, a young woman named Dellarobia happens upon the uncanny spectacle of millions of monarch butterflies congregating in a field near her house. As competing interests fight to worship, capitalise upon, or preserve this unique phenomenon, the ensuing “Battle of the Butterflies” is a lesson in our frustratingly human tendency to focus on symptoms instead of root causes. As she watches the frenzied media coverage on her television, Dellarobia observes: “Nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were.’”