The best novels on environmental issues

Dystopian novels are often bleak but this ‘cli-fi’ book, recommended by the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Gates, offers possible pathways through an impending climate catastrophe. This novel is science fiction that is heavy on the science. The story imagines a Ministry for the Future that holds future generations’ rights as important as the current generation’s and launches initiatives—from a ‘carbon coin’ currency to geoengineering to prevent glaciers from melting in Antarctica. There are two protagonists—Mary, who heads the ministry, and Frank, an aid worker traumatized by deadly heat waves. It’s an epic and intricate story, and author Kim Stanley Robinson has a peerless track record in climate fiction, previously writing a trilogy on colonizing Mars.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and global bestseller—The Overstory is one of the most successful and widely read works of environmental fiction. It’s a complex novel, weaving together nine separate stories of Americans whose close connections with trees spur them to protect the forests. The story is divided into four sections—root, trunk, crown, and seeds, reflecting the life cycle of trees. If it strikes you that combining nine separate narratives through four cycles is complicated, then you’re right—this is no easy read. Many of the characters endure terrible hardships too—from family tragedy to paralysis and untimely deaths, but there is optimism and above all the book is an inspiring, thought-provoking homage to trees.

Published in 2012, this literary novel won several awards. The author draws upon her background in biology to tell the story of a farmer Dellarobia, who hikes behind her farm in the Appalachians one day to find millions of Monarch butterflies in the valley below. The butterflies have been displaced from Mexico—some locals think it’s a message from God while scientist Ovid Byron deems it a worrying sign of climate change. Awash with biblical imagery, the novel’s central tension is between climate change deniers and scientific investigation. 

The three books listed above are very serious, as befits the genre. To lighten the mood a little, albeit with sardonic wit, go back to the 1970s, when this novel was first published. The novel became so well known that it spawned the use of the term ‘monkey wrench’ to mean ecologically-motivated sabotage. The four main characters are misfits, led by Vietnam veteran George Hayduke, who target industrial interests threatening the ecosystems of the southwest USA. They burn billboards, sabotage machinery, and eventually plan the destruction of a dam. The law inevitably closes in. It’s good fun but with a serious message—and may well have influenced the current Extinction Rebellion movement.

I’ve come full circle by returning to my own book’s genre—crime fiction. This new take on the genre sees an ecologist playing Miss Marple. The author draws upon years of experience in ecology to weave a whodunnit in which main character Dr. Nell Ward finds herself at the center of a murder investigation. She must employ all her skills as an amateur detective and ecologist to clear her name. It’s the first in a series of eco-whodunnits from the author, mixing crime fiction with romance.