The best books that make science the story

Fire & Water does not make a spectacle of climate change. While global warming and environmental damage may be the catalyst for many of the stories, the weight of the stories is in the way the characters encounter new challenges, reconsider their relationships to each other and to their environment, and discover the wonder in the world around them, even as it changes. These stories fly us like a kite in hurricane-force winds through the gamut of emotions brought into specific relief by the devastating realities of climate change. As the climate crisis becomes more real, these stories steeped in realism are pertinent and necessary, heart-breaking and beautiful.

Robin Wall Kimmerer published Gathering Moss before her now-gone-viral Braiding Sweetgrass. This book is slightly more technical than Braiding Sweetgrass. I told my daughter, who had to take Biology this summer so she could take Engineering III in the fall that she could probably just read Gathering Moss and get an A in the class. 

But the book is no textbook. Kimmerer guides us through the world of how moss interacts with other plants, evolves, and reproduces with such careful attention, lucidity, and detail that the connections she makes to how humans interact and evolve and reproduce are as clear and self-evident as they are exciting and surprising.

Marco Wilkinson writes about his mother who moved from Uruguay to the States, who he knows well, and his father, who he doesn’t. Wilkinson understands his childhood and complicated adulthood as a story intertwined with the plants he’s learned about. In Madder, the narrator details plants’ xylem and their weediness, their Latin names, and their unpredictable growing habits while peeling away the internal systems of his own plant-like self. Wilkinson pairs plant with human to show how growth, thirst, rootedness, and supportive nutrients make for resilient bodies.

Wilkinson takes such care, too, to pull back the weeds and to pull them apart—Thanks to his careful attention to every part of the plant, I can see through the plant as well as inside the workings of the plant. I am physically in the body even though I get that it’s a big metaphor for the mind.

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s first book, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir taught me how memoir can be compiled through multiple lenses—one that invites into the author’s self-view and another through which you can learn about place and environmental degradation. With two (or more) questions, who-I-am becomes complicated and textured. Antonetta’s new The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here illustrates that understanding ourselves comes only through looking at those selves through other texts, other people, our current understanding of ourselves, science, place, and our childhood’s vision of the world.

Antonetta takes quantum entanglement, her grandmother’s Christian Science beliefs, and her own account of spending summers at the shore in a small hut with her family whose history of mental health—and professional accomplishments—is complexly textured. In a section called “The Problem of the Past,” Antonetta describes the behavior of photon particles. In the double-slit experiment, if you send one beam of light through a double slit into a mirror, that beam’s photons behave as a particle but if you send a second beam of light, you can retroactively show that both behave as waves. Physicists call this first beam’s change in point of view “delayed choice.” This metaphor drives the central question of the book. If you look at the past, it is bound to behave differently than if you look at it head-on. The key, she seems to argue, is to look at the past and present simultaneously, recognizing that light can behave both as a particle and a wave—it’s the memoirist’s job, through the double lens, that we can not only see both, but hold the idea of different qualities and different identities simultaneously in our minds.

Rolf Halden makes reading about the environment fun. He is a microbiologist working at the Arizona State University’s Center for BioDesign. He is working to invite people to pay attention to the lifestream of the chemicals and other substances humans invent and then dispose of without a thought. For example, at the water treatment plant, he discovered piles of contact lenses because people just throw them in the toilet. Just throw them in the garbage can people. Plastic is still bad news on land but it’s even worse in our waterways.

Halden himself didn’t think of the results of his own contact-lens throwing away until he visited the treatment plant. By recognizing that humans will be humans, he advocates for us trying not to make stuff or use stuff that can’t be easily dissolved in the environment because it’s nearly impossible to know where all this human-made stuff goes or what happens to it. And, if we do find out, the answer isn’t always good.