Environmental Literature

The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of Jonathan Franzen's essays and speeches from the past five years, in which he grapples with the most important and heated ethical subjects of the day: environmentalism, capitalism, wealth inequality, race, technology, and the role of art. He challenges us to ask difficult questions: What is our civic responsibility in the face of climate change, the greatest ever threat to our planet and species? Does technology give us a sense of control or community or is it stripping these from us?

When the spaceship Viking encounters a variety of adversaries in the Asteroid Belt - including a prospector and his family, a cyborg, the solar system's greatest sculptor, and an evil industrialist - a confrontation begins that transforms the human solar system.

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.

Jax, Yas, Spider, and Han are the four cornerstones of Team Jericho, the best scavenger hunting team in all of Seattle. Each has their own specialty: Jax, the puzzler; Yas, the parkourist; Spider, the hacker; and Han, the cartographer. But now with an oil refinery being built right in their backyard, each also has their own problems. Their families are at risk of losing their jobs, their communities, and their homes. So when The Order hijacks the scavenger hunting forum and concocts a puzzle of its own, promising a reward of influence, Team Jericho sees it as the chance of a lifetime.

On her thirteenth birthday, Inés receives a mysterious necklace from her abuela in Mexico that turns her into a monarch butterfly—the fulfilment of a prophecy linking Inés’ destiny to her family’s legacy and the butterflies’ survival. The adventure continues as Inés joins the monarchs on their long journey south to the butterfly sanctuary in Mexico—an odyssey that has become increasingly perilous due to human activity.

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.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall - a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son - and they take steps to assure their future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A satisfying tale of honor, chance, and star-crossed love infused with Southern wit, grace, and charm - the story of two old Southern families. The Langleys have more money than the Morgan Stanley Bank. And they think they have more class. The Barrett family made their 19th-century fortune in a less distinguished manner: corner grocery stores and liquor stores.

Stella gets a big surprise when her mom plans a trip to visit their family in Mexico! Stella loves marine animals, and she can't wait to see the ocean for the first time...until she arrives and learns that the sea and its life-forms are in danger due to pollution. Stella wants to save the ocean, but she knows she can't do it alone. It's going to take a lot of work and help from old and new friends to make a difference, but Stella Diaz never gives up!

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.

For sixth grader Sam Warren and his friends Catalina, Alistair, Jaesang, and Zoe, the effects of climate change are too pressing to ignore. Adults don’t seem to be up to the challenge of taking action to make real change, but kids know it’s their futures on the line. If their parents, teachers, and government officials won’t step up well, then, they will!

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.

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.

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, easy-to-understand chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before.