The Natural World in Books; A Few Non-Fiction Picks

Today we have an essay by JoeAnn Hart, author of Arroyo Circle, a novel about wildfires in Boulder, Colorado causing Shelley, a white, middle-aged handmaiden to a hoarder, to learn about Buddhism and the healing powers of nature from a scientist. All of the links go to reviews of books at EcoLit Books, written by JoeAnn.

Reliable scientific information is the backbone of my fiction, where I incorporate animal life, genetics, environmental catastrophes, and scraps of engrossing facts I pick up on life’s messy trail. Sometimes I garner info from academic papers, but those are usually as dry as kindling. My mind wanders and not in a good way. For me, and I would guess for many others, such information is more easily absorbed through the scrim of a feeling human with excellent writing skills, someone who might even share their own personal experiences. Just as with climate fiction, I like science woven into non-fiction without sounding like an early morning presentation at a phycology conference.

For my novel, Arroyo Circle, where late-stage capitalism is viewed through the lens of environmental degradation, I read a teetering stack of material on wildfires. That stack gave me the technical knowledge I needed, but a memoir I reviewed for the website EcoLit Books, Soil, The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by poet Camille Dungy, told me what it felt like. Dungy also helped me understand the ecologies of the western landscape where she lives, and where the novel is set. Other great regional books that will make you feel the cactus needles are Mountain Time, A Field Guide to Astonishment by Renata Golden, and recently Satellite by Simmons Buntin. They are a good resource for anyone setting their fiction in the desert, which, as the earth keeps warming, might soon include all fictional settings.

Marine research was my middle name as I wrote Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean (for a book about the role of humor in climate fiction, read Aaron Sachs’ Stay Cool), and I continue to read about the sea because the Atlantic is right outside my door and rising. One of my favorites is Between the Tides by Adam Nicolson (published in the UK as The Sea is Not Made of Water). He starts off discussing tidepools then lets his thoughts drift to Viriginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, and T.S. Eliot. Fun fact: Not only do winkles have shells to protect them from predators, but the very smell of a crab in a tidepool will induce them to increase their shell thickness by 30%. I also took a deep dive into the world of jellyfish with Stung! by Lisa-Ann Gershwin, and found it informative as well as terrifying. They were the first multi-cellular animal and might well be the last.

No matter the setting or theme, animals always play a role in my fiction so I’m constantly referring to my notes from Ed Yong’s An Immense World. I read it with utter fascination, although Gene Helfman wrote the in-depth review for Ecolit. The scientific studies that Yong presents are readable as well as astounding and, as Helfman wrote, they will change how you perceive the world. This is a book about sensory perceptions and the umwelt of the non-human world. Trust me, you will never leave an outdoor light burning again. Other great science-based books on animals are Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald (author of H is for Hawk), and The Narrow Edge by Deborah Cramer, who tracks the flyway of a migratory bird called the red knot as she wrestles with the consequences of human interaction with the natural world. A very different sort of animal book is How To Be Animal, A New History of What it Means to Be Human by Melanie Challenger, which, in these days of mass extinctions, unpacks genetics and cloning as ways to save species, not the least to save our own.

Maria Popova writes a fantastic newsletter called The Marginalian where she invites us to join her as she explores the mysteries of ourselves and the universe. She has led me to many books over the years, and she recently came out with her own, The Universe in Verse, which gorgeously weaves art and science together. Lastly, I encourage every climate fiction writer to grab a copy of The Best American Science and Nature Writing every year. I don’t often review these because each essay is usually its own little marvel. The 2025 edition, A Collection of the Year’s Most Insightful Essays on the Natural World, Climate Change, and the Wonders of Science curated by the Susan Orlean, will come out in the fall and I am prepared to be amazed.

Find out more about JoeAnn’s books Float and Arroyo Circle.

JoeAnn Hart writes about the pervasive and widespread effects of the climate crisis on the natural world and the human psyche. She is a regular reviewer of environmental fiction and non-fiction for EcoLit Books, as well as Terrain.org.