In honor of Earth Day, we asked authors to tell us about the books that influenced their relationships with the natural world. These are their responses (lightly edited for style).
1. Paolo Bacigalupi, author of ‘The Windup Girl’ and ‘The Water Knife’
Without question, “The Wump World,” by Bill Peet. I was around 7 years old when I first read it. I don’t know how it came into my possession. I remember it as a plain green hardback, which I assume means the cover flap had been lost. I assume it must have been a gift from a grandparent. It’s a beautifully illustrated picture book about these sweet critters called wumps that sleep under the bumbershoot trees, drink from clear streams, bathe in crystalline lakes, eat nice green grass, and mostly mind their own business. Then one day spaceships blaze down out of the sky. Out of the rocket ships pour a bunch of little blue people unsubtly named Pollutants. These wacky blue guys proceed to happily dig up the grass, chop down the trees, pave the planet and build massive cities. The wumps are driven underground into caves to wait out the apocalypse grinding over their heads. In the end, the Pollutants clog the rivers with garbage, choke the skies with smoke — and then get angry about how crummy it is. So they bail to find another planet to do it all over again (Mars, anyone?). The wumps emerge to discover a shattered world. Slowly the Wump World starts to heal. But it’s never quite the same.
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Rough stuff for a kids’ book, but just as relevant now as when it was written.
2. Diane Cook, author of ‘The New Wilderness’
In 1990, environmentalism was having a moment, and people were celebrating the 20th anniversary of Earth Day by reading “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth,” by the EarthWorks Group. There weren’t a thousand books about saving the Earth yet. It seemed there was one — this one. I was 13 years old and bought a copy with my allowance. I really thought we were all going to save the Earth because of that book. The fact that a book pointed out the need for change meant society would — must! — take action. Of course, the “simple things” were not enough. Bigger changes needed to be made by people in power, but they kicked the can down the road, and my young generation watched a movement fizzle.
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While this book didn’t teach me how to save the Earth, it did offer me an important lesson in how to view the ruling class of society: with skepticism. It was the dawning of my political self. I learned that I’d need to cobble together my own kind of activism on my own terms. And it moved me to build a personal relationship with the environment. So I did, and it’s rich, and it affects almost every aspect of my life.
3. Ash Davidson, author of ‘Damnation Spring’
I first pulled a copy of “A Bitter Fog,” by Carol Van Strum, from the stacks at the University of Iowa library in 2010. I was trying to understand the long shadow herbicide spraying had cast over my own family, and “A Bitter Fog” tells the story of everyday people — mothers, schoolteachers, neighbors — from rural Oregon to Arizona going head-to-head with chemical companies and the federal government to stop the aerial spraying of the two herbicides my family had encountered: 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the active ingredients in Agent Orange. “A Bitter Fog” does for phenoxy herbicides what “Silent Spring” did for pesticides, and deserves to be just as widely read. Van Strum’s book not only made me furious with the chemical companies and with the government agencies charged with regulating them, it made me want to write a book of my own. Like “A Civil Action” or “Erin Brockovich,” “A Bitter Fog” lifts you up, breaks your heart and makes you believe in the power of a few thoughtful, committed individuals to change the world. Van Strum’s archives, which reveal fraud in safety testing and coverups by chemical companies and federal watchdogs, are useful resources for anyone seeking information about herbicide spraying and its effects, and are digitized at the Poison Papers.
4. Omar El Akkad, author of ‘American War’ and ‘What Strange Paradise’
A few years ago — embarrassingly late in life, as far as these kinds of revelations go — I read a book that completely upended the way I think not just about landscape, but about what it means to truly observe. “Horizon,” Barry Lopez’s final book published before his death, is a life story made of place. Six regions, from the Galapagos to Antarctica, anchor an assessment of both the grand sweep of humanity across nature and the intimate sweep of a life across time. More than reverence or stewardship, what seems to guide Lopez’s writing is an ethics of closeness. You read and you are there, in both place and purpose. You walk alongside him up and down the length of the planet, content to note the motion of the sun. When he describes instances of the modern Western world’s gutting of rare and once-pristine ecosystems, it is your skin the knife tears open. But so too is the contagious effect of his stubborn, endless astonishment at the miracle of simply being here and woven through this earth, this water, this constellation of life. I’ve read lots of great books about the aesthetics and mechanics of the natural world, but “Horizon” is something different, detailed with decades of piercing attention and feverish with love.
5. Barbara Kingsolver, author of ‘Demon Copperhead’ and ‘Unsheltered’
I was in my 20s when I read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” by Annie Dillard, and it rearranged my soul. I can’t say it made me fall in love with the natural world; that had already happened in the long, unsupervised childhood summers I spent roaming the fields and woods around our farm. I caught crawfish and turtles and tried to learn the names of everything I saw. But Dillard is a mystic. She approached her ordinary little creek with eyes open to the wonder, showing me the firmament in a tree full of birds, the Gordian knot of a shed snakeskin, the resurrection of fecundity. Her writing helped me see nature not as a collection of things to know or possess, but a world of conjoined lives, holy and complete, with or without me. She left me with this sentence that has guided my life ever since: “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
6. Sy Montgomery, author of ‘The Soul of an Octopus’ and ‘How to Be a Good Creature’
“Never Cry Wolf,” by Farley Mowat, was published in 1963, but I didn’t read it until I was in high school, 10 years later. The book is a portrait of a biologist whose findings turned him into an activist. The book moved me deeply. True, though originally published as a factual account, parts of it were later decried as fiction. (“Never let the facts get in the way of the truth,” Mowat would later tell me, when he generously welcomed me to his home while I researched my first book.) But while I’ve remained a stickler for facts in my own writing, this book showed me the importance of remaining true to matters of the heart as well — and that a writer must use not only the fruits of the intellect but also honor one’s emotion and intuition to tell a story that moves readers to action.
7. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of ‘World of Wonders’
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” brought a scientist-mother’s voice to the table of nature writing that I so desperately welcomed and needed. In evocative and lyrical prose, she uses science to consider the question: What consequences befall us when we don’t tend to the land, each other and our gathering of hearts? But also — most importantly — what bounty there is to be had when we remember our interconnectedness.
8. Nnedi Okorafor, author of ‘Binti’ and ‘Noor’
I read “The Ministry for the Future,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, as I was in the process of moving to Phoenix. The novel starts with a deadly heat wave in India. Issues of water shortages and extreme heat were very much on my mind. I knew of Phoenix’s brutal summers, but was yet to experience one. The stark step-by-step details of this catastrophic event that leaves millions dead was such a terrifying read that it nearly gave me a panic attack. I had nightmares. After reading the first part, I went on to take some very aggressive (and expensive) precautions. “The Ministry for the Future” opened my eyes wider to how the Earth is changing and alarmed me in a way that only great science fiction can.
9. Tochi Onyebuchi, author of ‘Riot Baby’ and ‘Goliath’
By the time I read John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” I’d lost my adolescent appreciation for the environment and its meteorological caprice. I used to be fascinated by the insides of large stones I could split in two. I used to be grateful for swift, transient rainstorms that sometimes gave us raindrops so large you could almost dodge them. But then you grow out of the idea that there’s magic in the air you breathe. “Little, Big” returned to me the notion that there might be a world behind ours. And though the novel isn’t about the environment per se, though it’s about faeries and families and houses that are bigger on the inside than on the outside, reading the book did make me look at rain differently, and grass, and sky.
10. Margaret Renkl, author of ‘Late Migrations’ and ‘The Comfort of Crows’
I was born in love with the natural world, but I was shockingly old — in my mid-40s — before I learned that I could be far more than a passive, do-less-harm observer in its wondrous, fragile ways. Douglas W. Tallamy’s 2007 book, “Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants,” was a lightning bolt. With the twinned calamities of climate change and mass extinction weighing heavier and heavier on my nature-besotted soul, here were concrete, affordable actions that I could take, that anyone could take, to help our wild neighbors thrive in the built human environment. And it all starts with nothing more than a seed. “Bringing Nature Home” is a miracle: a book that summons butterflies.
