We would never downplay the importance of sustainability science and policy, but come the dog days might we suggest foregoing white papers in favor of breezier, if similarly slanted, fiction? We view it as the ideal way to recharge and reflect on the values that drive sustainability professionals. And with that in mind, Trellis presents half a dozen (well, technically, eight) novels as elucidating as they are entertaining.
‘The Ministry for the Future’
By Kim Stanley Robinson
In one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020, an organization is formed under the auspices of the U.N. to tackle climate disasters. Blending fictional firsthand accounts with equally fictional policy memos and speculative solutions, “The Ministry for the Future” is daring in theme as well as form. As the Los Angeles Review of Books noted, the book is “asking a question that has typically been forbidden to ask: What if political violence has a role to play in saving the future?” In doing so, the novel doesn’t just imagine climate solutions, it confronts their moral and political implications as well.
‘The Overstory’
By Richard Powers
With an ambitious storyline and far-ranging emotional scope, this Pulitzer Prize winner spans generations and landscapes, weaving together the lives of seemingly unconnected characters — each with a unique relationship to trees. The epic, as grand and intricate as forests themselves, is, as Benjamin Markovits wrote in The Guardian, “an astonishing performance.”
‘Parable of the Sower’
By Octavia E. Butler
One of The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year in 1994, “Parable of the Sower” continues to hold up. The novel follows a young woman, who suffers from “hyperempathy” in a California ravaged by climate change and economic collapse, as she leads a group of fellow survivors north and develops a new belief system along the way. Butler’s masterwork is a powerful story about resilience, adaptation and the drive to build something better.
‘Flight Behavior’
By Barbara Kingsolver
“[C]omplex, elliptical and well-observed,” is how The Guardian’s Robin McKie described this novel. Sitting in the top slot of USA Today’s “10 Books We Loved in 2012” list, the book follows a young housewife in rural Appalachia who discovers an anomalous migration of monarch butterflies that quickly draws the attention of scientists and the media. Interrogating climate change and class, the novel presents a tale of self-discovery alongside a reckoning with ecological and social truths.
‘The MaddAddam Trilogy’
By Margaret Atwood
The books in “The MaddAddam Trilogy” — “Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood” and “MaddAddam” —explore a world shattered by environmental catastrophe. With its plagues and floods, corporate corruption and transgenic creatures, the series probes the consequences of scientific ambition and ecological neglect — not to mention the human capacity for destruction and reinvention. James Kidd of The Independent noted that the trilogy “is not always a pretty picture, but it is true for all that.”
‘Birnam Wood’
By Eleanor Catton
This international bestseller follows a guerrilla gardening group in New Zealand and its uneasy alliance with a tech billionaire who claims to support their cause. It’s a sharp eco-thriller where competing motives collide, exposing the fault lines between environmental idealism and the will to survive. The novel made Time’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2023” and was described by Kirkus as a “blistering look at the horrors of late capitalism [that] manages to also be a wildly fun read.”
