Best Environmental Fiction: Novels About Nature and Climate
The best environmental fiction — from The Overstory and Bewilderment to Flight Behavior and The Ministry for the Future. Novels about nature, ecology, and climate change.
By Natalie Osei
Environmental fiction — climate fiction, or cli-fi as it is sometimes called — has emerged as one of the most important subgenres of the twenty-first century, as the literary novel begins to reckon seriously with ecological collapse. The novels below range from accessible realistic fiction (Kingsolver) to speculative policy (Robinson) to Pulitzer-winning literary fiction (Powers) — different approaches to the same central question: how do we live with what we are doing to the planet?
The Literary Masterwork
The Overstory — Richard Powers (2018)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about trees — and the most ambitious literary argument for the moral standing of non-human life. Nine Americans, in separate stories that gradually intersect, have their lives shaped by trees: an activist who chains herself to a redwood, a game designer who discovers that trees communicate, a soldier who is saved by a chestnut tree. Powers’s novel is demanding (it asks readers to restructure their understanding of which lives matter) and formally beautiful — the structure mirrors a tree’s form (roots, trunk, crown) — and it is the most important environmental novel since Silent Spring.
Accessible Environmental Fiction
Flight Behavior — Barbara Kingsolver (2012)
The most accessible climate novel — a story about Monarch butterflies and a woman in rural Appalachia who encounters them, narrated with Kingsolver’s characteristic warmth and her scientist’s precision about the ecological crisis her novel is illustrating. Dellarobia Turnbow is one of the most fully realised characters in recent American fiction: a woman of intelligence and ambition trapped by circumstance, finding an unexpected path through the arrival of the butterflies and the scientist who comes to study them.
Bewilderment — Richard Powers (2021)
Powers’s smaller and more personal environmental novel — a father’s attempt to help his son without conventional medication, and what that attempt reveals about the relationship between human consciousness and the ecological systems that support it. The novel’s argument: the attention we give to the inner life of one child is the same attention we need to give to the planet, and the lack of that attention is killing both.
Speculative Environmental Fiction
The Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)
The most ambitious climate fiction novel — a near-future account of how the world might respond to catastrophic climate events, written as a work of speculative policy and institutional design. A new UN body (the Ministry for the Future) attempts to enforce the Paris Agreement; Robinson imagines the specific mechanisms that might actually work: carbon quantitative easing, rewilding, the conversion of agriculture. Less a novel than a policy argument in fictional form, but the most comprehensive account available of what serious climate action might look like.
Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood (2003)
Atwood’s speculative fiction about genetic engineering and ecological collapse — a world in which corporations have replaced governments, most of the natural world has been destroyed, and Crake has engineered a pandemic to replace humanity with a genetically improved successor species. The most darkly comic of the environmental novels, and the one that best captures the specific combination of technological optimism and ecological nihilism that has characterised the twenty-first century so far.
Reading Order
Start accessible: Flight Behavior → Bewilderment → The Overstory.
Speculative: Oryx and Crake → The Ministry for the Future → The Overstory.
Complete: The Overstory → Bewilderment → Flight Behavior → The Ministry for the Future.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best novel about climate change?
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is the most comprehensive climate fiction novel — a near-future account of how the world responds to catastrophic climate events, written as a work of speculative policy as much as fiction. The Overstory by Richard Powers is the most celebrated literary novel about trees and ecology — a Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-generational narrative that makes the argument for the moral standing of non-human life. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver is the most accessible climate novel — a Monarch butterfly migration disrupted by climate change, told through the experience of a woman in rural Appalachia.
What is The Overstory about?
The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers follows nine Americans whose lives become intertwined with trees — a chestnut tree that has survived a blight, a mulberry tree that witnesses three generations of a Chinese-American family, an ancient chestnuts grove in Oregon being clearcut by a logging company. The novel's structure mirrors its argument: it begins with nine separate stories (the roots), brings them together in the middle (the trunk), and separates them again in the ending (the crown). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is the most ambitious literary argument for the moral importance of the non-human world.
What is Flight Behavior about?
Flight Behavior (2012) by Barbara Kingsolver follows Dellarobia Turnbow, a woman in rural Appalachia on the verge of an affair who instead encounters millions of Monarch butterflies wintering in the mountains near her home — displaced from their Mexican habitat by climate disruption. A scientist arrives to study the phenomenon; Dellarobia becomes his research assistant and begins to understand both the ecological crisis and her own life differently. Kingsolver uses the butterflies as a way of making climate change personal and specific, felt by characters whose daily lives are shaped by weather and agriculture.
What is Bewilderment about?
Bewilderment (2021) by Richard Powers follows Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist, and his nine-year-old son Robin, who has been diagnosed with a condition that makes emotional regulation impossible. Theo refuses to medicate Robin and instead enrolls him in an experimental neurofeedback treatment in which Robin's brain is trained using the neural patterns of his dead mother. The novel weaves Robin's treatment, Theo's research on exoplanets, and a political crisis threatening funding for the project — an argument that the imagination required to conceive of life on other planets is the same imagination required to care for life on this one.
