There is a maxim that “nothing happens in publishing in the summer.”
Apparently, that maxim doesn’t apply to environmental literature — as we’ve seen a wide range of impressive books pass our way over the past few months. Please check them out!
To Have and To Hold: Nature’s Hidden Relationships
By Sophie Pavelle
What can nature teach us about living together? Investigating eight symbiotic relationships trying to survive the climate and biodiversity crises, Sophie Pavelle explains why it has never been more vital for us to understand symbiosis. Symbiotic relationships regulate ecosystems, strengthen resilience and bind pivotal connections, and nature thrives on relationships as glamorous as they are grotesque and as bizarre as they are engrossing.
Symbiotic relationships don’t happen accidentally – these dynamics evolved – and species form and sever alliances everywhere, from deep within temperate rainforests to the open ocean, quiet tidal pools or chalk grasslands.
In To Have or To Hold, Sophie low-carbon travels in the British Isles relishing the interconnectedness between species, celebrating the relationships underpinning natural environments and sharing some of nature’s frauds, fortune-tellers, misfits and cheaters.
The natural world is built on parasitism, a cunning blend of bargaining and exploitation in the name of survival. In our relationship with the natural world, are we the parasites? Will we continue to exploit nature’s resources? Or will we vow to love and cherish what remains – shaping a more restorative life alongside nature – till death us do part?
Forfeiture
By JP Nebra
Hunter-gatherers and their shaman flee murderous loggers in the Amazon. An elderly Inuit woman enacts an obscure ritual in the melting ruins of her ancestral Arctic village. Defenseless under the modern onslaught, the indigneous peoples’ only hope is a cultural echo. A memory of how to beckon interstellar explorers who, puzzlingly, have not been seen for eons. Do they even exist?
Tracking the distress signals, the aliens speed back to Earth, a planet they consider a temple of Life. And when they discover the paradisial planet is now polluted and beset with extinctions & ecological destruction, they issue an ultimatum. Humanity has one year and one chance to fix things.
But as the powerful alien leader grows warm to present-day humans and their ways, usurpers in her ranks feel no affection for this untrustworthy species and plot a grim judgement. What will be the fate of Life on Earth?
In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon: Happiness, History, and Environment in a Changing Bhutan
By Betsy Bolton
Landlocked, mountainous, and surrounded by global giants India and China, Bhutan has provided remarkable leadership on both climate action and human happiness, despite its pre-2023 status as a least-developed nation. Bhutan was the first country to be internationally recognized as carbon neutral; it is also the birthplace of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH), a pointed alternative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a means of measuring the success of national policies in promoting citizens’ wellbeing. Yet Bhutan has also been a site of ethnic conflict, with roughly tens of thousands people displaced into refugee camps in the 1990s and eventually resettled abroad.
International views on Bhutan tend to be sharply split between admiration for its democratizing development strategies and opposition to its human rights abuses—a division partly maintained by Bhutan’s tight limits on immigration and foreign travel within the country. In the first book-length study of its kind, In the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon explores the tensions and contradictions of Bhutan’s rapid political and economic transformation from the perspective of a Fulbright scholar helping start a new master’s program in the remote east of the country.
When Mothers Dream: Stories
By Brenda Cooper
Cooper’s new collection, When Mothers Dream, celebrates strong women. This mix of science fiction and fantasy, seasoned with poetry, makes the case that women may be the ones who can save the world.
When Mothers Dream is full of stories that explore the power and beauty of strong women in their many roles. Mothers. Bosses. Fighters. Scientists. Every story deals with real concerns and valuable fights, with protecting nature, children, and each other. Brenda Coper has won two Endeavor awards. Many of her stories have selected for various “best of” anthologies.
Many Voices: Building Erie, the Canal That Changed America
By Laurie Lawlor
In the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine a canal as cutting-edge technology. Yet even to the most scientifically-minded, the 363-mile Erie Canal once seemed an unachievable dream. Thomas Jefferson himself called it “nothing short of madness;” one critic felt sure it was impossible as “building a canal to the moon.” Yet with eight years and nearly $185 million dollars in today’s currency, the Erie Canal opened in 1825 to celebratory cannon fire: an innovating — and enduring — marvel of engineering.
But as the Canal shaped the flow of American history, the sociopolitical impact reached much further than its shores. A largely untold tale of creativity and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, heroism and prejudice, the Erie Canal’s story is as complex and compelling as that of America itself.
Author Laurie Lawlor captures the landmark achievements of the Erie Canal while diving deep into corporate greed, environmental devastation, poor working conditions, and its impact on the Haudenosaunee people. Pairing rich back matter (including maps, source notes, an index, bibliography, glossary, and timeline) with attention grabbing photographs, accomplished STEAM storyteller Laurie Lawlor connects the Erie Canal’s past and present to plumb the depths of unexplored American history.
Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless
By Tamara Dean
Shelter and Storm is a collection of twelve true tales of discovery that invite readers to experience nature mindfully in a time of uncertainty.
Dean’s boundless curiosity and gift for storytelling imbue these essays with urgency and a sense of adventure. She invites readers to share in her discoveries while hunting for water, learning that a persistent weed could be food, or burning a hayfield to recreate a prairie. Contending with the fallout of fires, floods, and tornadoes, she offers responses to natural disasters that reflect the importance of community, now and for generations to come. Whether tracking down a rare, blue-glowing firefly, engineering a beaver-friendly waterway to appease a dying neighbor, or building a house of earthen blocks, Dean unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling.
Keenly attentive to the stakes for our planet’s future—and the implications of extreme weather, shifting agricultural practices, and political divides—Shelter and Storm illuminates a thoughtful way forward for anyone concerned about climate change and its far-reaching consequences or for anyone searching, as Dean has, for a more sustainable way to live.
The Path of the Jaguar
By Virginia Anzola
What if El Dorado had a voice—and it was a woman’s?
In 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh sails deep into the Orinoco River in search of gold, empire, and glory. From the solitude of his prison cell, on the eve of his execution, he recalls the journey that undid him—not for its failures, but for a gaze that defied him.
Across the river, in the depths of the Amazonian forest, voices whisper beneath the canopy. They are women—guardians of a sacred land, protectors of stories buried by conquest. Among them is Wararí, a fierce survivor entrusted with a sacred mountain and the flame of her people.
Told in three distinct voices, The Path of the Jaguar blends historical fiction with oral myth, bringing together a fallen English courtier, a hidden tribe of warrior women, and the spiritual legacy of a land that remembers everything.
This is not Raleigh’s story. It is the story of those who watched him come—and let him go.
Uplift
By Jessica Mann
Born high in a spruce tree, Columbina and her brothers grow up listening to ancestral tales through long winters and harvesting pine seeds in summer. But Columbina begins to question her clan’s traditions and forms bonds with creatures beyond her species. When she uncovers a looming threat from the mysterious Tall Ones, she must decide how far she’ll go to protect her world.
A richly imaginative novel told through avian eyes, UPLIFT explores the strength of community, the power of connection, and the impact of environmental change. It may just change the way you see birds forever.
With original pen-and-ink illustrations by Steve Habersang
The Greenling
By David Booram
The Greenling transports readers to 2060, where they meet Noah, a young Irish woman who finds herself at the tipping point of the planet’s climate catastrophe.
Because of her strange connections with non-human life, she is misunderstood by her family and peers. Through her growing sensitivity to Nature’s communications, Noah realizes she is being chosen to lead an impending planetary reset—one on a direct collision course with global corporatocracy’s unstoppable lust for greed and control.
As she strives to effect environmental change through local and global activism, she begins to wonder if instead of fighting for Nature, it’s time to fight alongside Nature, which has become increasingly sentient with a mind and plan of its own.
John is co-author, with Midge Raymond, of the Tasmanian mystery Devils Island. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and Where Oceans Hide Their Dead. Co-founder of Ashland Creek Press and editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program).