How to Write About a Changing World

For millennia, human society has been organized around the predictable march of the seasons: The weather has controlled what we eat, where we live, what we wear. But as the climate changes, the world we adapted to is being disrupted. In his new book, The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan tells the story of civilization through this lens, showing how people in the past responded to and were ruled by meteorological conditions. What the book ultimately reveals, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote this week, is that “we’re as foolish and catastrophically inattentive as any society—or global collection of societies—before us.”

The one difference is that we live in an era of dramatic, unprecedented warming caused by human activity. And the planet’s climate is not the only thing that has changed: Our loud, brightly lit modern way of life has drastic consequences for other species, Ed Yong writes in An Immense World. Light pollution disrupts birds; noise pollution upsets whales. As Tatiana Schlossberg pointed out last year, animals are dying and species are vanishing; consequently, we can no longer predict what the world will look like when our children grow up. The books she reads to her young son mention kangaroos, crocodiles, and tigers. Will those creatures one day feel as fantastical as the fictional characters he loves, such as Custard the dragon?

In literature, climate collapse used to be the province of speculative fiction. Today, it’s an “unavoidable part of life,” showing up in kitchen-sink dramas, comedies, and mysteries, as Heather Hansman notes. Writers have even begun to experiment with new ways to write about plants and animals. Elvia Wilk’s book Death by Landscape shows that this might be a good thing. “Giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature,” Michael Friedrich argues. As the new ecological status quo emerges, we’ll all need to keep adjusting our expectations and rethinking our place on the planet.

​Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What We’re Reading

JOHN THYS / AFP / Getty; Museum of the City of New York / Getty

A force that has shaped the history of the world

“The question is no longer whether climate change can influence the scale and force of an individual hurricane or typhoon. Of course it can. We see it happening as storms intensify all around us. Global warming is affecting nearly every Earth system, including polar-ice conditions, monsoon cycles, ocean temperature, and the dynamics of the major ocean currents and oscillations. It’s bringing an end to what the poet Marianne Moore once called “the unegoistic action of the glaciers.” What use is history in this context?”

???? The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, by Peter Frankopan

Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic

How light and noise pollution confound animals’ senses

“We have instigated what some scientists have called an era of “biological annihilation,” comparable to the five great mass-extinction events of prehistory. But we have also filled the silence with noise and the night with light. This often ignored phenomenon is called sensory pollution—human-made stimuli that interfere with the senses of other species. By barraging different animals with stimuli of our own making, we have forced them to live in our Umwelt. We have distracted them from what they actually need to sense, drowned out the cues they depend upon, and lured them into sensory traps.”

???? An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong

Rop van Mierlo

Will children’s books become catalogs of the extinct?

“Whales aren’t the only threatened storybook animals. “We are going to lose Gorilla and Brown Bear, Brown Bear,”  says Hillary Young, a community ecologist and professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies our biodiversity crisis and is a mother of three. “But we’re also losing Frog and Toad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar, because our loss of animal life is so deep and pervasive.”

???? Gorilla, by Anthony Browne
???? Brown Bear, Brown Bear, by Eric Carle
???? Frog and Toad Are Friends, by Alfred Lobel
???? The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

Lori Nix

As the climate changes, so does fiction

“The books below aren’t about climate change—they’re about immigration, corporate malfeasance, and tourism; they focus on families, neighbors, and friends. But in each, the anxieties of our warming age force their way in, simmering quietly in the background or erupting across the page.”

???? Vigil Harbor, by Julia Glass
???? The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea
???? The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi
???? Here Comes the Sun, by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Internet Archive; Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The way we talk about nature is getting weirder

“As we live through the Anthropocene, our current epoch of human-made disaster, a new book, Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape, argues compellingly that giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature—and, even in the face of institutional inertia, exercise greater responsibility to each other.”

???? Death by Landscape, by Elvia Wilk

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Emma Sarappo. The book she’s reading next is Idlewild, by James Frankie Thomas.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.