Nature writing has shifted significantly over the past 25 years, transitioning from a focus on fictional anomalies to an urgent exploration of climate concerns. Early novels lacked a direct imperative to address climate change, and while public awareness existed, it often fragmented across various issues like desertification and greenhouse warming. The 2000s saw a rise in nonfiction that emphatically warned of impending ecological doom, prompting authors to channel these predictions into new narrative forms. Works like The Carhullan Army imagined dire futures, reflecting an increased societal urgency around environmental topics.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O'Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things.
In the 2000s, while the scientific data was righting itself from hacks and attacks, a whole spate of alarming nonfiction books arrived, forecasting the devastating effect of global temperature rises, mass extinctions, and the chaotic world that would occur if our trajectory of fossil fuel consumption, industrial farming, deforestation and the like wasn't altered.
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