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Some time ago, Shepherd invited me to share some of my favourite stories and why I picked them. I decided to feature novels that moved me greatly and inspired me to action. I chose five works of eco-fiction that made me care and gave me hope.
The environment and how we treat it has always been important to me since I was a child. My passion for storytelling morphed into writing, but the underlying spark came through environmental activism. I got a university degree in aquatic ecology, published numerous papers, and now write eco-fiction that is grounded in accurate science with a focus on human ingenuity and compassion. The most meaningful and satisfying eco-fiction is ultimately optimistic literature that explores serious issues with heroic triumph. Each of these five favourites intimately connects human to environment. Each novel moved me to think and deeply care.
The Books I Picked & Why
The Overstory
by Richard Powers
What resonated with me on so many levels was the author’s use of lyrical and beautiful language in describing trees and forests: as characters. I’m an ecologist and I felt a particular kinship with the botanist Patricia Westerford, a disabled introvert who must swim against the hegemonic tide with heretical ideas. When she argues that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services, have intelligence and society, her scientific peers ridicule her and end her university career. This story is as much her triumph over overwhelming challenges as it is about the dwindling majestic forests that must quietly endure our careless apathy as they continue to offer their gift of life-giving oxygen and medicinal aerosols for hundreds of years.
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Barkskins
by Annie Proulx
This 600-year saga about human-environment interaction through the forest industry in Canada evoked emotional connections with my environment, the Canadian forests, and the plight of indigenous Canadians. From the arrival of the Europeans in pristine forest to its destruction under the veil of global warming, Proulx weaves generational stories of two settler families into a crucible of terrible greed and tragic irony. The bleak impressions by the immigrants of a harsh environment crawling with pests underlie their combative mindset of a presumed infinite resource. I was particularly moved by the linked fate between the Mi’kmaq and the majestic pine forests, how both were similarly mistreated and changed. This history is also my legacy. As the daughter of immigrants, I felt both educated and moved.
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The Breathing Hole
by Colleen Murphy, Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murtphy and more
What struck me most was the use of simple language to portray powerful intimacy and connection between human and animal, and by extension, environment. Murphy’s humorous dialogue, together with sparing, often ironic, descriptions, struck deep into my heart. The play starts in 1535 on an ice shelf up north—when an Inuk widow risks her life to save a lost one-eared polar bear cub on an ice floe, and adopts him. In the last scene five hundred years later in the oily waters of the Northwest Passage, the same bear—starving and cruelly injured by eco-tourists on a cruise ship—struggles to keep from drowning. No one on the ship cares. No one weeps for him. But I did. I wept for him and for his world destroyed by apathy.
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The Windup Girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Bacigalupi’s biopunk science fiction novelexplores a 23rd-century post-food crash Thailand after global warming has raised sea levels and depleted carbon fuel sources. The main character, Emiko, is a ‘windup,’ a modified human who is vilified and abused by humanity, despite her abilities. I was struck by how well this work of ‘mundane science fiction’ used Emiko as an avatar for a trickster Nature after abuse by humanity through the disrespect of reckless gene-hacking, greedy corporate espionage, and arbitrary foreign takeovers. I cheered Emiko’s breakaway from her oppressors as she emerged from a cloak of obedience and embraced her survival in this changing world of unintended consequences—only realizing later that I was cheering for that changing world and the optimism it promised.
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Memory of Water
by Emmi Itäranta
This book features a passion of mine as an ecologist and mother: water and how we treat it. Life-giving symbols of water flow throughout this story, which explores a post-climate change world of sea level rise in which freshwater is severely rationed due to scarcity. Water’s very nature is tightly interwoven with the main character, Noria, a tea master who guards a secret spring in the fell by her house against cruel government agents who would kill her for water crimes. In prose both sensual and lyrical, this book explores honor, sacrifice, betrayal, and friendship, and how each can be victimized through commodification in a power play of ideology. I found myself pulled in by the intrigue even as I cherished and lingered in the beautiful metaphoric prose.
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Explore my eco-fiction book:
A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water.
Centuries from now, in a dying boreal forest in what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, yearns for Earth’s past—the Age of Water—before the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity. Looking for answers and plagued by vivid dreams of this holocaust, Kyo discovers the diary of Lynna, a limnologist from that time of severe water scarcity just prior to the destruction. In her work for a global giant that controls Earth’s water, Lynna witnesses and records in her diary the disturbing events that will soon lead to humanity’s demise.
Recently I felt honoured to have A Diary in the Age of Water included as one of several eco-fiction novels that inspired action.
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The feminist book review site Liisbeth recently wrote about A Diary in the Age of Water: “If you believe Canada’s water will remain free forever (or that it’s truly free now) Munteanu asks you to think again. Readers have called A Diary in the Age of Water “terrifying,” “engrossing,” and “literary.” We call it wisdom.”
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 