Heather Hansman

On a shelf next to my desk, I keep the books that shaped how I think about our planet—and how I cover it as a journalist focused on nature and the climate. When I sit down to write about the natural world, titles such as The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben; A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold; and The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich, accompany me. In the decades since they were published, I’ve returned to these touchstones again and again.

Our stories about environmental catastrophe used to be set in distant futures: the desolate endlessness of The Road, or the hopeless, cutthroat scrounging in the Parable of the Sower. But that kind of far-off storytelling feels like it was made for a time when the repercussions of changing climate and the inequity of natural-resource use were, in fact, far off. Must have been nice.