The real reasons for that gap in the

bookshelf, it seems to me, are the simplest. Most people just don’t find the destruction of nature very interesting. After all, there’s not just a dearth of novels about ocean acidification — there’s also a dearth of movies and songs and blog entries and Twitter updates on it. On the one hand, this is fair enough — it seems like a good thing that no one pressured Kafka or Calvino to write about something important. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be sort of troubling if no one had written any novels about, say, the siege of Sarajevo? And wouldn’t it be even more peculiar if Sarajevo had been under siege for decades, if it were still encircled by artillery today, and if everything suggested that its markets would continue being shelled for the rest of our lives?

Maybe writers worry that by choosing an environmental theme they’ll be labeled sanctimonious, or graded on their politics rather than their art. (“Isn’t she the global warming one?”) Whatever the reason, one is left with the distinct impression that the devastation of the natural world has been weighed by today’s writers and found lacking, compared to the thousands of other things that apparently are worth writing about. And the same must be true of readers. Maybe some readers of this essay have muttered: “So what? I like my fiction just fine without sea urchins.” To which one can only reply: When was the last time you tried any fiction with sea urchins?

The second good reason why there are so few novels about nature’s destruction is that while destruction is a relatively easy topic for a novelist, nature is not. What does it mean for a writer that there are 16,000 species of trees in the Amazon, and that a character there will routinely come into contact with hundreds of them? The practical answer is that it doesn’t mean very much at all. It’s mostly extraneous detail to plot and conflict and character than can be dealt with briefly, or not at all — like the fact that a character in Palm Beach will routinely come into contact with hundreds of different kinds of cars. But the better answer is that those trees offer a brand new axis along which plot and conflict and character can cast their shadows. After all, Amazonian trees are living beings that are born, struggle, and die; that share a common ancestor with all other life on the planet; and that lived perfectly dignified lives until we rolled out a non-stop campaign to splinter them to pieces. Surely novelists can find a little more emotional heft in that kind of diversity than in a parking lot.

A hundred years ago, when painters began to break free of century-old conventions, novelists were hot on their heels. By now it should be clear how badly they blew their chance. No doubt, over the last century novelists have succeeded in melting down narrative, and reliability, and even the reader’s sense of reality — all of which is neat, and some of which feels modern — but then they’ve consistently kneaded those things back together into the same old questions storytellers have been asking for centuries. Will Penelope give in? Will Crusoe survive? Will John Self lose it all? That’s no real surprise — because sex, death, and competition are what you find interesting when you’ve been designed by millennia of natural selection. What’s disappointing is that the current generation of novelists — a generation with all the tools to see this trap, and to see why it matters — isn’t seeking out questions a little farther from their navels. Questions like: Would Penelope, Crusoe, and John Self please stop trying to burn down the house?

All of this raises a lot of questions about the novels that some day soon are going to score the full hat-trick: the vastness of what we’ve destroyed and the offhand way we’ve destroyed it and the meek attempts to save a bit of what’s left. Are we talking about a Calvino-like talent capable of inhabiting a coral reef as comfortably as he did subatomic particles? Or something more along the lines of David Foster Wallace, constantly apologizing, apologizing, and second-guessing his own apologies? Or some kind of Sebald, obsessively aware of everything that’s gone down but only capable of dealing with it through sidelong glances and half-mad digressions?

Are we talking about a fairly standard set-up with a few tweaks to set, plot, and wardrobe? That’s easy enough to imagine. Cloud Atlas, with an overarching theme of men preying on nature. Lush Life, in which the teenage shooter is a homesick immigrant from the cloud forests of Rwanda. Austerlitz, the story of an Indonesian professor who travels obsessively through the smoking countryside in search of something he no longer remembers. To each of these alternate universes one’s first reaction is “Yeah, but that’s just not what that particular writer does….” Which only brings us back to the question at hand: Where are the writers who will?

And the questions keep coming. Is pulling the natural world out of fiction’s background and sticking it up in the footlights going to require what they call ‘formal experimentation’? Does a biodiversity novel require at least one character who pipes up every now and then to remind everyone that a fifth of vertebrate species on Earth are threatened with extinction, or that the Amazon basin accounts for 15–20% of the planet’s fresh water? Will there always be some ornithologist just back from the field, wringing her hands? More broadly, if we agree that modern literature is 99% Prufrock and 1% ragged claws, can we talk about what a more equitable ratio should look like? Do we need to bring back the talking rabbits from Watership Down? And if you let 2.2 million tropical beetles start talking, what sorts of things are they going to say?