Nine Eco Fiction Novels Worth Reading and Discussing

In most fiction, environment plays a passive role that lies embedded in stability and an unchanging status quo. From Adam Smith’s 18^thCentury economic vision to the conceit of bankers who drove the 2008 American housing bubble, humanity has consistently espoused the myth of a constant natural world capable of absorbing infinite abuse without oscillation. This thinking is the ideological manifestation of Holocene stability, remnants from 11,000 years of small variability in temperature and carbon dioxide levels. This stability easily gives rise to deep-seated habits and ideas about the resilience of the natural world. 

 

But this is changing. 

 

Our world is changing. We currently live in a world in which climate change poses a very real existential threat to most life currently on the planet. The new normal is change. And it is within this changing climate that eco-fiction is realizing itself as a literary pursuit worth engaging in.

 

Eco-Fiction (short for ecological fiction) is a kind of fiction in which the environment—or one aspect of the environment—plays a major role, either as premise or as character. Our part in environmental destruction is often embedded in eco-fiction themes, particularly if  they are dystopian or cautionary (which they often are). At the heart of eco-fiction are strong relationships forged between a major character and an aspect of their environment. The environmental aspect may serve as a symbolic connection to theme and can illuminate through the sub-text of metaphor a core aspect of the main character and their journey: the grounding natureof the land of Tara for Scarlet O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; the over-exploited sacred white pine forests for the lost Mi’kmaq in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins; the mystical life-giving sandworms for the beleaguered Fremen of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

 

Many readers are seeking fiction that addresses environmental issues but explores a successful paradigm shift: fiction that accurately addresses our current issues with intelligence and hope. The power of envisioning a certain future is that the vision enables one to see it as possible. 

 “the best part about writing science fiction,” writes Ottawa SF author Marie Bilodeau, “is showing different ways of being without having your characters struggle to gain rights. Invented worlds can host a social landscape where debated rights in this world – such as gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia – are just a fact of life." The emerging sub-genre of ‘mundane science fiction’ addresses Bilodeau’s argument by featuring worlds and people within a new paradigm of ‘ordinary’. Eco-fiction examples of ‘mundane’ include Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girland Kim Stanley Robinson’s post-climate-change drowned New York 2140.  

 

In fact, eco-fiction has been with us for decades—it just hasn’t been overtly recognized as a literary phenomenon until recently and particularly in light of mainstream concern with climate change (hence the recently adopted terms ‘climate fiction’, ‘cli-fi’, and ‘eco-punk’, all of which are eco-fiction). Strong environmental themes and/or eco-fiction characters populate all genres of fiction from the literary fiction of Richard Powers to the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and the science fiction of Frank Herbert. This establishes eco-fiction as a cross-genre phenomenon of literature better described as a focus or treatment than a sub-genre or brand, per se. My thought on the emergence of the term eco-fiction to describe works is that we are all awakening—novelists and readers of novels—to our changing environment. We are finally ready to see and portray environment as an interesting character with agency.

 

The ten examples I list below of impactful, highly enjoyable works of eco-fiction represent a range of genre, writing style, topic and treatment. Some are optimistic; others are not or have ambiguous endings that require interpretation. The relationship of humanity to environment also differs greatly among these examples as does the role of science. What they all have in common is that they are worth reading and discussing.

 

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2012) is a literary fiction, whosepremise of climate change and its effect on the monarch butterfly migration is told through the eyes of Dellarobia Turnbow, a rural housewife, who yearns for meaning in her life. It starts with her scrambling up the forested mountain—slated to be clear cut—behind her eastern Tennessee farmhouse; she is desperate to take flight from her dull and pointless marriage of myopic routine. The first line of Kingsolver’s book reads: “A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.” Dellarobia thinks she’s about to throw away her ordinary life by running away with the telephone man. But the rapture she’s about to experience is not from the thrill of truancy; it will come from the intervention of Nature when she witnesses the hill newly aflame with monarch butterflies who have changed their migration behavior.

 

Flight Behavior is a multi-layered metaphoric study of “flight” in all its iterations: as movement, flow, change, transition, beauty and transcendence.Flight Behavior isn’t so much about climate change and its effects and its continued denial as it is about our perceptions and the actions that rise from them: the motives that drive denial and belief. When Dellarobia questions Cub, her farmer husband, “Why would we believe Johnny Midgeon about something scientific, and not the scientists?” he responds, “Johnny Midgeon gives the weather report.” Kingsolver writes: “and Dellarobia saw her life pass before her eyes, contained in the small enclosure of this logic.”

The Overstory by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton, 2018) is a pulitzer prize winning work of literary fiction that follows the life-stories of nine characters and their journey with trees--and ultimately their shared conflict with corporate capitalist America.

Each character draws the archetype of a particular tree: there is Nicholas Hoel's blighted chestnut that struggles to outlive its destiny; Mimi Ma's bent mulberry harbinger of things to come; Patricia Westerfors's marked up marcescent beech trees that sings a unique song; and Olivia Vandergriff's immortal ginkgo tree that cheats death--to name a few. Like all functional ecosystems, these disparate characters--and their trees--weave into each other's journey toward a terrible irony. Each in his or her way battles humanity's canon of self-serving utility--from shape-shifting Acer saccharin to selfless sacrificing Tachigali versicoloured--toward a kind of creative destruction.

At the heart of The Overstory is the pivotal life of botanist Patricia Westeerford, who will inspire a movement. Westerford is a shy introvert who discovers that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services--and have intelligence. When she shares her discovery, she is ridiculed by her peers and loses her position at the university. What follows is a fractal story of trees with spirit, soul, and timeless societies--and their human avatars.

Maddaddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood (McClelland & Stewart, 2013) is a work of speculative dystopian fiction that exploresthe premise of genetic experimentation and pharmaceutical engineering gone awry. On a larger scale the cautionary trilogy examines where the addiction to vanity, greed, and power may lead. Often sordid and disturbing, the trilogy explores a world where everything from sex to learning translates to power and ownership. Atwood begins the trilogywithOryx and Crake in which Jimmy, aka Snowman (as in Abominable) lives a somnolent, disconsolate life in a post-apocalyptic world created by a viral pandemic that destroys human civilization. The two remaining books continue the saga with other survivors such as the religious sect God’s Gardeners in The Year of the Floodand the Crakers of Maddaddam.

 

The entire trilogy is a sharp-edged, dark contemplative essay that plays out like a warped tragedy written by a toked-up Shakespeare. Often sordid and disturbing, the trilogy follows the slow pace of introspection. The dark poetry of Atwood’s smart and edgy slice-of-life commentary is a poignant treatise on our dysfunctional society. Atwood accurately captures a growing zeitgeist that has lost the need for words like honor, integrity, compassion, humility, forgiveness, respect, and love in its vocabulary. And she has projected this trend into an alarmingly probable future. This is subversive eco-fiction at its best. 

 

 

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (HarperCollins, 2014) is a science fiction eco-thriller that explores humanity’s impulse to self-destruct within a natural world of living ‘alien’ profusion.

The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy, Annihilationfollows four women scientists who journey across a strange barrier into Area X—a region that mysteriously appeared on a marshy coastline and associated with inexplicable anomalies and disappearances. The area was closed to the public for decades by a shadowy government that is studying it. Previous expeditions resulted in traumas, suicides or aggressive cancers of those who managed to return. 

 

What follows is a bizarre exploration of how our own mutating mental states and self-destructive tendencies reflect a larger paradigm of creative-destruction—a hallmark of ecological succession, change, and overall resilience. VanderMeer masters the technique of weaving the bizarre intricacies of ecological relationship, into a meaningful tapestry of powerful interconnection. Bizarre but real biological mechanisms such as epigenetically-fluid DNA drive aspects of the story’s transcendent qualities of destruction and reconstruction.  

 

The book reads like a psychological thriller. The main protagonist desperately seeks answers. When faced with a greater force or intent, she struggles against self-destruction to join and become something more. On one level Annihilationacts as parable to humanity’s cancerous destruction of what is ‘normal’ (through climate change and habitat destruction); on another, it explores how destruction and creation are two sides of a coin.

 

Barkskins by Annie Proulx (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2016) is a work of literary fiction that chronicles two wood cutters who arrive from the slums of Paris to Canada in 1693 and their descendants over 300 years of deforestation in North America.

The foreshadowing of doom for the magnificent forests is cast by the shadow of how settlers treat the Mi'kmaq people. The fate of the forests and the Mi'kmaq are inextricably linked through settler disrespect for anything indigenous and a fierce hunger for more of the forests and lands. Ensnared by settler greed, the Mi'kmaq lose their own culture and their links to the natural world erode with grave consequence.

Ploulx weaves generational stories of two settler families into a crucible of terrible greed and tragic irony. The bleak impressions by immigrants of a harsh environment crawling with pests underlies the combative mindset of the settlers who wish only to conquer and seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource. From the arrival of the Europeans in pristine forest to their destruction under the veil of global warming, Proulx lays out a saga of human-environmental interaction and consequence that lingers with the aftertaste of a bitter wine.

 

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta (Harper Collins, 2014) is a work of speculative fiction about a post-climate change world of sea level rise. In this envisioned world, China rules Europe, which includes the Scandinavian Union, occupied by the power state of New Qian. Water is a powerful archetype, whose secret tea masters guard with their lives. One of them is 17-year old Noria Kaitio who is learning to become a tea master from her father. Tea masters alone know the location of hidden water sources, coveted by the new government.  

 

Faced with moral choices that draw their conflict from the tension between love and self-preservation, young Noria must do or do not before the soldiers scrutinizing her make their move. The story unfolds incrementally through place. As with every stroke of an emerging watercolour painting, Itäranta layers in tension with each story-defining description. We sense the tension and unease viscerally, as we immerse ourselves in a dark place of oppression and intrigue. Itäranta’s lyrical narrative follows a deceptively quiet yet tense pace that builds like a slow tide into compelling crisis. Told in the literary fiction style of emotional nuances, Itäranta’s Memory of Waterflows with mystery and suspense toward a poignant end.

 

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemison (Orbit, 2018) is a fantasy trilogy set in a far-future Earth devastated by periodic cataclysmic storms known as ‘seasons.’ These apocalyptic events last over generations, remaking the world and its inhabitants each time. Giant floating crystals called Obelisks suggest an advanced prior civilization.

 

InThe Fifth Season, the first book of the trilogy, we are introduced to Essun, an Orogene—a person gifted with the ability to draw magical power from the Earth such as quelling earthquakes. Jemison used the term orogene from the geological term orogeny, which describes the process of mountain-building. Essun was taken from her home as a child and trained brutally at the facility called the Fulcrum. Jemison uses perspective and POV shifts to interweave Essun’s story with that of Damaya, just sent to the Fulcrum, and Syenite, who is about to leave on her first mission. 

 

The second and third books, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, carry through Jemison’s treatment of the dangers of marginalization, oppression, and misuse of power. Jemison’s cautionary dystopia explores the consequence of the inhumane profiteering of those who are marginalized and commodified.

 

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Nightshade Books, 2009) is a work of mundane science fiction thatoccurs in 23rd century post-food crash Thailand after global warming has raised sea levels and carbon fuel sources are depleted.Thailand struggles under the tyrannical boot of predatory ag-biotech multinational giants that have fomented corruption and political strife through their plague-inducing genetic manipulations. 

 

The book opens in Bangkok as ag-biotech farangs(foreigners) seek to exploit the secret Thai seedbank with its wealth of genetic material. Emiko is an illegal Japanese “windup” (genetically modified human), owned by a Thai sex club owner, and treated as a sub-human slave. Emiko embarks on a quest to escape her bonds and find her own people in the north. But like Bangkok—protected and trapped by the wall against a sea poised to claim it—Emiko cannot escape who and what she is: a gifted modified human, vilified and feared for the future she brings. 

The rivalry between Thailand's Minister of Trade and Minister of the Environment represents the central conflict of the novel, reflecting the current conflict of neoliberal promotion of globalization and unaccountable exploitation with the forces of sustainability and environmental protection. Given the setting, both are extreme and there appears no middle ground for a balanced existence using responsible and sustainable means. Emiko, who represents the future, is precariously poised.

 

 

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) is a science fiction dystopian novel set in 21^stcentury America where civilization has collapsed due to climate change, wealth inequality and greed. Parable of the Soweris both a coming-of-age story and cautionary allegorical tale of race, gender and power. Told through journal entries, the novel follows the life of young Lauren Oya Olamina—cursed with hyperempathy—and her perilous journey to find and create a new home. 

 

When her old home outside L.A. is destroyed and her family murdered, she joins an endless stream of refuges through the chaos of resource and water scarcity. Her survival skills are tested as she navigates a highly politicized battleground between various extremist groups and religious fanatics through a harsh environment of walled enclaves, pyro-addicts, thieves and murderers. What starts as a fight to survive inspires in Lauren a new vision of the world and gives birth to a new faith based on science: Earthseed. Written in 1993, this prescient novel and its sequel Parable of the Talent speak too clearly about the consequences of “making America Great Again.”

An earlier version of this article was first published on Tor.com in November, 2020, and again in April 22, 2021 as "Ten Eco-Fiction Novels Worth Celebrating" on Tor.com

More Eco-Fiction Worth Reading:

The following is an updated list of eco-fiction books in addition to those featured above that I have since enjoyed. The list is by no means an exhaustive one, but certainly includes my favourites, those that have impacted me and incited me to think and feel and act:

• Dune by Frank Herbert
• The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
• A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
• New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Canadian Tales of Climate Change by Exile Editions (an anthology)
• Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Breathing Hole by Coleen Murphy
• Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
• The Bear by Andrew Krivak
• Fauna by Christiane Vadnais
• Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad 
• Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan 
• Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

Now is The Age of Nature…

Age of Nature is a series of three films made by PBS and narrated by Uma Thurman about humanity’s relationship with nature and wildlife and how scientists and conservationists study ways to restore the planet. The series, beautifully narrated and filmed, shows how restoring nature might be our best tool to slow global warming. From Borneo to Antarctica, the resilience of the planet is helping us find solutions to cope and even mitigate climate change, providing hope for a more positive future. The series consists of three episodes: Awakening, Understanding, and Changing:

 

In AWAKENINGyou will discover how a new awareness of nature is helping to restore mostly collapsed ecosystems; this included: restoring the cod fishery in Norway’s Lofoten Islands; the restoring the Chagres watershed in Panama; rehabilitating the collapsed ecosystem of Mozambique’s Gorongosa Park; and restoring the denuded Loess Plateau in China by planting a forest (and reducing the sediment in the Yellow River by 80%). This episode shows how innovative actions are being taken to repair human-made damage and restore reefs, rivers, animal populations and more.

 

“We are at a turning point in history,” says narrator Uma Thurman. “and moving in a new direction. How we live with nature now will determine our future. A new age is upon us, the age of nature.” This new awakening comes with a change in philosophy.

 

“Materialism has suggested that wealth is coming from things. But, in fact, wealth is coming from ecological function.”—John D. Liu, Ecosystem Ambassador, Commonland Foundation  

 

In UNDERSTANDING you will explore how a new understanding of nature is helping us find surprising ways to fix it. From the salmon runs and connection to forest health of the Pacific Northwest to restoring fireflies in China, and the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone—scientists, citizens and activists are restoring the environment, benefiting humans and animals alike.

 

“If humans get our acts together and start thinking about the whole ecosystem, we’re going to be recovering the whales and ultimately we’re going to be saving ourselves.”—Dr. Deborah Giles, Killer whale researcher, University of Washington 

 

In CHANGING you will discover why restoring nature might be our best tool to slow global warming. From Borneo to Antarctica, the resilience of the planet is helping us find solutions to cope and even mitigate climate change, providing hope for a more positive future. Bhutan’s negative carbon system is based on “decades of enlightened but courageous policies,” says Tshering Tobgay, former prime minister of Bhutan. By law they maintain over 60% forest cover to maintain a rich biodiversity and help balance climate as a carbon sink. Over 70% of Bhutanese live along river banks where they cultivate rice and other crops. “We’ve always had a strong association with water,” Tobgay adds. Something here ninahre.

 

“Ultimately, if we’re going to understand how to stop climate change, we need to understand our planet,” says Professor Tom Crowther, who leads a team of ecologists in categorizing forests and soils around the world from “on the ground information” to understand the carbon they contain and absorb. Crowther stresses that “the key is to restore these ecosystems in the right ecologically-minded way. That means we don’t plant trees in ecosystems that would naturally be grasslands. We also restore trees in a very biodiverse mixture; we don’t just want plantations, monoculture of the same species. We need all the different interacting species which help one another to grow and capture huge amounts of carbon…We absolutely need nature to survive on this planet. If humanity is going to have a chance, we’re going to have to restore ecosystems all across the globe…Biodiversity is the life support for our planet.”

 

The movie showcases three major ecosystems of significant carbon sequestration that need to be (and are in some cases) encouraged, nurtured and grown:

 

1.  Old growth forests of the world: Bialowieza in Poland is the oldest forest in Europe: 

 

Malgorzata Blicharska at Uppsala University reminds us of an ecological tenet: the higher the biodiversity of an ecosystem, the more stable and resilient it is. “The more complex the forest is, the more resilient it will be to different environmental pressures, which is really important now in relation to climate change.” A more complex ecosystem has a larger toolkit to draw from when confronted with change. “Even if one species with a particular function disappears because of climate change, there will be other species that take over this function.” This provides a natural buffer to change, helping it cope with disruption. “A natural forest is not a stable forest; it is changing all the time.” Adapting. The simpler the ecosystem, the less likely it will be equipped to adapt to imposed change; the more likely it will collapse with change. 

 

2,  Ocean phytoplankton, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows: Peter MacReadie, at Deakin University, studies seagrass meadows that store enormous amounts of carbon. They, along with tidal marshes and mangrove forests lock massive amounts of carbon; this is known as blue carbon. Mention what the mangroves do… “Blue carbon is definitely one of the new heros in the climate change mitigation scene.” They not only effectively sequester carbon, they protect coastlines, and they support half of the world’s fisheries.

 

MacReadie acknowledges the role apex predators in achieving balance in the ecosystem that might otherwise be destroyed by an over-abundance of herbivores. The apex predator keeps a balance not so much by eating prey but through what is called “fear ecology” and achieiving a healthy trophic cascade: the shark changes the behaviour of the next trophic level down, the turtle, that would otherwise over-graze the seagrass. “Through fear, they affect how much turtles breed, where they forage, where they move around,” ultimately creating a healthy balance of apex predators at the top, turtles in healthy balance and seagrass meadows thriving.”

 

3.  Peatlands: Taryono Darusman, director of research and development of the Katingan Project in Indonesia, tells us that, “globally, peatlands store around five hundred and fifty gigatons of carbon.” Covering only 3% of the land on Earth, peatlands absorb twice the amount of carbon in all the world’s forests—which are ten times the size. Peatland ecosystems also provide for a unique and highly biodiverse community. Peatlands form in wetlands and rainforests; many of these areas have been drained to create canals or for agriculture. The drying peatlands become susceptible to fire. The Borneo fires of 2015 released more carbon than all of North America’s industry of that same year.  

 

The last ten minutes of the film are truly heartwarming and encouraging as the film documents how awareness is growing and inspiring a grass roots movement, particularly with the brave efforts of youth around the world. People like young Dayak activist, Emmanuela Shinta (who worked with youth groups to replant a destroyed ecosystem in Kalimantan, Borneo), and eleven-year old Madison Edwards (who started a social media campaign to stop oil drilling off the shores of Belize). 

 

Eco-heroismis sprouting all over the planet in response to her need for balance. Showing us that every single individual can make a difference…  

Walking in the Rain

 

One morning, in late spring, I went walking in the rain through the Trent Nature Sanctuary forest. Looking for magic… 

 

Moisture covered everything. It coaxed out vivid colours and textures in a tangle of stable chaos. I felt like I’d entered a Tom Thomson painting…

 

The rain intensified the forest’s mosaic of unique scents from pungent, heavy and sharp to floral, fresh and sweet.The gossamer morning light favoured photography with a gentleness that softened and deepened everything, and invited intimacy. Mist hung low and rose like steam from the damp earth, slowing time. It felt as though I was walking through a cloud. The forest emerged ghost-like in glimpses of tree, shrub and grass. The brilliant red of the osier dogwood. The vivid greens of mosses and leaves. A tangle of blue-green lichens and bright red cedar roots. I was witness to a chaotic tapestry of Nature’s art. Infinite shades of green, brown, grey and yellow created a fluid landscape that water painted into a vibrant watercolour scene. I moved through it, boots squelching along the spongy loam path, as though wrapped in a moving artwork.

 

The moisture carried the warbles and fluting chirps of lively bird song amid the hush of raindrops on vegetation. Each surface had a unique voice. And the rainfall—from light drizzle to hard pour—carried its own tune, rhythm and percussion. A symphony of diverse frequency from rich infrasound to beyond. 

 

I kept my camera, attached to its tripod, tucked under several water-proof bags and walked with deliberate steps through wet duff, decayed leaves and mud. I had a hood but couldn’t stand to keep it up—I needed to hear and feel all of it: the rain sizzling through the vegetation, the red-winged blackbird’s conk-a-lee! The robin’s cheerily-cheer-up-cheerily-cheer up! The crow’s caw and rattle. The primordial shriek of a blue jay or kingbird. All were out, though not visible, as I navigated the huge puddles and slippery mud-leaf mix. Hair dripping, face in a grin. 

 

I felt elation in Nature’s celebration of life.

 

I was the only person in the park and thoroughly basked in that feeling of humbleness that comes with a kind of knowing: of being part of something far greater than oneself and yet in some way being that greater ‘self.’ Like I belonged there. Hard to explain. But it felt truly awesome and eternal. 

 

I could have stayed there, wet in the rain, for hours. But I felt sorry for my camera and headed home, thinking of a warm cup of tea. 

 

"A Diary in the Age of Water" Included in Ecological Fiction that Inspires Action

 

How We Get Tree Planting Wrong…

 

 

“In the face of impending climate catastrophe, there has been a growing clamor to repopulate the trillions of trees our planet has lost over the centuries,” says the Guardian.But large-scale tree planting is not helping, and in some cases it’s creating more problems for the environment. In the YouTube video below, Josh Toussaint-Strauss discusses how we’ve been getting tree planting wrong, and what we should be doing instead to safeguard precious ecosystems and reduce greenhouse gases.

 

“The right trees in the right place are a good thing,” says Toussaint-Strauss. Choosing the right location and the right tree for it, is crucial. Toussaint-Strauss provides the example of Israel’s Yatir forestation of a natural desert, now adding to global warming due to increased albedo. The wrong location can deplete groundwater, dry up streams, and kill off peatland (itself a major CO2 sequester).

 

An ecological approach is required that considers: appropriate type of soil, local climate, other biota and what is being planted (e.g. native vs. non-native). Tree planting long-term success relies on using an ecosystem approach. This does NOT include the use of monoculture, which do not form a natural ecosystem, store less carbon, lack biodiversity, do not contribute ecosystem functionality, and are susceptible to disease. This also does NOT include planting with later harvest in mind. Plant the trees and leave them there, to grow, die, and replenish the ecosystem.

 

The bottom line is that we must create ecosystems, not just plant trees.

 

More importantly, we must leave currently intact forest ecosystems alone. Let them flourish and do their job for the planet. We must focus on natural forest regeneration by giving already established forests room to thrive and expand—not cut them down for timber or agriculture. Deforestation removes close to 10 billion trees of intact primary forest ecosystem every year. 

 

We need to think like ecologists—not engineers or planners or socio-economists and politicians—for the sake of the forests and the trees on this planet. 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhvOJrkhh8I

A Hidden Alvar Meadow Treasure

 

 

It was two years ago, on a crisp April morning—as I walked the naturalized trail through Peterborough—that magic found me. 

 

I was heading north and unsure where the trail would take me. My muse had brought me here to explore my new environment; I’d recently moved from the bustle of Toronto and felt the restlessness of discovery. The trail wound mostly through backyards and cleared parkland, lined with mixed woodland of locust, black walnut, maple and oak and clearings bordered by thickets of sumac and buckthorn. I caught glimpses of houses and backyards as I walked the trail, surrounded by a chorus of lively birdsong. Robins and cardinals. Goldfinches. Red-winged blackbirds brought fond memories of childhood with their signature conk-la-ree! Chickadees flitted across the trail and sang their chickadee-dee-dee. A group of grackles took over a lilac-buckhorn thicket, their chatter sounding like an overused squeaky clothes line.

 

The trail crossed a main road then a minor one and the backyards became harder to see as the shrubs and trees that lined the trail grew dense.

 

Then, at a set of rocks on the east side of the trail, the thicket opened to a grassy rise and I glimpsed a small path, leading up the rise. The path was more like a depression in the grass where repetitive footfalls had created a trail of sorts. Several mature buckthorns and willows dotted the crest of the rise. And beyond the crest … well, that was my question. What lay beyond it? From my current position I could only make out the possibility of forest in the distance. The main trail up to this point had been through forest scrub of sumac, dogwood, black locust and other shrubs dense enough to obscure what lay beyond them.

 

Drawn to what lay beyond the rise, I turned onto the path, boots crunching on a brittle layer of frost that had settled on the grass and leaf litter. It was a steep climb through slippery wet grass. When I crested the hill, I stopped and inhaled with wonder at the unexpected view below me. It was as though I’d walked through a portal. Gone was any sign of Peterborough suburbia; below me, stretching in all directions lay a vast natural meadow, with a maple-beech woodland rising to the east; striking white limbs of poplar trees marked the leading edge of the monochrome forest. 

 

The meadow that stretched before me was a gently rolling landscape of pale gold grasses and a chaos of strewn limestone rocks and gravel dotted by russet junipers and the gray-brown umber of dwarf hawthorn, buckthorn and sumac shrubs. In a lower depression in the centre of the meadow, a grove of young cedar trees added splashes of green to the gold-copper mosaic.  

 

I made my way down into the rock-strewn meadow and was immediately struck by the silence. As though a hush had settled there, a kind of sacred humility stayed me. I felt unexpectedly blessed. I walked with silent steps as if in a church, toward a grove of stunted sumacs and came suddenly face to face with two white-tailed deer. We were both startled. In that protracted moment when our gazes met, time paused and the world stopped. Then one deer sprang away, followed by the other, their shocking white behinds bobbing as they fled through the sumacs toward the forest.

 

As if by design, at that exact moment, it began to snow. Huge flakes fell lazily like confetti in a mild breeze. Then it came down in a thick passion. 

 

I felt the presence of magic.

 

Alvar Ecosystem

 

In the next two years, I returned many times to this magic place of barren beauty. My good friend and naturalist Merridy suggested that this meadow was likely an alvar, a distinct ecosystem that establishes on a limestone or dolostone plain with thin or no soil, and characterized by sparse grassland vegetation. This made sense to me, given the habitats I’d observed. Also called a pavement barrenof limestone pavementand a calcareous grassland, alvars are often flooded in the spring and affected by drought in midsummer. Because of this, alvars support a distinct prairie-like community of grass, lichen and mosses, as well as stunted trees and shrubs.

 The term ‘alvar’ originated in Sweden to describe the unique ecosystem of the Swedish island of Öland, with its unique exposed limestone slabs. Alvars are a rare ecosystem; they are found in a handful of places, including the eastern European Baltic region, the United Kingdom and Ireland. In North America, close to 75% of alvars are located in Ontario. Ecologists describe seven habitat types for alvar ecosystems in Ontario. These include: tall grassy meadows, tall forb-rich meadows, low grassy meadows, low forb-rich meadows, dry grassland, rock margin grassland, and bare rock flats. In my various wanderings through thisalvar meadow over the seasons, I recognized several of these habitats, from wet marshy lowland grass-forb meadow to dry tall grasslands and rock-strewn stretches of dry flatland.

 

Given the role of disturbance in the formation of alvars, I studied the lower ‘bowl’ of the meadow more closely for signs. An old structure may have once stood where semi-structured rock piles were arranged to form a square.  A patch of young cedars and birches—both flood-tolerant—surrounded it. I’d seen this same successional phenomenon in the Trent Nature Sanctuary, where it had been previously farmed. At the southern rising edge of the alvar stood a farmhouse, accessed by the little minor road I’d crossed earlier on the trail. I considered that this alvar was dominated by early sere plants, often the first to colonize a disturbed environment—lilac, hawthorn, buckthorn, sumac. Had there been a fire through here? Had someone tried to cultivate this site? It was surrounded by rural and residential development with a dedicated parkland (Trent Nature Sanctuary) of a drumlin maple-beech forest bordering it to the east. Attempts to cultivate parts of the nature sanctuary at one time are also evident.

 

This place remains a bit of a mystery and I am intrigued to solve it. Stay tuned…

 

  

 

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.