5 Eco Books To Enjoy This Summer

When the weather gets warm, find a cool spot to relax and read one of these books. Plus, concerning water levels at Lake Mead & bipartisan legislation you should know about.

Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash

Books can be powerful portal to help bring the natural world alive and help us understand our relationship to it. I’m always thinking about different ways to discuss pollution, corporate greed, and grab people’s attention, and I think books, podcasts, and TV shows can all help. Some of us are more visual learners, while others like to hear stories to better connect with them. I’m always trying to elevate the stories of people in real places, dealing with real problems, but fictional stories also highlight real problems.

I loved the show Landman, inspired by the podcast Boomtown hosted by Christian Wallace. The show stars Billy Bob Thornton as a landman for an oil company but does a fascinating job of teaching about the oilfields in West Texas and how they have reshaped our climate, our economy, and our geopolitical environment. As you get to know the fictional characters that live and work in this town, you learn a lot about Big Oil as well.

Books are another way to explore environmental topics that maybe feel a little too scary to examine in a non-fiction book or essay. Many people turn to books in the summer to read at the beach, at the pool, or in a shady spot in the backyard.

Eco-fiction, also known as environmental fiction or “cli-fi,” generally refers to stories that unfold within natural landscapes or help elevate stories about contamination, environmental corruption, changing weather, and more. These narratives center on human stories within these environments or focus entirely on the natural world itself.

In the spirit of summer reading lists, here are five books you can pack for your next road trip, pool day, or hammock time.

Just Released

Something In the Water by Phyllis R. Dixon, 2025

Buried secrets, environmental disaster, and a legacy of corruption hit too close to home when a California native and her family make a fresh start in small-town Texas and find trouble just beneath the surface in this powerful novel.

The main character, Billie Jordan, used to helping others fight trouble as director of an award-winning investigative news radio show. But she faces her own issues when the radio station is sold, and she can’t find work. As her husband gets a professorship at an HBCU in his hometown, they relocate to get a fresh start. All is well until severe storms cause massive destruction and contaminate the town’s water supply, making it unsafe to drink.

Billie learns water woes and boil water notices have existed for years. In her new job at a local bank, she finds connections between money, power, and family, are as dirty as the water. Warned to mind her own business, she remains persistent and discovers a shocking cover-up.

Appalachia Strong

Stay and Fight by Madeline Ffitch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

If you want to ponder the meaning of freedom and the functionality of idealism, this book is for you. It also raises themes of rural life, poverty, and living off the land,

This debut novel is set among a group of back-to-the-landers in Appalachian Ohio, where fracking has unsettled the surrounding land, particularly the homestead of three women trying to raise a child there. The drilling impacts parenting, economics, and more.

As the child’s future comes into question, the novel becomes a tense pitted battle between survivalists and the forces of business and government that seem determined to undermine them.

Wildfire Fighter

Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West by Kelly Ramsey, 2025

Ok, this one is not fiction, but it’s a true-life story that is so compelling about a woman working in a “man’s world.” Kelly Ramsey is from Frankfort, Kentucky and later moved to Northern California, where she worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a trail maintenance worker, wilderness ranger, and wildland firefighter.

This story is all about when Kelly drives over a California mountain pass to join an elite firefighting crew. She’s terrified that she won’t be able to keep up with the intense demands of the job. Not only will she be the only woman on this hotshot crew and their first in ten years, she’ll also be among the oldest. As she trains relentlessly to overcome the crew’s skepticism and gain their respect, megafires erupt across the West, posing an increasing danger both on the job and back home.

Through the vivid prose, you’ll learn how major wildfires are fought and the psychological toll, the bone-deep weariness, and the unbreakable camaraderie that emerge in the face of nature’s fury.

Best Book Title

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, 2023

A funny and profound novel that looks at environmental collapse and unbridled capitalism—and that title is so good!

In the near future, tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants. The book's main characters Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet.

Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker.

Butterflies & More

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, 2013

This book is about many things including marriage, the environment, and the raw beauty of the natural world.

Barbara Kingsolver sets this novel in rural Appalachia in a fictional town called Feathertown, Tennessee. As Dellarobia Turnbow charges up the mountain above her husband’s family farm, she stumbles onto a “valley of fire” filled with millions of monarch butterflies. This vision is deemed miraculous by the town’s parishioners, then the international media.

But when Ovid, a scientist who studies monarch behavior, sets up a lab on the Turnbow sheep farm, he learns that the butterflies’ presence signals systemic disorder, and Dellarobia's in-laws’ logging plans won’t help. This book eloquently balances climate science with deeply personal stories.

In Other Water News…

Concerning water levels at Lake Mead. Water levels at Lake Mead are lower this week than they have been in four out of the past five years at 1,054 feet. The reservoir sits at 31 percent capacity, and new projections highlight a dire situation for Las Vegas's primary water source. The latest Most-Probable 24-Month Study from the Bureau of Reclamation projects losing an additional 16 feet by June of 2027, reaching an elevation of 1,038 feet.

Protect the manatees from septic systems. This week, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection argued a federal appeals court should overturn decisions that required the agency to take a series of steps to protect manatees in the northern Indian River Lagoon. Back in May, a federal judge ordered the state to halt new septic tank permits near the Indian River Lagoon. Septic tanks discharge nitrogen that can cause harmful algae blooms in waterways and kill seagrasses, which is a source of food for the manatees. Manatees are classified by the federal government as a threatened species.

A Tijuana River rescue. For decades, local advocates have been sounding alarms about severe pollution in the Tijuana River on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. Every day, millions of gallons of contaminated stormwater, sewage, harmful chemicals, and trash flow down the river into the Pacific Ocean. Last week, the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement to resolve longstanding pollution problems. See the EPA press release about it here.

Show a little legislative promise. A bipartisan bill in the House looks to revive a water bill assistance program created during the pandemic. The program helped low-income households pay their water bills, but the funding has expired. The bill authorizes $500 million annually for the program through 2030. Another bill known as the “Healthy Drinking Water Affordability Act’’ or the ‘‘Healthy H2O Act’’ would help establish a grant program for rural drinking water improvements. The bill allows households, childcare facilities, and apartment dwellers to install in-home drinking water filters. Grants can also be used for water quality testing. The House is on recess until after Labor Day.

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Do you have a favorite book with an environmental plot? Let us know in the comments below.