Literature is a bit like magic, I think – capable of expanding worlds or returning us, simply and cleanly, to ourselves. We look to books for solace, escape, reflection and orientation through difficult times – so what kinds of stories are needed today, for this time? What voices and perspectives might help us as we face the ecological fallout of this period of unprecedented human-led change?

The past decade has brought a renewed interest in environmental writing, along with a new appetite for personal narratives. Where in the past it might have been possible to pick up a book from the nature writing shelf and find the author all but absent from the text, today we mostly find them in the frame. We seem to want to tie the personal to nature – to hear about a first-hand encounter with a living world that often we feel estranged from.

So far so fine, but this inclusion of personal material perhaps bears further reflection. It’s very tricky, these days, to limit any writing about the natural world to a purely personal encounter. Can an author write about their experiences of beekeeping without acknowledging the presence of industrial agriculture? And conversely, could they write about a trip to Antarctica without recognising the ways in which their lifestyle at home (and even the trip itself) is bound up in the melting of the very ice sheets they’re at pains to describe? For Greg Wrenn, author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis (a rigorous study of psychedelic plants and endangered coral reefs, and a story of recovery from complex PTSD), "the ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological". In the 21st century, it isn’t possible to write about the natural world without also writing about ourselves, and vice versa. So how to find a form of writing equal to the complexity of our time?

Here enters the "ecological memoir" – a form of autobiographical writing that is wilfully alive to the complex web of relations binding us to our environments. An ecological memoir doesn’t just take personal writing and tack it to an encounter with the natural world – it’s not about subject matter so much as the form of engagement between a writer and their material. To write ecologically is to think in terms of connections and relationships; to pay attention to the lines of influence that run between living things. The past few years have seen a happy swell in this kind of writing — authors for whom the personal is not an end in itself, but a vessel for approaching some of the most perplexing questions of our time. What does it mean to be alive in a climate crisis? What power dynamics are present, what forms of solidarity and kinship might be missing?

What voices and perspectives might help us as we face the ecological fallout of this period of unprecedented human-led change?

The nature writing shelf hasn’t just got more personal, then – it’s also more political. I’m thinking of the quiet urgency and almost unbearable care of Michael Malay’s Late Light or Marchelle Farrell’s Uprooting; of the striking sense of physicality in Polly Atkin’s Some of Us Just Fall or Sally Huband’s Sea Bean; the blending of science and storytelling in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, or the experiments with voice and form in Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone, or the masterful study of character and community in Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening. There are many more. Interesting that so many of the books that come to mind are written by women, and I wonder if they tend to possess a particularly keen sense of how the personal and the political collide. Regardless, all are authors who — in different ways and by different means — are teasing out questions about connection and relatedness; coexistence and care. Such questions necessitate (indeed, they would be invalid without) a clear-eyed reflection of oneself and one’s place in the world. To read someone else’s account of those difficult and far-reaching themes is, if the conditions are right, to be gifted a deeper understanding of ourselves.

My new book, Mother Animal, takes place mostly within the domestic space; the non-human species that appear on the pages are the ones I spotted in ceiling corners or between the cracks of floorboards at home, and the creatures that crowded my thoughts as I navigated the first phases of motherhood. In this book, nature is both intimate and remote – it erupts in sudden leaps and unexpected turns. It’s present in the microbial communities living in my armpit, and the Arctic polar bears whose milk is laced with chemicals that have flowed into and out of my own home. To bring our attention to these entanglements is to ask questions about reach and relation, cause and effect, and how we live together. It is to understand that things aren’t just connected – they’re deeply intertwined. The nature we once went looking for in books and far-off landscapes is right here, in our homes, just as our human traces are out there on mountaintops, and in ice caps and the deep sea. To find ways of expressing that, of looking at it for as long as we dare, is to expand our sense of the world; to gain a sense of who we are, and – sometimes – who we might want to be.