Novelist Millet (Dinosaurs), also a creative director at the Center for Biological Diversity, ruminates in this profoundly affecting meditation on what it means to live through climate change. The narrative flows as if by instinct, moving from personal anecdotes to condemnations of corporate pollution to elegiac examinations of the havoc wrought by humans on the natural world, the organizing logic arising tacitly through suggestion and juxtaposition. In that vein, Millet's admission of how she used to believe systemic explanations constituted attempts to evade personal responsibility leads into a discussion of how the mid-1970s "Crying Indian" anti-litter campaign redirected culpability from the companies selling single-use plastic products to consumers. Contemplations of mortality recur throughout, as when Millet writes "I fear that my children one day... will be forced to endure the vanishing of much more than we ever did" and discusses how the last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936 after "she was locked out of the warm part of her enclosure overnight in a cold snap and froze." In scintillating prose, Millet makes a passionate case that humans must own up to their responsibilities to each other and the natural world ("Our coexistence has been, since forever, the backdrop of being. A dappled, shifting impression like the patterns of sun and shadows that fall across beds and ceilings and walls"). Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they finish the last page. (Apr.)

Millet's (Dinosaurs, 2022) passion for the living world and concern over humanity's tragic role in destroying it is evident in her fiction. In her first work of nonfiction, she steps into the light, sharing personal stories and her informed observations of the extinction crisis as a conservationist long-associated with the Center for Biological Diversity. Millet contrasts humanity's violence toward animals with the central roles animals play in place-based, preindustrial cultures and every child's imagination. She considers the impact of Christianity on the West's elevating of humanity above the rest of nature, how those in the know long concealed the truth about climate change, and why we're failing to address planetary crises. Bewitched by our screens and filtered versions of reality, we are largely unversed in science and deluded in our assumptions about solutions to environmental disasters. And our priorities are skewed. Millet reports that we spent $490 million in 2018 on our pets' Halloween costumes, five times the funds budgeted to protect endangered species. In a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty, Millet reflects on our dangerous muddlement and pins hope on the growing impact of one digital advance, our ability to more fully perceive "the awesome variety" of life on Earth in all its "grandeur" and "precariousness."