Jeff Goodell on the books that influenced him:

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, this book is about understanding what living organisms are set to face as the climate changes, and it also discusses this issue in contrast with other extinctions. It’s a great book.

The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future by Richard B Alley.

This book, about underscoring and understanding the deep dimensions of time and climate change, is one of the first books I read about climate change when I started covering it. I’ve gone back to it many times. Alley is one of the great scientists and climate scientists of our time, and even though the book is 15 or 20 years old, it is still as relevant today as ever.

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee.

This book won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. It’s a kind of cliché for many writers like me to mention McPhee because he is such a master. But this book about the geology of North America is somehow told in a human way that is masterful and explains incredibly complex science in a readable way. I now think of geology as the most fascinating of all natural sciences. But when I first read McPhee, I had no interest in geology, as I thought it was just about rocks. He showed me as a writer that there was a way to write about rocks, and about rocks in time, that was as compelling as any detective novel, and his eloquence and specificity were a huge influence on me. I think everyone who writes about climate change owes a debt to McPhee.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey.

Published in 1968, this was a hugely influential book for me, because Abbey was such a rebel, and so ruthlessly devoted to nature and the natural world around him — as opposed to humans. I turned to the vividness of his writing, especially on heat, several times while I was working on my book.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock.

(And indeed all books by Lovelock.) I wrote a profile about him for Rolling Stone about 10 years ago and was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks with him at his house in England. He and I took long walks together, and our conversations were amazing. His Gaia theory and the idea of feedbacks and of the Earth as this self-modulating sort of system, was profoundly influential to me, even though I realised it was a simplistic model. But the idea that the Earth is an organism that is alive and seeks out its own natural balance, a kind of homeostasis, I think is one of the most important ideas in natural science of the last century. Even though there are problems with the idea, I think it’s one of those big metaphors that helped shape my thinking and the thinking of a lot of scientists.