In my book The Way of Imagination (Counterpoint, 2020), I invented a young woman named Rachel, an ecologist, who lives early in the 22nd century. As she struggles to help save the last surviving runs of salmon, she laments the disastrous legacy from the generations that preceded hers—the killing heat, violent storms, wildfires, floods, droughts, pollution of land and waters, extinction of species, hunger due to crop failures, shortage of fresh water, waves of epidemic disease, and social upheaval. She wonders if any American writers were paying attention to these crises back in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when much of the damage and suffering could have been foreseen and avoided.

Because I wanted Rachel to know there were such writers, I imagined her receiving a trove of books from her great-grandmother, a poet and environmentalist who lived in our present day. After acknowledging the limits of my tastes and the scope of my reading, here is the shortlist of authors I proposed for Rachel’s library: Edward Abbey, A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Jim Harrison, Robert Hass, Barbara Kingsolver, Galway Kinnell, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams.

The list could have been greatly extended. The notes from which I drew this sample included more than a hundred additional names, including writers such as Alison Deming, John Elder, Robert Finch, John Hay, J. Drew Lanham, Bill McKibben, Kathleen Dean Moore, Gary Nabhan, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, Kim Stafford, and Ann Zwinger. But the few names I offered in The Way of Imagination should be enough to serve my purpose, which is to characterize the literature from our time that addresses most deeply and urgently the grave challenges we are passing on to our descendants.

Recently, a reader from North Carolina wrote me to suggest authors he would add to Rachel’s library: E. O. Wilson, Wes Jackson, Thomas Berry, Bernd Heinrich, Lewis Thomas, Ted Kooser, David Suzuki, and Chet Raymo, among others. All worthies, for sure.

Now it’s your turn: Whom would you add to Rachel’s library?