It has long been thought that environmental crises are, in part or in sum, crises of narrative, which is to say crises of belief. At least as far back as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), critics and commentators have been calling for new stories, new myths, and new symbols with which to better fit ourselves to the world not of economy, whose false narratives have led us to apocalypse, but of truth, of science — a call that has taken on a note of alarm in the era of global warming; we need those new narratives now. If only we can get the story right, runs the liturgical refrain of an enormous number of op-eds, scientific papers, academic panels, TED talks, white papers, think pieces, essays, books, and tweets from across the ideological spectrum — if only we can flip the script to fit the facts, then we can save the planet and ourselves.

These are the environmental jeremiads, those pieces that, wittingly or not, draw on the many-millennia-old tradition rooted in the Book of Jeremiah, an existential meta-tale of narratives and faith and sustainability and environmental destruction. God, the story goes, was angered that his chosen people had turned from his word (“Thy word is true,” the earlier book of Psalms says, “from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever”), angered that his people had been “burning incense unto other gods,” had listened to other stories. And so he tells the Old Testament prophet to deliver both a promise — “If ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings…then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever” — and a threat: “For thus saith the Lord…I will make thee a wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited. And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his weapons, and they shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into the fire.”

The Book of Jeremiah is a thorough enumeration of error and sin, but it is also rooted in hope: Jeremiah’s listeners can still choose the right narrative and so save themselves and their world, forever. This pairing of criticism and what the literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch once called the “litany of hope” — this is what marks the jeremiad as a literary form, the possibility of paradise gained by believing the right set of words. It’s not difficult to hear Jeremiah’s voice in generations of environmental and nature writing, back, at least, to George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864), with its famous line, “man is everywhere a disturbing agent,” its exhaustive history of deforestation and soil depletion and river damming and social collapse, as well as its faith that the truth of science would make us free. Think of all those signs sprouting from liberal yards during the reign of Trump: “We believe…science is real.”

But the story is different today. The last time the Earth’s atmosphere had this much carbon in it, humans had yet to spring from the clay: the world belonged to trees and plants, fish and fowl, living creature and creeping thing. Beech forests grew in Antarctica, the seas were fifty feet higher than they are now, and three-ton ground sloths lugged themselves across Florida. Jeremiah’s listeners still had time, but it seems we have squandered ours, and no amount of recycling, bike commuting, veganism, or hope will keep the Anthropocene at bay. It’s here. Coastlines are drowning. Life is dying off: the smooth handfish, thirty-two species of Bangladeshi orchid (and nine from Madagascar), as well as sixty-five North American plants all disappeared from the planet during this, the Sixth Extinction.

Perhaps the jeremiad is also limping toward extinction. I’ve come to think that two books, William T. Vollmann’s two-volume Carbon Ideologies (2018) and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), may mark its dying gasp. What they share is volume unshaped by any trace of narrative, an accounting unleavened by hope. Instead of story, instead of characters, or ideas, or themes, or symbols, or forms, rhythms, patterns, and sounds, Vollmann and Wallace-Wells give us lists. Facts piled like layers of discarded plastic, irrefutable, immovable, baffling in their persistence.

Carbon Ideologies could be read as two very long, very bleak lists totaling 1,268 pages (this does not include Vollmann’s 129,000-word online list of notes, citations, and calculations). The first volume, No Immediate Danger, is a list-like chronicle of places Vollmann traveled in and around Fukushima, after the disastrous meltdown of its nuclear power plant in 2011, and a list of the radiation levels he found in those places using a tool called a pancake frisker. Volume two, No Good Alternative, is a file cabinet full of interviews Vollmann recorded in the coal country of West Virginia and Kentucky; in Phulbari and Dhaka, Bangladesh; in the fracking fields of Colorado; and in the oil camps and corporate offices of Mexico, California, Oklahoma, and the United Arab Emirates. “How could I represent this malignant chaos of effects as anything but a bundle of broken stories?” Vollmann writes near the middle of volume two. Not much holds Carbon Ideologies together, except the bitter, despairing refrain, appearing every few pages, that readers of books like Vollmann’s willingly traded the world for the pleasures and convenience of consumerism. Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, meanwhile, is a list of facts, organized by thematic chapter — on famine, fire, air pollution, rising seas, and more — culled from scientific articles and climate reportage, all of it given significance by what will be remembered as one of the great first lines of climate nonfiction: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

But the books diverge in the all-important matter of faith. Vollmann is an apostate whose heaping lists of figures convince him of the hopelessness of our situation, as if, after bearing witness to his people’s many failures, Jeremiah had turned to God and said: You know what, now that I see it clearly, we’re fucked. The Uninhabitable Earth, on the other hand, can’t bear the concrete weight of its first line and accumulated research; instead, Wallace-Wells turns to the classic, dogmatic deus ex machina: “Should anything save us,” he writes, “it will be technology.” His is a waverer’s attempt to fit The Uninhabitable Earth into the familiar environmental nonfiction form, updated with a neoliberal faith in silicon gods, that fails to convince: either the engineers can handle it, or the truth of climate change exceeds our techno-dreams.

Jeremiah’s time has passed. Both Carbon Ideologies and The Uninhabitable Earth seem to sense it: believing the right narrative and having the right facts were never going to be enough. There may be no absolution for what we have done. In my life, I’ve worked with a MacArthur genius and a researcher who split the Nobel Prize for his climate work; I’ve shared my writing with dozens of devoted ecocritics and environmental humanists, green essayists and poets, and journalists and editors — true believers, all — and none of them, none of us, not with the millions of pages we’ve read between us, the stats, facts, and library stacks we’ve combed, not one of us lives as if the words we’ve read matter.

And I wonder: what, now, in the Anthropocene, is the point of reading?

This question came back to me, forcefully, as I sat with Charlie Hailey’s newest book, The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature. It’s a slow book. Deliberate. As it begins, Hailey’s narrator stands on the weather-worn, screened-in porch, whose “three layers of flaking paint sandpaper [his] bare feet.” The porch shoulders a small cabin set back from the Homosassa River, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. “It is,” Hailey writes, “a ruin in waiting.” The cabin is accessible only by boat, and near enough the water’s edge that it floods when hurricanes stomp through, near enough that in forty years, the porch and the cabin will have drowned in the rising sea. The narrator, if that’s the right word, is standing on the porch — doing what? — when the book begins: “A manatee’s breath drifts across the porch screen. It is a sound so delicate yet insistent that I stop breathing.” The fourth line: “I listen for the next breath but this manatee is moving fast, and its footprints blend back into the burnished roll and flicker of the river that holds its own breath between tides.”

The Porch is many things: a cultural history of porches and the thoughts thought upon them; a first-person essay about the porch attached to the cabin that Hailey’s family now owns; and a meditation on living in the Anthropocene (Hailey, early on, calls himself a “rogue metaphysician”). It’s all of these at the same time, though it’s never quite clear, at any particular moment, which porch we’ve landed on, because the book’s content — the histories it tells and the moments it records — is less important than what the book does.

What a porch does is simple: it’s the place where “we lend ourselves to the world, and the world lends itself to us.” The porch is a place of in-betweens: neither indoors nor out, private nor public, protected nor exposed, it’s a place where edges overlap. A place for impossible realities: as long as they’re not glassed-in, porches are built as much of air as they are of timber or stone, and it’s that air that has long drawn people to seek their coolness — for rest during the heat of the day, as a place to gather informally away from the stuffiness of the sitting room or study, or simply for sleeping. (Jack London had a sleeping porch; so did Eudora Welty, Bill Bryson’s grandparents, Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbit, and Woodrow Wilson, who scuttled out of a third-floor window of the White House to reach it.)

The Porch is built of six chapters, “Porch,” “Tilt,” “Air,” “Screen,” “Blue,” and “Acclimate,” each of which is lapped with cultural history. To say that the history is the creakiest part of the book is only to say that the rest fits so flawlessly together. There is a genre of nonfiction, call it the “Secret History Of,” whose essential argument is that there is one thing underlying most of what we know. That thing could be an economic or ecological or sociological principle, an idea, a substance — it doesn’t really matter, because the point is always the same: there is one thing that explains everything. This makes for exciting reading at first — complexity and chaos distilled into one easily graspable or hackable concept! — but such books quickly grow tiresome as the self-fulfilling prophecy laid out in the introduction winds its inevitable course. There is something of this quality to Hailey’s history, which can occasionally feel like a catchall who’s-who of porch-sitters, turning the porch into an inert platform upon which great people make great art. But when it works, which is often and spectacularly, Hailey’s book reaches beyond the merely static facts of history to something more poetic, a place where facts are free to glide against each other.

Hailey is at his most masterful when building inversions and sliding metaphors into something at once phenomenological and mythological, as in a dream. In the third chapter, “Air,” Hailey begins, “A funnel weaver crouches where the corner boards gap.” There’s no obvious reason for this line, except that it’s an invitation for the narrator to observe webs, to notice “how flues of silk seem to bend air,” which in its inverted strangeness asks us to linger a moment longer with the spider and see if we can see the air turning. But lingering lasts only a moment before the chapter is off: from the spider to the Geiger brothers (one, the inventor of the radiation-measuring device, the other a scientist of the atmosphere), banjos, and ship-wrecked sailors — natural cohabitants only for Hailey’s narrator, who has carefully attuned himself to the air breezing in and out through a porch’s screen, air that “ripples with stories,” so that, though it seems strange and whimsical and literary to write that a single strand of spider’s silk bends the air, it’s also wonderfully true.

There’s something of the philologist to Hailey, and his chapter titles are polysemous flues: “tilt,” “air,” and “screen” are both nouns and verbs; “blue,” an adjective, noun, and verb; “acclimate” a noun wrapped in a verb; and “porch,” a place to pause a while before steeping off. I’ve come to think of each chapter as an imperative — Tilt! Air! Screen! — or at least an invitation to join Hailey’s narrator. The prose itself, its very grammar, is incantatory: it works on the reader as we’re working on it, which explains Hailey’s fondness for the chiasmus, that rhetorical mode of reciprocity and dialectic change. This is one of those rare books that teaches us to read—that teaches us to notice — as its pages float by. A porch may simply be a site of exchange, but The Porch is a place for practice.

In the book’s most stunning chapter, “Blue,” the narrator flies nearly 5,000 miles to Sweden, “to see a porch designed by Sigurd Lewerentz,” which is attached to the Resurrection Chapel in Skogskyrkogården, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Or not quite attached. The porch’s rear edge just barely fails to meet the chapel’s wall, but the gap is also skewed: one edge is closer to the wall of the chapel than the other. Few would notice, but Hailey’s narrator has flown from the Tropic of Cancer near to the Arctic to see it, to measure it and pin down its angle precisely. But he has forgotten his measuring tape. In the fugue-like passages that follow, the narrator, without a tool to extract the objectivity he came looking for, instead “stood in the wedge of light” streaming through the gap, arms spread wide, before realizing that he could stuff his own body into the void, a subjective measure, and so take stock of the world. He does, trying first his forearm and then hand before discovering that the width of his boot divides the space perfectly: four boots plus a thumb at its narrowest, westernmost edge, five boots plus a thumb at its terminus. At one point, he pauses to look through the gap to the sky, to a brilliant blue, the blue that he’ll paint the roof of his porch back on the Homosassa, the “blue of imagination.” It’s an extraordinary passage, where the seams between things — porch and building, subject and object, absence and presence, body and structure, inside and out, author and reader — open wide.

The book culminates with a slow but tidal and irresistible rising in “Acclimate,” a chapter lapping at the planking of the porch, the place where “difference and indivisibility coincide along the frontiers of home.” Difference, in Hailey’s hands, is the point—all those chapters tilt us out into the air so that we may be immersed in the world with its “gift of opposites” rather than holed up in our artificially conditioned atmosphere. The porch is a sort of public forum, not just for humans, but for spiders and breezes and snippets of conversation caught from across the water, and manatees’ breath and strangers who need a towel and warm drink, a place where, Hailey writes, our “citizenship in the world” is affirmed, but also our precarity — “a house, much less a porch, is a tenuous endeavor.”

The Porch, a book I’ve come to think of as A Sand County Almanac for the Anthropocene, sharpens our sensibilities against the precision of its language so that we become attentive to the beautiful skew of an angle, how air and spider’s web caress each other, the rich wild color of our own imaginations. To attune ourselves is to resonate sympathetically with beings different from us, and to acclimate is, as Hailey writes, to attune ourselves to a constantly changing world. “I think,” Hailey writes, “about how we can’t always anticipate, much less choose, all the meanings that gather on the porch. The transitional and vulnerable places we inherit don’t always tell the stories we want to hear.”

The concrete footings along the Homosassa River that hold Hailey’s porch above the water are failing, sinking into the fluvial earth, unable to bear the downward pressure of the porch. At the book’s end, the narrator listens to the river pry one board after another loose during Tropical Storm Nestor. There is no other world but this one, and The Porch is not a book that proposes to solve the climate crisis, but to free us from the possibility of redemption. “We retreated instead to the crisis itself,” writes Hailey.

Such humility may feel offensive, or solipsistic and unforgivably privileged, or be taken for despair, for certainly the drift of much of the climate discourse is toward hacking the environmental jeremiad with big, bold, unprecedented, transformative innovation. But there is something happening in nature and environmental writing, a literary and intellectual response to the Anthropocene that is moving beyond understanding environmental issues as solvable problems of information or engineering or marketing, and toward accepting that the Anthropocene has become the condition of life, such as it may be, on earth. With that acceptance—one would be foolish to confuse it with acquiescence—comes a turn away from the sermon and the harangue, toward quietude and something like grace. Instead of solving anything, Hailey’s narrator repaints the ceiling of his doomed porch. When finished, it changes the color of the atmosphere. “It was the color of cedar berries after a rain. It was a mullet’s eyelid, and how the tannin lens of the lagoon water gives its fins their pale blue aura. It was the color of a manatee’s skin immersed in the headwater’s spring.”