For far too long, Asian Americans have been overlooked in conversations on climate change and the natural world. In a Yale School of Climate Change Communication report that purports to reveal which racial groups care most about climate change, for instance, the results for Asian Americans were unavailable, raising concerns over the low sample size. However, the inability to retrieve data on Asian communities—whether because of language barriers or questions over which ethnic groups are considered Asian American—reveals a more insidious concern: that Asian Americans have always been an afterthought in the national imagination. 

Since the Atlanta spa shootings last March, however, in which eight women of Asian descent were murdered, alongside the ongoing surge of violent attacks against Asian elders, Asian American community members and allies have been tirelessly organizing on social media and in the streets to #StopAsianHate. By extension, conversations on the Asian American experience are becoming more common in popular culture. But still, the discourse on how Asian communities are affected by the climate crisis continues to be largely dismissed in a country in which environmentalism remains a movement dominated by white people.  

The reality is this: Asians and Asian diasporic folks have always been on the front lines of the environmental justice movement—whether that looks like Richmond, California’s Southeast Asian community organizing against the expansion of Chevron’s massive oil refinery or the millions of farmers in India protesting for fair labor conditions amid extreme drought and flooding. 

Furthermore, Asian and Asian diasporic folks have been contributing to the growing body of academic writing, poetry, fiction, and reportage on the environment for a while now, breaking the mold of what it means to relate to the natural world by doing so through the lens of migrants, children of immigrants, third-culture kids, and Global South communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. For AAPI Heritage Month, we’d like to recommend 13 incredible Asian and Asian diasporic nature and environment writers. From an environmental historian who wrote a memoir about her journey through the mountains of Taiwan to reclaim her ancestral past, to a Native Hawaiian’s essays calling for the protection of Indigenous land from the expansion of corporate control and the American empire, these authors will open your eyes to new, critical perspectives on the environment, fostering cross-cultural understandings that’ll remind you that our hope for a sustainable future is universal. 

1. Sonia Shah 

Sonia Shah is an award-winning Indian American journalist who has written about science, politics, and human rights for outlets such as The Nation, PBS NewsHour, and Mother Jones. Although she was raised in New York by parents who practiced medicine, she frequently visited Mumbai and Bangalore to see her working-class family, piquing her desire to investigate the ways in which inequality operates within and between societies. Marrying questions of migration with scientific inquiry, Shah demystifies mainstream science narratives through her deeply nuanced reporting, producing stories that unpack the problematic notion that the coronavirus originated from exotic animals, the complicated distinction between native and invasive species, and more. She’s also an author of multiple critically acclaimed books such as Crude: The Story of Oil (2004), Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (2011), and Pandemic: Tracking Contagions From Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond (2017). Her latest—Amazon’s best science book of 2020—is The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, a collection of reportage on how global migration, pathologized as a disruptive force to Western society, is critical for preserving biodiversity and ensuring the survival of humanity. Migration is not a problem, Shah argues, but the solution to the climate crisis. During this critical moment in which climate migration is on the rise and racist narratives around immigrants are fueling xenophobia, Shah’s work is more salient than ever.

2. Anita Sethi 

Manchester-born writer and journalist Anita Sethi draws creative inspiration from the natural world. On top of her writing on culture and environment for outlets like BBC Wildlife, The Guardian, and The Observer, Sethi’s nature writing has been anthologized in collections including Seasons (2016), Seaside Special: Postcards From the Edge (2018), and the upcoming collection Women on Nature (2021). She’s also a vocal advocate in the movement to diversify the outdoors, sharing her experiences hiking in England as a South Asian woman of Guyanese and Indian descent. Her debut memoir, I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain, released in April, recounts Sethi’s journey exploring the Pennines—a range of hills and mountains known as “the backbone of Britain"—after being a victim of a racially motivated hate crime during a hiking trip. “I’ve been racially abused before and told so many times where I do and don’t belong," Sethi tells The Bookseller. “But when this man told me to go back to where I’m from, I thought: Enough is enough. This is my home!” Meditating on race, womanhood, nature, and belonging, Sethi documents her process of moving past trauma as she rekindles her relationship to the outdoors. Critics describe this memoir as “a brilliant and important book.” 

3. Arthur Sze 

Born in New York City, Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American poet whose work transcends genre. An author of 11 books of poetry, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review, Sze is an expert observer of the natural world, writing vivid, lyrical prose at “the intersection of Taiost contemplation, Zen rock gardens, and postmodern experimentation” (as described by critic and writer John Tritica). Rich with scientific inquiry, Sze’s poetry is informed by conversations with scientists, whether via a dinner with Nobel Peace Prize–winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann or a mushroom-hunting trip with renowned mycology expert Bill Isaacs. In Ginkgo Light (2009), Sze contemplates the meaning of survival and resiliency in the wake of nuclear collapse at Hiroshima through the perspective of a ginkgo tree, a woodpecker drilling a utility pole, a 1,300-year-old lotus seed, and other mundane natural phenomena. Likewise, Sight Lines (2019) surveys the rugged terrain of the Anthropocene as he navigates the ecological and emotional consequences of a planet-in-crisis through an array of human and nonhuman voices: a lichen on a ceiling, a man behind on his rent. His latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), continues to grapple with an endangered planet. “Our actions here and now have profound effects on the farthest reaches of the planet,” Sze tells the Brooklyn Rail. “I can simply invoke climate change to show how we are all living, affecting, and damaging our planet together.” 

4. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a Chinese American anthropologist whose research lies at the nexus of feminist studies, the Anthropocene, and globalization. An author of multiple ethnographies, such as In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1993), which surveys the Meratus Dayaks, a marginalized community of people who reside in the depths of the South Kalimantan rainforest in Indonesia, and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004), which highlights the communities that comprise the labor supply of global natural resource markets, Tsing’s fascinating research has now come to the forefront of anthropological inquiry. Her latest, heralded by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction science and economics books of 2015, is The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The 352-page book takes readers on a journey through the globalized commodity chain of the matsutake mushroom—from a Southeast Asian village of matsutake mushroom pickers in the middle of an Oregon forest to the clearcut pine forests in northern Finland—in search of answers to an existential question: What can this rare, highly sought-after fungus teach us about sustainability? Tsing is also one of the editors of the anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017), which challenges readers to rethink their relationship to the earth, and is the cofounder of Feral Atlas, an interactive, multimedia platform where users can learn about the ecological relationship between nonhuman species and infrastructure. 

5. Vandana Shiva 

Known as both an “environmental hero” and “Monsanto’s worst nightmare,” Indian writer, scientist, activist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva is one of the most influential environmental leaders of our time. Her activism began in 1991, when she became a vocal critic against the Asian green revolution (a modern, scientific approach to address the widening Asian food crisis in the '60s), which favored large-scale industrialized food production. Shiva rallied Indian farmers to resist corporate-led monoculture by encouraging local, regenerative farming practices that preserve native seed strains. “Food is a weapon,” Shiva asserts in the documentary The Seeds of Vandana Shiva. “When you sell real weapons, you control armies. When you control food, you control society. But when you control seed, you control life on Earth.”  

Shiva engaged in regenerative agriculture movements across Africa, Latin America, and eventually, the United States, where in 1999, she pioneered the national crusade against genetically modified crops, accusing multinational biotech corporations like Monsanto as well as the US government of indoctrinating “food totalitarianism” onto the world. More recently, Shiva has been brought on as a political commentator in the media—one of her latest appearances being on Russell Brand’s podcast Under the Skin, in which she writes off Bill Gates’s book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster as “rubbish” for offering tech-giant solutions that she predicts will spur a new wave of colonization of Indian land and food production.  

Throughout her career, Shiva has written over 20 books, including Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Crisis (2015), Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2015), Biopiracy: The Plunder and Nature of Knowledge (2016), and Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (2016).

6. Arundhati Roy 

Indian writer and environmental and human rights activist Arundhati Roy is one of the world’s most salient voices of our current moment. An award-winning novelist and prolific essayist, Roy’s unapologetic commitment to systemic change bleeds through her prose. She is most known for her fearless, controversial essays criticizing the Indian government’s role in perpetuating the nation’s political, social, and environmental injustices against marginalized communities—especially farmers, Adivasi, Dalits, and other groups on the lower rung of its caste system. In her 1999 essay “The Greater Common Good”—included in her essay collection The End of Imagination (2016)—Roy reports on the communities that opposed the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley, a project that would have resulted in major flooding and waterlogging, the obliteration of rich natural habitats, and the displacement of millions of the poorest people—all in the name of “national progress.” “Big Dams are to a nation’s development what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal,” Roy writes. “They’re both weapons of mass destruction.” 

More of Roy’s commentary on the current state of environmental affairs can be found in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2018), an epic that interweaves issues from the Indian vulture crisis and the predicament of captive zoo animals to filthy polluted rivers, deforestation, and mushrooming slums. She is frequently brought on as a political commentator in progressive news outlets. In a Democracy Now interview, she argues that capitalism is “a form of religion” by unpacking the backwards logic of natural-resource extraction. “There’s a psychotic refusal to understand that the survival of the species is connected to the survival of the planet,” Roy says. “Can you look at a mountain and not just calculate its mineral worth?”   

7. Chen Qiufan 

Born in Shantou, a town in the Guangdong Province near Guiyu, the largest electronic waste site in the world, popular Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan draws literary inspiration from the ways in which humans alter the environment. When he toured the Guiyu facility for the first time, Qiufan was floored by what he saw. “Metal chassis, broken displays, circuit boards, plastic components and wires, some dismantled and some awaiting processing, were scattered everywhere like piles of manure, with laborers, all of them migrants from elsewhere in China, flitting between the piles like flies,” Qiufan writes in the introduction of his award-winning book Waste Tide (2013). Inspired by his visit, Waste Tide is set in a dystopic future China and follows Mimi, a poor “waste girl” who works in the Silicon Isles, the global capital for e-waste based in the southeastern coast of the country. One day, an American cargo ship (part of Project Waste Tide) arrives at the site and carries over a virus that infects Mimi, rendering her conscious of injustice. A class war between the eco-terrorists and the waste workers ensues. “I try to stir up the awareness of the truth that all of us are equally as responsible for the grave consequence of mass pollution happening across the globe,” Qiufan tells British sci-fi journal Vector. “If we continue to fall into the trap of consumerism and blindly indulge in newer, faster, more expensive industrial products, one day we may face trash that is nontransferrable, unavoidable, and unrecyclable.”

In addition to authoring Waste Tide, Qiufan is a prolific writer for print and digital magazines, publishing over 30 short stories of speculative fiction in outlets like Clarkesworld, Slate, and China’s Harper's Bazaar. His second novel, AI 2041: Ten Visions for our Future, comes out in fall 2021. 

8. Kazim Ali

While professor and poet Kazim Ali may not be an environmental writer in the conventional sense, his relationship to the earth is a prevalent theme in his work. Born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent and raised in Canada and the US, Ali never felt like he belonged to a particular place, especially as a queer person of color. An author of 18 books—a series of poetry, novels, memoirs, and translations—Ali probes questions of history’s role in identity. Silver Road: Essays, Maps, and Calligraphies (2018) is a collection of poetry that charts a path toward an existential, philosophical understanding of the self through a hodgepodge of subjects: quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, and of course, climate change. His reflections on alienation and the environment are deeply explored in his most recent book, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (2021), a memoir that takes Ali back to Jenpeg, Canada, where he immigrated as a child. Nestled between the boreal forests and waterways of Manitoba, Jenpeg is now the site of a hydroelectric dam that is under construction, threatening the local Pimicikamak community’s water supply and culture. Eager to learn more, Ali revisits Jenpeg and spends a week meeting and talking with members of the Pimicikamak community to seek answers to questions about land and power, and to better understand where his story fits within the community. “The provincial and federal governments should have known the value of what the community was giving when they agreed to allow the damming of the river,” Ali tells Foreword Reviews. “They should have respected that gift.”

9. Bonnie Tsui 

Bonnie Tsui is a New York–born Chinese American journalist who writes stories on climate change, the environment, and culture, ranging from the shark fin trade in Hong Kong to the plight of Cal Fire pilots in the age of the megafire. As a child of swimmers and as a competitive swimmer herself, she always possessed a deep affinity for the water. “I just always remember feeling more comfortable and happy in the water, actually, than on land,” Tsui told NPR. “There's just this sense of magic that you get from being in the water and buoyancy that you just don't have on land.” Looking to explore humanity’s relationship to water more deeply, Tsui wrote Why We Swim (2020)—a blend of science, memoir, and deep reportage that reveals what it is about water that seduces and brings us closer to one another. She tells the stories of Olympic champions, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, an Icelandic fisherman who survived a shipwreck after swimming six hours back to shore in hypothermia-inducing water. She also edited A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise (2007), a collection of 20 stories from young writers exploring their relationship to nature. Her latest book, Sarah and the Big Wave—an illustrative story of the first woman to surf Mavericks—comes out this month. Tsui’s writing consistently offers fresh insights into what we can learn from the earth, and how it connects us all. 

10. Jessica Lee 

Jessica Lee is a Taiwanese, British, and Canadian nature writer and environmental historian who is fascinated by environmental aesthetics and botanical history. She is also the founding editor of The Willowherb Review, a digital platform that amplifies nature writing by emerging and established writers of color. Lee’s writing breaks away from the nature literary canon, offering incisive insights into the threads between land, culture, and belonging. In her latest book, Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past (2020), Lee traverses the ecological landscape of her ancestral homeland—hiking Taiwan’s towering mountains and biking its flatlands in search of rare birds—to unearth the secrets from her past after she accidentally discovers a collection of letters written by her immigrant grandfather. Interweaving personal narrative with observational wit, Two Trees Make a Forest casts a critical gaze upon the colonial explorers who shaped our understanding of the land as an attempt to highlight how geographical forces are intertwined with our family stories. Lee sets out to answer similar questions in her first nature memoir, Turning: Lessons From Swimming Berlin’s Lakes (2018), in which she embarks on a mission to swim the 52 lakes that surround Berlin, rain or shine. Lee’s words extend beyond the page, producing radio stories on natural history and writing personal essays for digital media outlets. Curious about the role that forests play in our imaginations? Lee’s three-part radio series on the BBC breaks it down. Interested in expanding your worldview on the role nature plays in the formation of diasporic identity? Lee’s Catapult column investigates the relationship between nationalism and cherry blossoms, the cultural dimensions of soybeans, and what the mango reveals about migration. All in all, Lee’s writing is paving the way for fresh voices in nature literature. 

11. Khairani Barokka 

Khairani Barokka is a London-based Indonesian writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist whose work centers disability, decolonization, and the environment. Barokka’s ballad, Indigenous Species (2016), tells the story of an Indigenous young girl who’s abducted and smuggled onto a boat that floats upstream into the deep recesses of the Indonesian river, passing by a landscape ravaged by ecological destruction and corporate greed. Rope (2017)—Barokka’s first full poetry collection—examines the state of human existence in the age of the Anthropocene, drawing connections between climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire, and the body. She furthers a similar line of questioning in Ultimatum Orangutan (2021), her second and latest poetry collection. Translating to "people of the forest" in Indonesian, Ultimatum Orangutan offers a raw, provocative glimpse into how colonialism fuels environmental injustice in Indonesia through the exploitation of humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Asked in a Mongabay interview about the power of literature in the fight against environmental destruction, Barokka asserts that “no artwork is passive.” She explains, “What happens as a result of affecting people’s hearts and minds is up to the individual, but change happens as a result of people recognizing the urgency of environmental and Indigenous rights issues.” 

Published in 15 countries, Barokka’s work can also be found in literary publications such as the Poetry Review, The New Inquiry, and The Rialto as well as in a spectrum of academic anthologies and journals.

12. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio 

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) academic, activist, and poet who studies and writes about identity, generational trauma, and cultural resilience. Her foray into the national spotlight took place at 18 years old, when President Barack Obama invited her to perform a poem at the White House titled “Kumulipo,” a story about the loss of Hawaiian identity in the wake of American empire. Since then, she’s dedicated her life to fighting to preserve Hawaiian culture through the protection of land and Mother Earth. In the late summer of 2019, Osorio was an activist on the front lines of a movement led by Native Hawaiians to stop the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the peak of Mauna Kea, a sacred site that's rooted in Hawaiian cosmology and Polynesian culture. Protesters, who call themselves kia’i, or “protectors,” claimed that the construction of the telescope would’ve ravaged the native ecosystem of the land, and in return, their culture. Thus, Osorio was inspired to join them.

During the 2021 Sundance Festival, a documentary on the Mauna Kea movement, This Is The Way We Rise, premiered, featuring a scene in which Osorio is huddling with the protectors on the asphalt, chained to a cattle guard, in an action to obstruct development. “The only way we can survive this climate catastrophe, the only way we can survive how capitalism has ravaged our environment, is if we pay closer attention to Native people and the things that they’ve been doing for generations,” Osorio tells Vogue. “At the end of the day, Native people and people of color building solidarity with one another is what is going to save our lives.”

Osorio also writes about her relationship to the land in essays such as “No Seed Left Unturned” in the second volume of the journal Value of Hawaii, and This Is Not a Drill: Notes on Surviving the End of the World, Again, now in its third volume. Her debut book, Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo’olelo, Aloha, ʻĀina, and Ea, which translates to “myth, love of the land, and sovereignty,” respectively, will be available for purchase in September 2021. 

13. Craig Santos Perez 

Scholar, poet, and environmentalist Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous Chamoru (Chamarro) from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is also an English professor at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, who teaches creative writing, eco-poetry, and Pacific literature. A scholar of many literary talents, he is the coeditor of five literary anthologies, author of two spoken word poetry albums—Undercurrent (2011) and Crosscurrent (2017)—as well as five books of poetry. His latest, 2020’s Habitat Threshold (winner of a gold Nautilus Book Award) is an experimental poetry collection that explores the ecological plight of his homeland—from the impacts of environmental injustice to the ravages of global capitalism—and challenges readers to critically reimagine what a sustainable future may look like. “When a species goes extinct, so much is lost,” Perez tells The Guardian. “Not only from the environment and the ecosystem but culturally as well. We lose our cultural connection to these important species, and we lose the deep meaning that they added to our lives.” Even though Perez doesn’t consider himself an activist, he aims to use poetry as a vehicle to raise political awareness that inspires empathy, community engagement, and environmental protection. He’s performed his poetry at the 350.org Climate March in Honolulu, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress, a Hawai’i Conservation Alliance conference, and many other advocacy-centered events.