By LIZ JOHNSTON and EOGHAN WALLS
Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU

It’s hard to fight for other organisms and remain on speaking terms with humanity. People don’t care about extinction. What’s one species, they say, compared to my precious convenience? Trees and birds do their bit for the ecosystem merely by existing. Humans are uniquely selfish and destructive. Come to think of it, maybe we’re the expendable species. 

Two timely new novels, The Fall-Down Effect, Canadian writer and Brick magazine editor Liz Johnston’s debut, and Field Notes from an Extinction by Northern Irish poet and novelist Eoghan Walls, center on those who risk their lives—and other people’s—for nature. Both books ask what makes a person willing to go that far. Nature? Nurture? What’s the tipping point? Why now?

The protagonists in these books have suffered family traumas that harden them to distractions like love, and they share reclusive personalities, as well as a mix of megalomania and desperation. The Fall-Down Effect’s protagonist says: Enough thinking. Now. The main character of Field Notes says: A species is dying. The world needs to know.