Writers have long mined Earth’s riches for parables, metaphors, and motifs. Think Daphne’s laurel leaves, Candide’s cultivated garden, Whitman’s spears of summer grass. Gifts from the natural world to the imagined ones are innumerable. Lately, though, Earth has been out of sorts and blowing hot and cold about things. We lived through the hottest eleven years on record from 2015 to 2025—by 2050, between 50 and 200 million people will be displaced by natural disasters, depending on which experts you ask—yet institutions struggle to coordinate care and individuals struggle to comprehend the problem’s full, terrible scale.
The planet’s mercurial behavior, along with posing existential questions for the future of our species, poses an existential question for the future of literature. David Wallace-Wells, in his 2019 travelogue The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, prophesied, “we will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.” Indeed, some climate fiction has veered sharply into thick irony to fashion worlds devoid of sensory richness. Humans have forced other animals into our Umwelt, a term for the sensory bubbles of creatures, coined by zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 and updated for the Anthropocene by journalist Ed Yong in 2022. Urban noises alter the song patterns of birds. Light pollution reroutes sea turtles toward their death on lit roads. “With every creature that vanishes,” Yong writes, “we lose a way of making sense of the world.”
Few understood this loss more intuitively than Italo Calvino, among the most inventive European writers of the twentieth century. He experimented with fantastical urbanism in Invisible Cities, spun tales from scientific theories in Cosmicomics and, in his posthumously published 1988 Six Memos for the Next Millennium, gave an apologia for the qualities of the novel he wanted to carry into the “so-called postindustrial era of technology.” His skill at natural-linguistic interplay was sharpened by his knowledge of the sciences. His father was an agronomist, his mother a botanist, and, as a young man, he studied agronomy at the University of Turin.
Calvino’s Six Memos attests to a tradition of discovering inner worlds, dependent on our access to the natural world. He praises contemporary poets from William Carlos Williams, who describes leaves so minutely in “The Crimson Cyclamen” that he gives his poem the delicacy of the plant itself, to Eugenio Montale, who constructs “a single very long sentence in the shape of an eel, following the entire life of the eel, and making the eel into a moral symbol” in “L’anguilla.” If the cyclamen and the eel were to go extinct, Williams’s and Montale’s imitations would be rendered hollow, left as artifacts for future generations to decipher. In an ironic twist, with nature wrecked, the written page could serve as a record of our old perceptual sensibilities and curiosity about others’ Umwelt, before the ability to recover the embodied knowledge of a formerly colorful world might also be lost.
Two primitive philosophies help explain the allure of Calvino’s approach and the contemporary environmental consciousness he anticipated. Gregory Bateson, a lesser-known anthropologist with a mixed legacy, sketches them in his 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. The desire to reach out to the natural world and for it to reach out to us creates a bidirectional pull: “totemism” occurs when man uses natural systems as metaphors for his own social and psychological systems; the reversal of this process, “animism,” explains how man applies clues from himself to natural objects, like rivers and mountains, bestowing attributes of his mind and personality onto them.
In his last collection of short stories, Mr. Palomar, Calvino artfully appeals to the two impulses, painting the universe in its modern mood. Mr. Palomar, the author’s alter ego, struggles to communicate with his fellow humans and likes to be alone. At the end of “The Universe as Mirror,” he is daydreaming. When he opens his eyes, he sees a frenetic scene of people elbowing past one another on a busy street while “the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.” The global scale of the climate crisis is reduced, made less abstract, by this exercise in thinking on a cosmic scale: here is an anxious universe, machine-like, staring back at the nervous man it begot. In a gray, industrial world, our overwhelmed senses could atrophy. However, Calvino doesn’t draw a correlation between subject and style, instead animating a world under siege.
What had Mr. Palomar been daydreaming about, before opening his eyes? He had decided, to be at peace with his neighbors, he would first need a way to get to know himself—explore his “inner geography.” He had been stargazing; once his telescope is trained “on the orbits traced by the course of his life rather than on those of the constellations,” his gaze can “rove freely inside himself.” He wonders what he’ll see. The calm rotation of a luminous spiral? “Stars and planets navigating in silence on the parabolas and ellipses that determine character and destiny?” It’s quiet in all the soft corners of open, moving space. “Will he contemplate a sphere of infinite circumference that has the ego at its center and its center in every point?” Calvino turns Mr. Palomar inside out and finds, inscribed in his inner lining, the geometrical patterns of the galaxy.
The writer’s playful methods of “reading” modern humans and ancient celestial bodies make a case for conserving nature not only for the sake of marveling at the beautiful world out there, but also to sustain the one in us.
Elsewhere in the collection, Calvino goes the opposite direction. In “The World Looks at the World” he separates the ego from the self, then, inscribes the former into the universe in a series of mathematical operations. The ego, he posits, is the one who peers out of the self’s eyes as if leaning on a window sill—it looks at the world laid out before it. He then divides the world in two parts, one on that side of the window and the other on this side. He can finally conclude that perhaps the ego is “simply the window through which the world looks at the world.” In swift movements, it molds into an apparatus for the world to watch itself, and Mr. Palomar is sewn into the cosmic fabric.
In the ’60s, Bateson developed a radical, countercultural ecological theory heavily influenced by the emergence of cybernetics. He took issue with Descartes’s dualism, wherein the mind is separate from the body. Then he went steps further to argue that thinking of man as separate from nature was an epistemological mistake. For Bateson, “the creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.” Human thinking and the environment are part of one interconnected “eco-mental” system with similar patterns and feedback loops. Say we dump by-products of human life into Lake Erie: “if the lake is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Bateson’s theory of total connectedness never achieved a seamless logic. But where we might demand clarifications about his global ecology, we replace doubt with pleasure as Calvino toys with incorporating elements of the self into the world or finding the world within us.
Calvino’s favored metaphors too imply a link between the health of the climate and the hygiene of our thought. “The written page is not a uniform surface like a piece of plastic,” he writes in a letter to critic Mario Boselli. “It is more like the cross-section of a piece of wood, in which you can see how the lines of the fibers run, where they form a knot, where a branch goes off.” Some sections are written big and tend toward verbal rarefaction. Others are written small and tend toward lexical precision. Imaginative possibilities are contained within these sylvan textures, some of which are detectable because of an attunement to our senses, which we in turn maintain by immediate encounters with literal, not just literary nature. The two feed off one another.
In Invisible Cities, Calvino’s best-known work, the writer uses organic material to ponder the meaning of building an empire. The traveler Marco Polo is describing cities to the emperor Kublai Khan, which he represents by arranging pieces on a chessboard. The two suddenly begin to contemplate the piece of wood, inlaid with ebony and maple, on which the game is played. The closed system of complex rules for winning and losing is ruptured, and Kublai’s empire of kings, queens, rooks, and pawns is reduced to an emblem of “nothingness,” Calvino writes in a later reflection on the novel. The new perspective surprises, activating a new sense in Kublai and the reader. As Marco Polo speaks, the emperor is overwhelmed by the “quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood”: ebony forests, rafts laden with logs floating down the river, docks, women at the windows.
The 1972 novel masterfully challenges the man-made split between the natural and the cultural. Its invisible cities are living, evolving organisms; they “redraw” themselves, a notion reminiscent of the Chicago School’s early urban sociology and one that has found relevance across generations and disciplines like architecture and urban planning. Urban cores are divided into two species: those that “continue to give their form to desires and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.” Zaira, for example, has an aging soul. It contains its past “like the lines of a hand” and soaks up memories “like a sponge and expands.” Nostalgia and yearning flow through streets and shape architectures.
The weight of the political and economic realities in a rapidly industrializing postwar Italy gave Calvino a darker motivation which fueled his creativity. Amid the threat of nuclear fallout in the 60s, he imagined landscapes bereft of human life. But at the end of his career, the author placed his bets on the writers who dared to dream new ways of seeing. He traces a genealogy of ambition in “Multiplicity,” his fifth and final finished memo (he never finished the sixth one): Goethe planning a novel about the universe; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg contemplating a poem about empty space; Mallarmé successfully giving a “uniquely crystalline form to nothingness.”
Think what it would be “to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic.” (In this radical empathy, even synthetic materials are included.) Yong, like Calvino, writes about the technology people have used “to make the invisible visible and the inaudible audible”: microphones let us eavesdrop on the otherwise inaudible symphonies of treehopper vibrations and night-vision goggles let us see like nocturnal bees in the dark.
We, however, live fast-paced existences, and these hidden realms are rarely on our radars. I’m reminded of Calvino’s surrealist fable about a rural man befuddled by a big city who tries to rescue a sad, uncared-for office pot plant by taking it out into the rain, only for it to grow too big to fit in his apartment. Even with no easy answers to the climate crisis in sight, it’s worth asking how the Umwelt of other creatures are vital to our literal and literary world. Calvino’s stories respond: without trees and treehoppers, songbirds and sea turtles, we would lose ways to know ourselves.
Image: Ferdinand van Kessel, Madrid from Four Parts of the World series, oil on canvas, 1689 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).