7 Tips for Writing Environmental Crime Fiction

Many people enjoy escaping into the outdoors to relax, reduce the stress in their lives, watch wildlife, and just reconnect with nature in a peaceful setting. But our natural places are in danger like never before due to development, destructive industries like mining, oil, and gas extraction, clearcutting, habitat degradation, and climate change.

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It’s all fertile ground for writing environmental crime, a growing genre with passionate readers.

Writing it, though, requires some tricky maneuvering to really bring the environmental message and suspense home. These tips can help.

Environmental crime is bound to be wrapped up in science, be it how pollutants enter and affect waterways, how clearcutting affects habitats, and so on. Some of this science might be complex, with specialized language. But when writing mystery and suspense, you don’t want to bog down the narrative with a lot of stilted, technical jargon.

One challenge is to take the science you want to include and make it easy to digest so that your readers take it all in without feeling jarred out of the flow of the book. Translate technical terms into more approachable ones without dumbing down the science in order please both readers new to the environmental issue and appeal to readers seasoned in the subject.

While you’re making the science conversational, also be sure it’s accurate. If you’re wanting to address a specific concern with the environment or species extinction, the facts should be solid and verified in order to best inform your readers.

Be sure to use reputable sources. Read peer-reviewed research papers coming out of universities. Interview scientists, activists, and lawyers who work in the field you’re describing. Find out what gear researchers use, for instance, what their typical day might involve, and the dangers they face from weather or poachers while out in the field.

Readers can easily be put off by a passage that is inaccurate. Sometimes this just means they put the book aside for a while. But if they are experts in the field you’re writing about, you run the risk of losing them completely.

Seeping readers in the atmosphere of a place can really draw them in. Think about where your environmental crime takes place. What is the scenery like? Mountains? Deserts? Canyons? The ocean? What plant and animal species are present? What bird songs can you hear? How does the air smell? Are there burbling rivers or roaring whitewater? Are cactus wrens singing from a nearby canyon or ravens calling to each other in a pine forest? Are waves surging in and out on a beach, crabs scuttling back and forth as they go?

Including vivid details like this to your prose can make readers feel like they’re right there with your protagonist. This has the added benefit of truly making the reader understand what could be lost if the environmental crime is not remedied.

For readers to really connect in a meaningful way with environmental crime, they should feel its immediacy and importance. If your book addresses an issue with wildlife, such as habitat loss or a lack of federal or state protection, describe that species in a way that readers can identify with.

Many people view themselves as separate from nature, so it’s important to establish a feeling of connection with the species you’re writing about. Show that animal in action in a relatable way, like feeding its young or interacting with others in its community. Show the role that species plays in the world and how that is interconnected with human concerns.

If your book addresses an environmental issue, such as water or air pollution or illegal logging or mining, show how this issue not only affects your characters and their immediate area, but how such crimes can affect communities anywhere, such as the danger of mining byproducts seeping into groundwater.

For instance, in a process called biomagnification, pollution seeping into the environment from coal-fired power plants and cement factories ends up in the water, where it is absorbed by plankton, which are then eaten by fish. The toxins grow more concentrated in the fish, which are then eaten by seals, upping the toxic content even more. Those seals are then eaten by polar bears, the pollutants becoming even more concentrated in their bodies. But humans also eat those fish with high levels of pollutants. We’ve probably all read about heavy metals like mercury in fish and how it should be avoided. Presenting the interconnectedness of things like this means you’ve now brought that topic home in a way readers can personally relate to.

In addition to telling a compelling story, you might want to address an environmental or wildlife concern in your fiction for the purpose of inspiring action in your readers. Giving them the tools and knowledge to help is invaluable. As your characters struggle to remedy or bring an environmental crime to light, this will provide examples to your readers of what they can do themselves, such as speaking out, engaging in beach cleanups, or improving habitat for a particular species.

And it’s not just about describing the steps and the tools; hope is also a vital component here. If you strike a tone that is too hopeful, people will just shrug and think, “Oh, good. It’ll all get fixed. I don’t have to do anything to help.” But if you’re too dire, people will think, “This is totally depressing. There’s no hope. Nothing can be done. I give up.”

So it’s important to present the environmental issue in an accurate, realistic way, but also work in those seeds of hope as to how things can be fixed.

In any mystery or thriller, you want to keep readers turning the pages. Long sections of only science description or environmental concern can take the reader out of the narrative. It’s very important to address these issues, but be sure to sprinkle those passages in amidst the action and plot.

Think of it like a series of peaks and valleys, where the peaks provide scenes in which the action ratchets up to a mountaintop, then descends into a valley where the characters can reflect on the environmental crime, what led to it, and how it affects them and the area (and even humanity) as a whole.

It’s great to have villains in environmental crime, such as a greed-driven CEO who doesn’t care that his company is polluting a local waterway. But it’s also important to have a compassionate character that readers can connect with. Show the personal, emotional toll of the environmental crime on your protagonist, on the community they are fighting to protect, and the animals that are being affected.

Using these tips can help you write an effective, suspenseful piece of environmental crime that will not only hook in readers for the story and action, but will serve to address an injustice and hopefully inspire change.

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