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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Richard McGuire’s Here, Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land, and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands connect environmental change and resource extraction to ordinary lives—but they do so from sharply different viewpoints. In a 2022 essay, literary scholar Dominic Davies argues that comics’ combination of words and images can bridge the vast scales of environmental change and the intimate scale of human experience. These books make that connection tangible through a room, communities and land, and one worker’s life.
How graphic novels bring environmental change down to human scale
Climate change and resource extraction can be difficult to grasp at the scale at which they unfold. Davies’s argument is that graphic narrative can place text and image together to connect those large processes with everyday human experience. He writes that graphic narrative is “particularly adept at bridging the macro scales of environmental change with the micro scales of our everyday human lives.” That is a critical interpretation of the form, not a scientific finding or a claim that every graphic novel works this way.
The three books approach the connection differently: Here uses one room to move across time; Paying the Land reports on Dene communities, land, and resource development; and Ducks recounts Beaton’s own experience working in Alberta’s oil sands. Their subjects overlap, but their genres and points of view are not interchangeable.
Here: planetary time seen from one room
Richard McGuire’s Here stays in a single room while its panels and timestamps jump between different periods. The publisher describes it as a story of one room and the events that take place in its space across time. Davies reads that fixed domestic viewpoint as a way to set births, deaths, and routines beside planetary deep time and imagined futures.
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The effect comes from the contrast: a familiar interior provides a steady point of reference while the years—and the scale of events—shift around it. Rather than following one character through a conventional timeline, the book invites readers to see human lives as moments within a much longer history of place.
Penguin Random House lists a 304-page Pantheon hardcover, ISBN 9780375406508, published December 9, 2014, as well as an ebook edition. See the publisher’s Here listing.
Rank #2
- THE CARTOON GUIDE TO THE ENVIRONMENT
- WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE
- BIRD ON FIRE
Paying the Land: communities, land, and resource development
Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land is comics journalism about Dene communities in Canada’s Northwest Territories, their history, and the costs and benefits of resource development. Davies draws attention to the book’s visual contrasts between relationships to land and extractive industry.
That framing is Davies’s reading of Sacco’s work; it should not be mistaken for a single, universal position held by Dene communities. The book’s focus is more specific than a general climate-change narrative: it examines how development and land intersect with community histories and lived experience.
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Rank #3
- A heartfelt graphic novel about a girl who discovers she has multiple food allergies and must navigate a new normalExplores themes of friendship, family, and resilience with relatable, authentic storytellingIdeal for middle-grade readers and anyone who has faced health challenges or felt different
Macmillan lists the Metropolitan Books edition at 272 pages, ISBN 9781627799034, with an on-sale date of July 7, 2020. See Macmillan’s Paying the Land listing.
Ducks: oil-sands work and personal financial pressure
In Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton recounts going to Alberta’s oil sands for work to pay off student loans. Davies highlights the friction between an individual’s need to earn a living and the workplace vulnerability and fossil-fuel economy surrounding that work.
That personal perspective gives the book a different route into environmental questions. It does not begin with a broad account of climate systems; it shows how one person’s financial circumstances lead into an industry built on extraction, and what it is like to work within that setting.
Drawn & Quarterly lists a full-color, 436-page hardcover, ISBN 9781770462892, and an ebook, ISBN 9781770466531. See the publisher’s Ducks listing.
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Which book fits the perspective you want?
| Book | Viewpoint and form | Environmental connection |
|---|---|---|
| Here | One domestic location viewed across many periods | Places everyday life alongside planetary deep time and imagined futures. |
| Paying the Land | Reported comics journalism about Dene communities | Explores land, community history, and resource development. |
| Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands | Beaton’s graphic memoir of work in Alberta | Connects personal finances and workplace experience with fossil-fuel extraction. |
Choose Here for a formally inventive view of time anchored in a familiar space, Paying the Land for reported attention to communities and development, or Ducks for a worker’s firsthand memoir of life inside the oil sands economy. Davies’s essay first appeared on The Conversation and was republished by Scroll.in on December 19, 2022; read the essay.
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