Stewart’s prose is never more rhapsodic than when he charts profound transformations that unfold over vast, inhuman stretches of time: the beaver colony’s work to impede the flow of a mountain creek, rainwater’s patient assault on limestone canyons, a river’s magic trick of turning a mountain into a molehill. In his spriteful dramatizations of natural processes, we see Stewart for the kind of writer he really is. He is not chiefly concerned with writing novels about complex human imbroglios, like The Petrified Forest or Grand Hotel, which he cited as initial models for Storm. He is instead a poet-ethicist in the tradition of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard, a dramatist of the natural order and our fragile standing within it.

A major running subplot concerns the decomposition of a cedar tree that first sprouted on a ledge in the Sierra Nevada in 1579—a drama that reaches its culmination, more than a hundred pages and about three hundred and fifty years later, when the bole drops down a cliff and snaps a telephone pole. Stewart follows the ecological ramifications past the mountain range and into society. The collapse of the cedar leads a Boise man to lose a prospective job, denies a girl in Omaha a final conversation with her dying mother, and ensures a divorce in Reno. Such chains of events recur frequently throughout the novel—falling air pressure in Winnipeg causes a storeowner in Sacramento to buy a new car; heavy rain over central California brings suicides in Florida. The desperate actions of human beings in response to the storm come to seem as predictable as the stages of the hydrologic cycle or the circulation of the oceans. As the reader stands back, counseled by Stewart to take the galactic view, it becomes clear that the panics and euphoria caused by Maria are not the exceptions but the rule. Maria, after all, is not a particularly severe storm. It is not even unusual. As Stewart writes, “Other storms would come.”

After Storm, Stewart would write a quartet of ecological novels, all inventive in form and all but one of them best sellers. The most prominent of these is Earth Abides, which has never gone out of print, the parable of an ecologist who survives a plague that has killed most of humanity. It would be a full generation, however, before other novelists tried to apply ecological thinking to their fiction—a gap in the literary record that we can see plainly from the distance of several decades, as a paleoclimatologist can detect a drought in the varying widths of tree rings. “Most people are not interested in the natural background,” Stewart would say near the end of his life, “at least not most novelists.” It would be two generations before any novelist dared again to attempt that most ineffable and maddening of subgenres: the climate novel.