Combing through our Best of Indie list is always an interesting end-of-year exercise. Which trend percolated through our sample size of 100 books in 2023? Stewardship, a call for protection of all of Earth’s flora and fauna. Whether that means encouraging action, managing limited resources, or exposing potential harm, the books that captured Indie reviewers’ and editors’ attention this year focused on repairing the world.

Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk (2023) catalogs the ways governments all over the world gamble with people’s lives by studying and experimenting with viruses and bacteria in labs with poor safety protocols. Alison Young, aninvestigative journalist, cites numerous laboratory leaks and accidents, including a 1978 smallpox outbreak at a lab in Britain, a 1979 anthrax release from a Soviet bioweapons lab, contaminated wastewater leaks at a U.S. Army research institute in 2018, and on and on. The author lists the various ways lab safeguards fail—equipment malfunctions, aging pipes, breaches in biohazard suits, and plain old foolishness (Young found one containment-lab door shut with duct tape). Our reviewer calls Pandora’s Gamble “a hard-hitting and timely report.”

Shannon Cram outlines the colossal failure of the U.S. government to properly manage nuclear cleanup in Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility (2023).Cram, an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, focuses on the Hanford site in eastern Washington state, a 580-square-mile decommissioned nuclear complex theNew York Times has described as “the largest and most contaminated of all the weapons production sites.” Kirkus’ reviewer notes, “In prose that’s both calm and solidly grounded in cited research, Cram presents a flatly devastating book about egregious mismanagement at the Hanford site and, more broadly, about the United States government’s calculation of risk in the field of nuclear waste disposal.”

Pamela Uschuk’s poetry collection Refugee (2022) portrays the overlapping effects of social injustice, illness, and climate change alongside the beauty of woods and waterways: “Feel the warmth of an otter’s last dive / before ice takes the river. Police sirens / fade like contrails across the exhausted heart of this land.” In another poem, Uschuk “ingeniously juxtaposes the migration of the monarch butterfly with the emigration of people from Central America,” says Kirkus’ reviewer, who calls the work a “spellbindingly compassionate collection rooted in the belief that redemption remains possible.”

In Living River: The Promise of the Mighty Colorado (2023), author and photographer Dave Showalter makes the case for the immediate protection of one of this country’s most essential and beloved resources, the Colorado River system. More than 40 million people, multiple ecosystems, and two countries depend on the river. Nearly all of the Unites States’ winter agriculture is grown using water from the massive system, whose water rights are dictated by laws created more than 100 years ago. The author provides his own perspective and those of other experts “to vividly portray the beauty and diversity of the lands along the river’s 1,450-mile journey,” according to our review. Showalter provides “an informative examination and celebration of the beautiful and endangered Colorado River and its importance for people and wildlife.”

Chaya Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.