There is a framed illustration on the wall of my 6-year-old daughter’s room, depicting a colorful assembly of wild creatures, all inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest. She loves this artwork, painted by my mother nearly 30 years ago for a National Geographic children’s book. “Who is that?” my little girl sometimes asks, wanting me to name the animals: golden lion tamarin, emerald tree boa, collared anteater.

Last year, as fires devastated more than 26 million acres of the Amazon – the vital lungs of our Earth, so pillaged by deforestation that the rainforest could soon face an irreversible dieback – I found it difficult to look at my mother’s illustration, or to answer my daughter’s questions about it without my voice breaking.

We live in an era imbued with an ambient sense of ecological loss, the existential disorientation of moving through our daily routines and raising our children against the backdrop of a great unraveling. There could hardly be a more urgent or necessary moment for the arrival of Lydia Millet’s exceptional new book, “We Loved It All: A Memory of Life,” in which the acclaimed novelist turns her substantial talents toward a different kind of story – a profoundly evocative ode to life itself, in all its strange and wondrous and imperiled forms.

This marks the first foray into nonfiction for Millet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose novels (including “A Children’s Bible”) have explored the effects of environmental degradation. “We Loved It All” resists easy classification; it has been deemed an “anti-memoir” by its publisher, but even this feels insufficient for a book so vast in scope. Drawing on Millet’s decades of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, “We Loved It All” marries her comprehensive understanding of our environmental crisis with her command as a deeply emotive narrator, to extraordinary effect. Modernity has created a fissure between humankind and the natural world, as Millet illuminates; her book is an attempt to bridge that divide, a work of spiritual grounding and radical realignment.

“When we’re small we’re enveloped in the images and lore of other creatures,” she writes in the book’s early pages, pondering the formative presence of animals in childhood – through picture books, stuffed toys, clothing – which then recedes as we age: “Growing up is an abandonment of the beasts. And in that abandonment our journey mirrors the arc of our culture’s history, which has also turned its face away from other animals.”

The book unspools in lyrical vignettes, a densely concentrated but propulsive form that allows Millet to move nimbly from one anecdote or idea to the next. These span a startling range of topics: Millet shares intimate recollections from her life (one particularly poignant passage recounts the death of her father, 12 weeks after the birth of her daughter). She presents fascinating portraits of various species (consider the green sea turtle, with eggs that increasingly produce females in a warming climate; or the immortal jellyfish, a creature that can revert to an earlier stage of its development again and again, potentially living forever). Millet examines the forces of capitalism and corporate greed that have driven us to the brink of climate catastrophe – it was the fossil fuel company BP, she reminds us, that popularized the phrase “carbon footprint,” an effort to shift responsibility from industry to individual. She explores the history of life on Earth, the sweep of deep time and our own small but disproportionately influential place within it. (Have you ever thought, as you pack your child’s sandwich for school, that the plastic zip bag in your hand is made of the unearthed bodies of ancient creatures? You will now.)

This is, mildly put, a lot of ground to cover. But Millet weaves these disparate threads together expertly, reinforcing how all of these elements – our individual memories, our ancestral identities, the future of human and nonhuman life – are fundamentally inextricable, whether we care to recognize it or not.

Perhaps the most potent through-line in the book is the meaning of parenthood – the inherent vulnerability of that role, augmented by the recognition of what is happening to the planet our children will inherit. Much has changed since Millet’s childhood, when she was blissfully free of worry for the wild animals she adored: “I fear that my children, one day – mine and the children of others – will be forced to endure the vanishing of much more than we ever did,” she writes. “I fear the despair of a helpless witnessing. Who has already gone? Do we still know their names?”

Millet introduces us to many of those creatures that have disappeared, or might soon disappear – like Lonesome George, the century-old Pinta Island tortoise who died in 2012, or the passenger pigeon named Martha who expired at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Millet tells us of the flightless birds known as great auks, the final pair of whom were found incubating an egg on an island off the coast of Iceland, where they were promptly strangled by men who claimed their bodies for a collector. She relates the story of Tahlequah, the grieving endangered orca who carried the body of her dead calf for 17 days.

We must hold these remarkable beings in our memory, Millet emphasizes, or we risk succumbing to shifting baselines, overlooking the way our world is transforming. If we know the names of those lost, we will remember them; if we remember them, we are compelled to fight for those that remain. Millet considers how we might feel if or when more familiar, iconic species begin to go away – polar bears, tigers, elephants, the animals we’ve loved since early childhood. Perhaps, Millet muses, “a jarring disturbance caused by the permanent loss of a friend from youth will allow us to feel with greater urgency the weight and fear of absence.”

There is, unavoidably, a melancholy that permeates Millet’s book. But “We Loved It All” also conveys fierce resilience and determination, the necessity of awe and joy.

“I think of the line between desperation and despair, those two words with the same root but such a different feel. Of how the first can drive us and the second defeat us,” she writes. How, then, to drive us toward something better? In the final third of the book, as Millet revisits her own ascent as a writer, she explores the formidable influence of our narratives. “Storytelling will never be the same as action,” she writes. “But action depends on a perception of possibility, which only arises from the tales we tell ourselves.”

This is where hope is found – in the emergence of a new possibility. “The future of our children is also the future of the others,” Millet writes. “Not a life on a private island, holed up against the rising winds and seas, but in a sprawling commonwealth of need.” She imagines the way forward as a circular path, returning us to the living world we’ve left behind; we can envision this brighter future, and move purposefully toward it. The task of saving our descendants, she writes, “can only be performed now.” For all the grief and anxiety of our present moment, isn’t it also an honor to exist at this time of astonishing consequence? We are, as Millet writes, “the parents of the world to come.”

This is a book that stays with you, and as it lingered I found myself thinking of the titular wild geese in Mary Oliver’s famous poem – those final lines, where she describes the calls of the migrating birds “over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.” How better to capture what Millet has accomplished? Hers, too, is a piercing voice guiding us home, reminding us where and to whom we have always belonged.

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