The concept of “scale” has become central to environmental debate. The challenge is that issues of a planetary nature resist being treated adequately, or even sometimes perceived, at the individual, national, or regional levels on which human thought, attention, and politics almost always operate or “make sense.” Such scalar dilemmas, practical, cognitive, and ethical and political, have been the focus of a small field of “scale critique” (Woods, 2014) and “scalar literacy” (Horton, 2019) studying how underexamined supposed norms of scale determine or pre-structure so many issues. In a literary context it is notions of realism and of genre that are most in question. Various literary exercises in scale are considered – poetry by Gillian Clarke, Gary Snyder, and Evelyn Reilly, novels by Jeff VanderMeer, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. The issues resist reduction to the dogma of there being one “right scale” at which to approach the complexity of environmental scenarios. Questions of scale have even a trickster element, best received as a spur to debate, against evasion, whether intellectual, political, or moral.