22 books
Aldo Leopold
You know it from “land ethic,” but you’ll remember it for his incredible observations of nature. Aldo Leopold was a forester who spent his early career killing predators for the government, then changed his mind, and this book is the…
Paul Kingsnorth
Kingsnorth used to be a green campaigner, walked away from all that, and now lives on a smallholding in western Ireland, where he went and got himself baptized Orthodox. This book is twenty years of him chewing on one bone.…
David Abram
David Abram put himself through school doing card tricks, which is how he ended up hanging around traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal. He figured they’d talk shop about magic. Instead he found their real work wasn’t with people at…
Edward Abbey
Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches in the late fifties, alone in a trailer at the end of a dirt road, before the pavement came. This is what he made of it, and it isn’t a nature…
Cory Doctorow
Doctorow coined the word in 2022 and it spread fast enough that the American Dialect Society made it word of the year in 2023. This is the long version of the argument. Platforms show up good — cheap, useful, generous…
Oliver Burkeman
Do the math and a normal lifespan comes out to about four thousand weeks. That’s it. That’s the whole allotment. Burkeman spent years writing a productivity column, running every system going, and finally decided the entire project is a trap.…
Jenny Odell
Not a digital detox book, which Odell says up front. She’s an artist who spends a lot of time watching birds in an Oakland rose garden, and her argument is that the attention economy is an economy, and that refusing…
Yvon Chouinard
Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing to make better pitons, sold them out of the trunk of his car in Yosemite, and then discovered his pitons were wrecking the cracks, so he stopped making the thing his company was built on and…
Joseph L. Sax
Sax was a law professor, and this is the clearest short statement of what national parks are for. His argument is that the parks aren’t a commodity to be delivered to consumers efficiently, and that the fight over what to…
Tyson Yunkaporta
Yunkaporta is an Apalech man from far north Queensland and an academic, and the book asks what Indigenous thinking has to say about global systems — not as culture but as method. Each chapter starts with a symbol he carves…
Matthew B. Crawford
Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy, took a think tank job, lasted five months, and quit to open a motorcycle repair shop. His argument is that we’ve built an economy that separates thinking from doing and calls that progress,…
Rachel Carson
Carson was already a bestselling nature writer when she turned to pesticides, and she was dying of cancer while she finished this. The opening is a fable — a town where the birds have gone quiet — and the rest…
Jack Turner
Turner spent decades guiding in the Tetons and this strident book stems directly from it. His argument is that we’ve replaced actual wild experience with representations of it — nature documentaries, photographs, managed parks, permits, interpretive signs — and that…
Rick Rubin
People went bananas over this book, but I’m not one of them. Rubin has produced records for Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and Adele, and he does not play an instrument or work a board. What he does is…
David Graeber
The standard story goes: Small egalitarian bands, then farming, then cities, then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that basically none of that holds. The evidence shows enormous cities with…
Edward Abbey
Four people meet on a river trip and decide to start wrecking things. A Vietnam surgeon with three ex-wives, a Mormon river guide with three current ones, a Bronx kid turned desert fanatic, and a woman from the Bronx who…
Gary Snyder
Nine essays, and the central move is to separate wilderness from wildness. Wilderness is a legal designation; wildness is a quality of self-organizing process, present in an old-growth forest and equally in your own body and in language. Snyder writes…
David Abram
Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land.…
Ken Ilgunas
Ilgunas walked the Keystone XL route across the Plains, most of it on other people’s land, and came out with a question: When did Americans lose the run of their own country? His answer is that they had it and…
Christopher Ketcham
Ketcham spent years reporting on the 450 million acres the federal government holds in the West and came back angry. The core of it is livestock grazing on public land — how few operators there are, how little they pay,…
Matthew B. Crawford
Matthew Crawford devotes Why We Drive to an anonymous couple he sees running down a wooded trail, pretending they’re riding motorcycles, making vrooming noises and playfully leaping over roots. It’s this eye for the small but uniquely human details that…
Nick Hayes
The follow-up to The Book of Trespass, and it moves from manifesto to action plan. Hayes and a dozen contributors argue that the English are locked out of ninety-odd percent of their own country, and that the answer isn’t just…
