73 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…
Ed Yong
An Immense World delivers miracles on every page. A fly’s vision updates six times faster than a human’s, perhaps rending its perception of our movements in slow motion. Cows’ gazes appear unfocused because they see in a horizontal band and…
John McPhee
McPhee spent twenty years riding shotgun with geologists up and down Interstate 80, pulling over at roadcuts, and this is his four books on the subject plus a fifth chunk stacked into one. It won the Pulitzer in 1999. He…
Sebastian Copeland
If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west…
Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez spent five years going north — on the ice with Inuit and Iñupiat hunters, on ships, in camps with biologists — and came back with the book that made his name. It won the National Book Award in…
John McPhee
McPhee’s California book, and the fourth of the Annals volumes. He drove I-80 across the state with Eldridge Moores, a Davis geologist who read ancient seafloor for a living, and the story they told is that California isn’t one place.…
John McPhee
McPhee’s first geology book, 1981, and the one that started the whole run. He rides I-80 across Nevada with Ken Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist with a beard and a scheme to make money pulling silver out of hundred-year-old mine tailings.…
Alison Jean Cole
Alison Jean Cole is a lapidary in Portland who cuts stone for a living, guides rockhounding trips, and puts out a zine called Thunderegg about where the hobby is headed. Most rock guides hand you a list of famous sites…
Merritt R. Turetsky
Takes the most sneered-at ground on earth and contends it’s one of the planet’s great underrated systems. It leans hard on “liminal” and the closing pep talk is earnest to a fault, but it’s a great read anyway.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
You’ve read it, right? Or seen it on the shelf? Or the bestseller list? How it got there is part of the story. Milkweed, a small nonprofit press in Minneapolis, published it in 2013 with no marketing budget, and for…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
John McPhee
McPhee went north in the mid-seventies, right as the Land Claims Act carved the state up and everybody was fighting over what would be park, what would be Native, what would stay open. The book comes in three parts. First,…
Dan Flores
Wolves got wiped out of the Lower 48. Coyotes got the same treatment — bounties, poison, a federal agency that killed millions of them for the better part of a century — and instead of dying off they spread into…
Edwin Corle
Erskine Caldwell got the idea for a series of books about American regions after coming home from covering the German invasion of Russia, and this was the first one out, in 1941. Edwin Corle got the desert — Nevada, Arizona,…
Raymond B. Cowles
Raymond Cowles grew up in South Africa, ended up at UCLA, and more or less invented the study of how cold-blooded animals manage their own body heat — the reason we know a lizard is running a schedule all day,…
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…
Gary Nabhan
Terroir is the wine world’s word for the way a place ends up in the glass — soil, sun, wind, water. Nabhan takes it out of Burgundy and drops it on the Arizona-Sonora border, where he’s spent his life. Mexican…
Edmund C. Jaeger
In 1946, Edmund Jaeger was poking around a canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains when he found a poorwill wedged in a rock crevice, cold and unresponsive, and it stayed that way for weeks. Nobody thought birds could hibernate. He went…
Ann Zwinger
Zwinger went down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon over and over, in every season and just about every kind of boat, usually tagging along with scientists doing river studies. She calls herself an observer at the river’s brim, and…
Ellen Meloy
Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off…
John McPhee
McPhee’s trick here is simple and mean. He takes David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and the most effective conservationist alive, and drops him in the field with three men who want to use the land, one at…
Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi are having a moment. Research shows psychedelics can be a powerful tool to treat mental health issues, and local, state, and federal governments are open to decriminalizing shrooms or exploring medical applications. But, as Merlin Sheldrake enthusiastically shows, fungi…
Rebecca Giggs
She helped push a beached humpback back into the water off a Perth beach. It came back, and she stood with the crowd while it died. What stayed with her was the question underneath: What happens to a whale that…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun. A camera instead, and years of sitting still in the timber watching bears…
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk is the falconer’s hard case — bigger, faster, and less forgiving than a falcon, with a reputation for being impossible to keep steady. Macdonald had been a falconer since childhood, and she bought one off a quay in…
Ryan Huling
The premise is a line from Henry Beston: Animals aren’t underlings, they’re other nations. Huling takes it literally and spends a year mapping their territories — Canada’s beaver belt, the tunnel complexes of sub-Saharan mole-rats, prairie dog cities inside the…
Robert Moor
The author of On Trails turns to biology, taking the tree as a lens and “treethinking” as a path to wisdom. The metaphor strains by the fourth or fifth application, but the range is his point and the reporting earns the reach.
Peter Kuper
A little context: Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years. Insects? Four hundred million years. In this beautifully rendered, graphic-novel-style accounting of the natural history of bugs, artist Peter Kuper notes insects are perfectly happy without…
Robert Macfarlane
The question posed by the title of celebrated British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s keenly felt study of rivers is answered in the first few pages by his nine-year-old son: “Duh.” Yet, self-evident values are not always treated self evidentally. In…
Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane found that a children’s dictionary had cut words like acorn, bluebell, and kingfisher to make room for broadband and cut-and-paste, and this book is his answer. Nine chapters, each on a landscape and a writer who saw it clearly…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
If Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. Godfrey-Smith works up the animal tree looking for where experience begins — sponges with no neurons at all, then corals, then a shrimp that stuns prey with a snap, crabs…
James L. Gould
Animals navigate better than they should be able to and we still can’t fully explain it. Gould and Carol Grant Gould go through the evidence: Bees using polarized light and dancing directions to a hive, monarchs three generations removed finding…
Robert Moor
Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Our last common ancestor with an octopus was a flattened worm about six hundred million years back, which makes them the closest thing to meeting an intelligent alien on this planet. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and a scuba diver, and…
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard spent a year watching the natural world around a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. What she produced is less nature writing than nature theology — a mystic’s journal of attention so fierce it borders on violence. The…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Perrin Roosevelt Ireland
Sex sells, even animal sex, and Perrin Roosevelt Ireland has made a career as a science educator by focusing on the squirts, wriggles, and wee thumps of the faunal world. Known on social media for her short dispatches on creature…
Chloe Dalton
Dalton was a foreign policy adviser in Westminster, stranded at a country house during lockdown, when she found a newborn leveret alone on a track. Hares aren’t domesticable — they’ve never been tamed, they die of stress in captivity, and…
Terry Tempest Williams
Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer,…
Ann Zwinger
Ann Zwinger ran the Green River from its source in the Wind River Range down to its confluence with the Colorado — by kayak, raft, and on foot — and wrote the whole river as a naturalist. Geology of the…
Laura Poppick
Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a…
Robert Finch
Finch wrote Cape Cod for forty years, then started spending summers in a Newfoundland outport called Burnside — known locally as Squid Tickle — population under two hundred, on Bonavista Bay. The book is the accumulation of those seasons: Icebergs,…
Alex Riley
Some critters will go a long way for a little privacy. Ten years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, thirty-seven forms of fungi were found growing inside the abandoned reactor, some of them thriving; this led microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova and colleagues…
Gary Snyder
Snyder’s 1968 collection, in four sections that map his life to that point: Far West, the Sierra and Northwest of his trail crew and fire lookout years; Far East, Japan and the years in a Kyoto monastery; Kali, India; and…
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Forty-nine British birds, every one of them in decline, from avocet to yellowhammer. Macfarlane writes each as a short essay rather than an identification entry — habits, flight, song, myth, and threat — and he varies the form wildly, including…
Patrik Svensson
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers—Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson—have been captivated by eels and their mysterious life…
Michael Pollan
Four plants, four human desires, and the argument runs backward: The apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato didn’t get domesticated by us so much as they figured out what we wanted and got us to plant them everywhere. Sweetness…
John McPhee
I think this might have been my first McPhee book. It’s three long pieces about people trying to stop geology. The Army Corps of Engineers at the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana, holding the Mississippi in its channel against…
Josh Jackson
Los Angeles-based furniture maker Josh Jackson had never heard of the Bureau of Land Management and wasn’t all that clear on “public lands”—he just wanted a last-minute place to camp. Then a friend mentioned “BLM lands” and he fell down…
Jennifer Ackerman
Birdbrain is a slur for which we should apologize to our feathered friends. Ackerman goes out with the researchers doing the work and lays out what birds actually pull off. New Caledonian crows manufacture hooked tools out of twigs and…
John Vaillant
A three-hundred-year-old Sitka spruce on Haida Gwaii with a genetic mutation that made its needles gold — a tree sacred to the Haida, protected in a small reserve, and a tourist attraction. In 1997, a former logging engineer named Grant…
Mary Austin
Austin published this in 1903, out of years living in the Owens Valley between the Sierra and Death Valley, and it’s the book that taught American writers how to look at the desert. Short chapters: A buzzard, a scavenger’s territory,…
Zoë Schlanger
Plants can hear a caterpillar chewing and respond with defensive chemistry. They warn their neighbors. Some appear to count, some to remember, and one Chilean vine imitates the leaves of whatever it climbs, including plastic ones, with no known mechanism…
Nan Shepherd
British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when…
James Galvin
A hundred years of one meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado line, at ten thousand feet, told out of order. Galvin owned part of it and knew the people who worked it, chiefly Lyle Van Waning, a man who built his own…
Lars Chittka
Chittka has spent his career designing experiments for bees, and the results keep being unreasonable. Bees count. They recognize human faces. They learn to roll a ball into a goal for a sugar reward by watching another bee do it,…
David Darlington
Darlington spent years driving and walking the Mojave in the years around the fight over the California Desert Protection Act, and the book is built out of the people who live there and can’t agree on anything. Miners who see…
Robert Macfarlane
It’s a book about company. Macfarlane’s argument is that an old path is a record of everyone who wore it, that walking one puts you in their company whether you want it or not, and that this does something to…
John McPhee
A million acres of sand and pitch pine in the middle of the most crowded state in the country, sitting on an aquifer holding trillions of gallons of clean water, with almost nobody living in it. McPhee spent months out…
Peter Wohlleben
Wohlleben’s follow-up argument is that forests are better at adapting than we credit, and that most of what we call forest management gets in the way. Trees pass on learned drought responses to their offspring, which is inheritance without genetics.…
Craig Childs
Two things are true in the desert: There isn’t enough water, and there is way too much of it. Childs spends the book hunting the first and getting caught by the second. He maps water holes in the Arizona desert,…
John McPhee
Henri Vaillancourt was in his twenties in Greenville, New Hampshire, building birchbark canoes by hand — no plans, no power tools, bark peeled off standing trees, split spruce root for lashing, pitch for the seams — because almost nobody was…
Gary Ferguson
Ponderosa is the tree that makes the Southwest the Southwest— cinnamon bark, high open groves you can ride a horse through, vanilla smell in the sun. In the last decade, from Santa Fe to the Sierra, more than two hundred…
Joseph Wood Krutch
Krutch was a New York drama critic and Thoreau scholar who moved to Tucson in his fifties and became one of the great desert writers. This is his naturalist’s year: The spadefoot toad that waits underground for the one right…
Craig Childs
Eighty percent of Americans can’t see the Milky Way from home. Childs goes looking for what’s left of the actual night — sleeping out in the desert without a light, tracking how animals use darkness, sitting with astronomers and with…
Robert Macfarlane
He set out to find what wildness is left in Britain and Ireland, expecting remoteness — islands, summits, moors — and slept out in fifteen of them over a year. Then Roger Deakin, his friend, kept pointing him back toward…
Richard Preston
A handful of amateurs discovered in the 1980s that nobody had ever been to the top of a redwood, and that the canopy three hundred feet up is a whole ecosystem — soil, huckleberry bushes, ferns, salamanders that live their…
Robert Macfarlane
Everything under our feet, in three parts: What we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. The dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill. The wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar between trees. Catacombs beneath Paris…
Roger Deakin
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as…
Jennifer Ackerman
Owls are hard to study — night, silence, no interest in being watched — so most of what people believed about them was folklore. Ackerman goes out with the researchers finally cracking it. Feathers with a comb on the leading…
Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard’s When the Forest Breathes indicts modern logging practices as starkly as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring indicted pesticide use. Her research in British Columbia forests shows that logging machines devastate the forest floor and carbon stored there. In a…
Ann Zwinger
Five canyons on Cedar Mesa in southeast Utah — Grand Gulch, Slickhorn, Johns, Fish, and Owl — walked and camped and described by a naturalist who was also a fine draftswoman. Zwinger works the geology and the plants and the…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Short essays, one animal or plant each, illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. The axolotl’s permanent smile. The corpse flower. The peacock she loved as a girl and the classmates who made that a problem. Firefly squid, whale sharks, cactus wrens, monsoon…
