28 books
Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau
The scientific baseline for the Mojave in one accessible volume. Geology and how the basins and ranges got there, climate and why so little rain arrives, soils and desert pavement and cryptobiotic crust, the plants from creosote clones thousands of…
David B. Williams
David Williams spent nine years in Moab, working as a ranger at Arches and teaching for the Canyonlands Field Institute, and this is the field guide that came out of it, illustrated in line drawings by Gloria Brown. It covers…
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.
Thomas Elpel
No book is going to teach you botany in a day — you have to get down on your knees and go face to face with the flora. But this one gets you further in an afternoon than any field…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Omer Stewart
Omer Stewart wrote this in the 1950s and nobody would publish it. His claim was that the pristine wilderness the pioneers walked into wasn’t pristine at all — Native people had been burning it on purpose for thousands of years,…
Tristan Gooley
The short, gentle one in Gooley’s run — an introduction rather than a manual, aimed at getting the senses back open. Fifteen short exercises, most taking a few minutes: Listen for the shape of a landscape in its sounds, notice…
Oliver Sacks
Sacks was a lifelong fern obsessive, and in 2000 he went to Oaxaca with the American Fern Society — a busload of amateur botanists, a few professionals, and him with a notebook. So the book is ferns, but it’s also…
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…
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…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
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…
Jared D. Margulies
There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in…
Edmund C. Jaeger
Jaeger’s 1933 guide, and for decades it was the only real one. Geology, water, weather, plants, animals, and the routes across the Mojave and the Colorado, written by a man who walked it for sixty years and taught at Riverside.…
Andrea Wulf
Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist in the world in his lifetime and is now mostly a list of place names. Wulf brings him back: Five years in South America, climbing Chimborazo higher than anyone had gone, and…
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…
Michael Pollan
This book disabused me of my illusions about “organic.” Four meals, traced all the way back. A fast food dinner eaten in the car, which turns out to be corn wearing costumes — Pollan buys a steer and follows it…
David Yetman
Everything known about one plant. Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
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…
Rosalie Haizlett
With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature…
Charlotte McConaghy
Set on a fictional and very, very remote island at the bottom of the world, Charlotte McConaghy’s third novel brings new meaning to Southern gothic: There are dark and stormy nights, melodrama, and a ruddy lighthouse keeper, but whales and…
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…
