13 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…
Jeremy Collins
Jer Collins is a climber and an illustrator, and somebody asked him to bring his sketchbook down the Amazon and draw the people living along it. That trip opened the door to mixed-media storytelling, and he kept going — the…
Michael Christie
I liked this book. The New York Times also liked it a lot. The Washington Post was a bit more cynical, but also on point. “Michael Christie’s second novel, Greenwood, makes it clear that we really want 500-page novels about…
Tristan Gooley
Every tree is a record of what happened to it. Gooley teaches you to read it: Why branches on the south side grow at a different angle, how a tree leans away from prevailing wind and thickens on the windward…
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.
Daniel Mason
One house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic son, a true crime writer,…
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…
Richard Powers
I was skeptical about this book, with its nine human characters, sprawling timeline from 19th century New York to Occupy Wall Street, and magical realism meets science fiction meets eco-terrorism fable. What? But Richard Powers, who’s won a National Book…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
