25 books
David Yetman
Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — it takes decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost none survive —…
Gary Snyder
Over nine essays, Snyder strives 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. He writes about walking,…
Fernanda Melchor
The body of the Witch is found in an irrigation canal outside a Mexican village called La Matosa, and the novel works outward from there through five people connected to the killing — a teenage girl, a boy, a mother,…
David Allen Sibley
Sibley drew the definitive field guides, and this is the opposite of a field guide: A big book of large paintings with the answers to the questions people actually ask. Why do birds stand on one leg. How they sleep…
Suhita Shirodkar
Shirodkar sketches out of San Jose and this is the entry point to the urban sketching handbook series, of which I have most, if not all. (I’m guilty of looking at sketching more than actually sketching). It was published about…
Robert Macfarlane
Rob Mac tackles what’s under foot, in three parts: what we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. He peers into a dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill, the wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar…
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about one hundred fifty pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that got me: A black…
John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren
The companion to Laws’s Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and it’s built for anybody leading a group — teachers, naturalists, parents, camp staff. Forty-plus field activities with the actual instructions, timing, and prompts, all organized around three questions…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
If Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. He 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,…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
