Nature

A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick 

#1 New York Times Bestseller

A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. 

Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a deckled edge and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book—gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred—and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants. 

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Since its establishment as a federally protected wilderness in 1964, the Boundary Waters has become one of our nation’s most valuable—and most frequently visited—natural treasures. When Amy and Dave Freeman learned of toxic mining proposed within the area’s watershed, they decided to take action—by spending a year in the wilderness, and sharing their experience through video, photos, and blogs with an audience of hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens.

This book tells the deeper story of their adventure in northern Minnesota: of loons whistling under a moonrise, of ice booming as it forms and cracks, of a moose and her calf swimming across a misty lake.

With the magic—and urgent—message that has rallied an international audience to the campaign to save the Boundary Waters, A Year in the Wilderness is a rousing cry of witness activism, and a stunning tribute to this singularly beautiful region.

Since its establishment as a federally protected wilderness in 1964, the Boundary Waters has become one of our nation’s most valuable—and most frequently visited—natural treasures. When Amy and Dave Freeman learned of toxic mining proposed within the area’s watershed, they decided to take action—by spending a year in the wilderness, and sharing their experience through video, photos, and blogs with an audience of hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens.

This book tells the deeper story of their adventure in northern Minnesota: of loons whistling under a moonrise, of ice booming as it forms and cracks, of a moose and her calf swimming across a misty lake.

With the magic—and urgent—message that has rallied an international audience to the campaign to save the Boundary Waters, A Year in the Wilderness is a rousing cry of witness activism, and a stunning tribute to this singularly beautiful region.

“Raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life.”—Katherine May, bestselling author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Two days after the winter solstice, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived, and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways, everything was forever changed. Mapping the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—Kerri tells the story of a changed life in a changed world. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical and deeply moving, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, the natural world, and most of all to a love that transformed a life. Guided by a voice that is utterly singular, this book is “raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical” (Katherine May), a meditation on home, the deepening of family, and the connections that sustain us.

“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR
A New York Times Bestseller
Barnes & Noble Book of the Year

Beloved author Aimee Nezhukumatathil's celebrated work of nonfiction, now including additional essays and illustrations. 

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and finding home.

Two days after the winter solstice in 2019, Kerri and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways 2020 was unlike any year we had seen before. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical, fragmentary in subject and form, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that transformed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri’s elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. This is a book for the reader who wants to slow down, guided by a voice that is utterly singular, “rich and strange,” (Robert Macfarlane). A book about home—the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us.

“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR

From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

Here is Connemara, experienced at a walker’s pace. From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place’s geography, ecology, and history.

We begin with the earth right in front of his boots, as Robinson unveils swaths of fiontarnach—fall leaf decay. We peer from the edge of the cliff where Robinson’s house stands on rickety stilts. We closely examine an overgrown patch of heather, a flush of sphagnum moss. And so, footstep by footstep, moment by moment, Robinson takes readers deep into this storied Irish landscape, from the “quibbling, contentious terrain” of Bogland to the shorelines of Inis Ní to the towering peaks of Twelve Pins.

Just as wild and essential as the countryside itself are its colorful characters, friends and legends and neighbors alike: a skeletal, story-filled sheep farmer; an engineer who builds bridges, both physical and metaphorical; a playboy prince and cricket champion; and an enterprising botanist who meets an unexpected demise. Within a landscape lie all other things, and Robinson rejoices in the universal magic of becoming one with such a place, joining with “[t]he sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world.”

Situated at the intersection of mapmaking and mythmaking, Listening to the Wind is at once learned and intimate, elegiac and magnificent—an exceptionally rich “book about one place which is also about the whole world” (Robert Macfarlane).

“Filled with nuggets of wisdom and provocative questions.” —ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

Rick Bass’s dog, Colter, is the brown dog of the Yaak. Described by Bass as a creature almost mythic, the dog charges through the mountain valleys following the scent of game. In this book, Bass gives a history of his years with Colter—including vignettes about interactions with well-known writers Jim Harrison and Barry Lopez—as a way of understanding what is intuitive in himself and his quest to create art.

A definitive collection of Henry David Thoreau’s major essays, annotated and introduced by Lewis Hyde.

Diverging from the long-standing custom of separating Thoreau’s politics from his interest in nature, renowned author Lewis Hyde brings together essays that highlight the ways in which these two strands of thought were intertwined. Here, natural history begins not with fish and birds, but with a dismissal of the political world, and condemnation of slavery concludes with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.

This definitive edition includes Thoreau’s most famous essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “Walking,” along with lesser-known masterpieces such as “Wild Apples,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” and an account of Thoreau’s 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin—an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. While Thoreau’s ideal reader was expected to be politically engaged in current affairs and well versed in Greek, Latin, poetry, and travel narrative, Hyde’s inviting annotations clarify many of Thoreau’s references and recreate the contemporary context of the day, when the nation’s westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

Hyde deems Thoreau’s writing prophetic because “the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time.” Thoreau’s revelatory writing coupled with the luminous insights from Hyde—“one of our country’s greatest public thinkers” (Lawrence Weschler)—make The Essays of Henry David Thoreau essential reading at a moment in our nation’s history when his subversiveness, foresight, and lyricism are badly needed.

“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada Limón

In this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.

From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”

At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.  

Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.

“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.  

Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.

“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape in Ireland—weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region’s mythologies.

From the northern fiord waters of Killary Harbour to the southern sea-washed islands of Slyne Head, western Connemara awes with a rugged landscape: sloping cliffs, towering mountains, and the ever-present thudding of the Atlantic. And here, within the earth, resides the record of the past; stones with ash-grey centers reveal volcanic episodes, a series of mysteriously arranged quartz boulders reminds us of the ancient secrets held in the soil, and a long-disappeared lake filled in by sand lies beneath a golf course, waiting to be rediscovered.

Mapping more than geography, Tim Robinson charts Connemara’s deep relationship to those who have inhabited its surface. The Last Pool of Darkness brims with tales of ghosts, centuries-old land disputes, periods of religious and political upheavals, philosophers entranced by the isolating landscape, poets, mathematicians, artists, fantastical smugglers, the discovery of botanical rarities, trickster fairies, and the delicate balance between humans and nature. Not merely a “certain tract of the Earth’s surface” but “an accumulation of connotations,” Robinson’s Connemara offers readers an opportunity to travel across space and time.

A work of great precision and tenderness, The Last Pool of Darkness is an enchanting addition to the Seedbank series and next chapter in “one of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English” (Robert Macfarlane).

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

A Junior Library Guild Selection

A multicultural anthology, edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith, about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

A hearth is many things: a place for solitude; a source of identity; something we make and share with others; a history of ourselves and our homes. It is the fixed center we return to. It is just as intrinsically portable. It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times—set in flux by climate change, mass immigration, the refugee crisis, and the dislocating effects of technology.

Featuring original contributions from some of our most cherished voices—including Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Pico Iyer, Natasha Trethewey, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Chigozie Obioma—Hearth suggests that empathy and storytelling hold the power to unite us when we have wandered alone for too long. This is an essential anthology that challenges us to redefine home and hearth: as a place to welcome strangers, to be generous, to care for the world beyond one’s own experience.

From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a “heartfelt and refreshing” (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope.

Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development.

A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.

“Teaches us how to be the best kind of human beings.” —ECLECTICA

As a boy in Colorado, Robert Michael Pyle fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took Pyle across the globe—until he realized that he was no longer as intimate with the natural world that first spurred him to action.

Walking the High Ridge is a journey through Pyle’s “unruly pack of interests”—biology, nature conservation, and literature—to his decision finally to choose the life that would give free reign to his scientific and creative impulses and keep him “as much as possible, out of doors.”

“The essential feature of the prairie is its horizon, which you can neither walk to nor touch.”

When there is no summit to reach nor farther shore to attain­­—only a constantly receding point between earth and sky to follow—a journey proceeds as much into one’s own mind as it does into the natural world. Sauntering through the tall grasses of the prairie, Paul Gruchow engages in just such a boundless journey, exploring simultaneously the subtle beauty of the Great Plains and the mind’s astonishment as such grandeur.

Charting one cycle of seasons, Journal of a Prairie Year reveals countless cycles of thought: the innumerable sounds of winter snow beg us to understand its song; the fecundity of spring questions the accuracy of naming its abundance; the tenacity of prairie roots in a summer drought contrast with the shallow roots of our culture; and the mortality of fall mirrors our steady destruction of a once seemingly infinite expanse.

The result is equal parts phenology and philosophy, a blend of natural and human history from a writer who “makes empty places full and a reader’s imagination soar” (Washington Post): calling us to remember a threatened world, and urging us to reach for its unmarred horizon.

Travelogue, cultural meditation, and love story, On the Ice casts a panoramic view on one of the oddest communities in one of the most extreme places on earth.

Negative 70-degree weather. Canned food that dates back at least a decade. Wind storms powerful enough to lift a human off the ground. Extremely unfashionable clothing. Welcome to Antarctica, the farthest-away place in the world.

Hoping to get away from the complexities of her life, Gretchen Legler arrives at McMurdo Station with the intention of researching the landscape; what she finds, instead, is a zany population of misfits and dreamers. Populated by people from all walks of life—bankers, MBAs, therapists, carpenters, scientists, laborers, and military brass—the individuals that Legler meets have gone to Antarctica to escape everything from parking tickets to angry spouses.

Part sociological study, part historiography, and part love story, On the Ice is an exploration of one of the most unexplored places on earth and the people who are drawn to it.

“Gruchow is an ideal guide to the BWCA.” —ISTHMUS BOOKS QUARTERLY

Organized by the seasons of the year, Boundary Waters explores the natural and soul-sustaining beauty of the largest roadless area east of the Rocky Mountains: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a vast network of forest and thousands of lakes, isolated and pristine, straddling the border between northern Minnesota and Ontario.

Throughout Boundary Waters, Paul Gruchow skis, backpacks, and canoes through the Boundary Waters and its environs, including Sea Gull Lake, Isle Royale National Park, the Grand Portage Trail, Quetico Provincial Park (Canada), and Voyageurs National Park. Drawing on the works of Thoreau and Wendell Berry, Gruchow turns his naturalist’s eye on this wilderness full of wolves, moose, and loons, contemplating the richness of our natural heritage and our need to share its treasures with others.

Boundary Waters is a testament to Gruchow’s magnificent ability to explores the relationship of person to place, illuminating not only our lands, but our souls.

From the cosmic to the quotidian, this collection of essays by Amy Leach asks us to reconsider our kinship with the wild world.

The debut collection of a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. This book represents a major break-out of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own.

Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.

When Thoreau stood on the flank of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin 1846, he was one of a handful of Americans who had ventured so deeply into the wilderness for the mere sake of seeing what was there. Today, hundreds of thousands of people—some with cell phones and GPS—stand where Thoreau did.

For some, Katahdin is the long-awaited terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the 2,160-mile footpath from Georgia to Maine. For others, Maine’s highest peak and the state park surrounding it are the closest they can come to wilderness—the Glacier National Park of the east. In North to Katahdin, Eric Pinder uses Katahdin as his laboratory to explore what draws people to the mountains and whether hikers today are having remotely the same experience as did Thoreau. Are they even trying to? And if wilderness means "an absence of humanity," what do we call it when it’s filled with people?

Pinder’s interviews with hikers and accounts of his own treks, humorous and witty, filled with knowledge about the region’s lore, geology, and weather, create a vivid portrait of wilderness and its denizens.

The North Woods tradition of making maple syrup serves as an illuminating backdrop for John Elder’s reflections on nature, literature, playfulness, and fatherhood, as he builds a sugaring house with his sons.

The tail end of the sugaring season in New England is called the “frog run,” when pools of snowmelt teem with frogs and the last run of sap good for making syrup flows from the maple trees. For John Elder, a longtime resident of Vermont, a professor of English, and a man at midlife, this moment is a metaphor of loss and resurgence.

In The Frog Run, Elder describes how he found a way to balance his passions for literature and for the outdoors by building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. For Elder, who also writes in this book about the resurgence of New England forests and about his life as a reader—moving from the game of Go to the Psalms and Bashō—the frog run is a time to savor and celebrate the fleeting beauties of his family’s place on earth.

Moving and elegant, The Frog Run is a testimony to the value of embracing what seems lost.

The spellbinding true story of a young woman's adventure in the Australian outback as she joins a small crew on an abandoned cattle station and drags feral cattle in from the wild.

One thousand square miles of coastal scrub—inundated by monsoon floods in summer, baked dry in winter, and filled with the most deadly animals in the world—Stilwater seems an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But in the countless miles beyond the station compound roam tens of thousands of cows, many entirely feral from a long period of neglect. Rafael has been hired, along with a ragged crew of ringers and stockmen, to bring them in for drafting. Over a season they use helicopters, motorcycles, bullcatcher jeeps, horses, ropes, and knives to win Stilwater Station back from the wild.

A deeply poetic inquiry into our desire to make order where we find wildness, Stilwater: Finding Mercy in the Outback suffuses us with salt and scrub and blood, blurring the line between domestic and feral in wondrous, unsettling ways. This is a whirlwind of men, women, cattle, horses, machines and landscape in collaborative evolution, all becoming different manifestations of the same entity—the Australian Wild.

Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? In her latest book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate.

Moore's essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends—of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter's arrest for protesting the war in Iraq—affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane.

Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family.

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, “multiracial” to “mixedblood,” the diversity of cultures in today’s world is reflected in our richly various stories—stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. For centuries, this richness has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature.

Featuring work from more than thirty contributors of widely diverse backgrounds—including Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths; Robin Wall Kimmerer on the language of the natural world; Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his Louisiana hometown to a blind faith in capitalism; and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of “unpredictable” nature—The Colors of Nature works against the grain of this traditional blind spot by exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future.

Bracing, provocative, and profoundly illuminating, The Colors of Nature provides an antidote to the despair so often accompanying the intersection of cultural diversity and ecological awareness.

“Marginlands is a tour de force, a magnificent first book about India’s marginalized landscapes and inhabitants, written with compassion, compressed elegance of observation, and urgent political force.”—Robert Macfarlane

As a child growing up in Mumbai, Arati Kumar-Rao’s parents instilled in her an abiding love for the natural world and a passion for storytelling. Years later, adrift in a corporate job and concerned by the unbridled development of her country, she asked herself, “When will you stop doing what you can do and start doing what you really want to do?”

Animated by an instinctive sense that our fate is bound to that of the earth and the more-than-human world, Kumar-Rao sets out on a journey across India, listening along the way to stories the land and its people share with her. In the Thar Desert, often reduced to the value of extractable commodities, she learns about ancient methods of harvesting rainwater from shepherds with deep ancestral memories. In the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers at the Bay of Bengal, she walks ancient shorelines and mangrove forests with a marine biologist, exploring tidepools and learning of the extent to which this astonishingly diverse ecology is increasingly endangered by commercial trawlers and overfishing. And on India’s northernmost plateau, surrounded by the Himalaya and home to snow leopards, ibex, and numerous endangered species of eagles and owls, she finds glaciers disappearing at an alarming rate and meets with inhabitants who play little role in creating climate change but now bear the brunt of it.

Richly illustrated with the author’s photographs and drawings, Marginlands is a vibrant and compelling account of the changes reshaping India today. Engaging and urgent, infused with wonder and profound empathy, this is a work of love and hope, inspiring readers across the world to preserve and protect the world around us.

“Deep down, there is just something that draws us to the land, to wild places. We were there to listen to the land.”

When National Geographic Adventurers of the Year Amy and Dave Freeman marry, they set out on an unusual honeymoon: a three-year, 12,000-mile journey across North America. From Alaska’s Inside Passage to Florida’s Key West, they traverse the continent by kayak, canoe, dogsled, and skis, encountering wildlife, sublime landscapes, and harrowing challenges.

Along the way, the Freemans also bear witness to environmental degradation and climate change—from plastic-covered beaches to forest fires to retreating glaciers. And as they engage with Native and rural communities most impacted by the changes resulting from modern industrial society and meet individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting the natural world, their adventure deepens in ways they never imagined.

From the white-knuckle rush of paddling white water to the wonderment of dogsledding across a frosted landscape where caribou and wolves roam, North American Odyssey is a celebration of our interconnectedness to the natural world and to each other. Beautifully written, engagingly told, and inspiring throughout, Amy and Dave Freeman’s story is a clarion call for change in the way we live.

A BuzzFeed "Best Book of June 2021"

From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it.

Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of a year in Dara’s Northern Ireland home patch. Beginning in spring―when “the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest―these diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are vivid, evocative, and moving.

As well as Dara’s intense connection to the natural world, Diary of a Young Naturalist captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning. We see his close-knit family, the disruptions of moving and changing schools, and the complexities of living with autism. “In writing this book,” writes Dara, “I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.”

Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing and already sold into more than a dozen territories, Diary of a Young Naturalist is a triumphant debut from an important new voice.

Toward the Livable City is intended for commuters, suburbanites, and city dwellers concerned about making their lives more livable and interested in knowing what that might mean. Combining first hand accounts of the attractions and distractions of city life, this book also introduces a wide range of perspectives about creating successful, livable cities, with examples from across America and around the world.

The book conveys what leading thinkers—including James Howard Kunstler, Jane Holtz Kay, Tony Hiss, Phillip Lopate, Bill McKibben, Myron Orfield, and john powell, among others—say about such topics as smart growth, opportunity-based housing, traffic calming, pedestrian rights, regional planning, riverfront redevelopment, urban agriculture, and the pleasures of a saunter down tree-lined streets to restaurants, theatres, shops, with the presence of other people.

The mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, closed downtown streets to cars and built bus stops that load and unload passengers with the same speed as subways. In Boston, urban agriculture produces more than 10,000 pounds of vegetables each season. Minneapolis has redeveloped its riverfront while Manhattan ponders what to do along the Hudson. With these and other examples, Toward the Livable City reveals the many benefits of parks, healthy neighborhoods, and mixed use communities.

The western mindset is arguably one of the greatest threats to the world’s ecological balance. Corporatism and globalization are two of the obvious villains here, but what part does human nature play in the problem?

Since its inception in 1982, Orion magazine has been a forum for looking beyond the effects of ecological crises to their root causes in human culture. Less an anthology than a vision statement, this timely collection challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional environmentalism.

Edited and introduced by Barry Lopez, The Future of Nature encompasses such topics as local economies, the social dynamics of activism, America’s incarceration society, naturalism in higher education, developing nations, spiritual ecology, the military-industrial landscape, and the persistent tyranny of wilderness designation. Featuring the fine writing and insights for which Orion is famous, this book is required reading for anyone interested in a livable future for the planet.

WINNER OF THE PHILLIP D. REED MEMORIAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING ON THE SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENT

Beyond the oil-soaked pelican, beyond the oil-soaked beach, beyond the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entirely, there is a deeper story of sacrifice unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Reporters and government officials focused on the smallest part of it: oil gushed into the water for 153 days, then, on September 19, 2010, the well was capped. The story was over. But for David Gessner the unimaginable amount of oil spilled into the ocean was only the beginning.

In The Tarball Chronicles, Gessner eats, drinks, and talks his way into the heart of Gulf country—exploring the region’s birds, sea life, and ecosystems with the oceanographers, activists, and subsistence fishermen who call it home. Just how much, he asks, are we willing to sacrifice to keep living the way we do? Part absurdist travelogue, part manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles is a love song for the Gulf from an author who has “redefined what it means to write about the natural world” (Washington Post).

Bill McKibben’s first book, the bestselling The End of Nature, offered a devastating portrait of the harm human civilization has done to the planet. Hope, Human and Wild sets out on a dramatically different journey to provide examples and hope for a sustainable future, one in which our society’s wealth is measured less by its material productivity and more by its spiritual richness; less by its consumption of resources and more by the extent to which we live in harmony with the natural world.

From the Adirondack Mountains to Kerala, India, to Curitiba, Brazil, McKibben offers clear-eyed and profoundly compelling portraits of places where resourceful people have confronted modern problems with inventive solutions, and thrived in the process.

With an afterword by the author updating developments over the decade since the book was first published, this edition provides a badly needed vision of optimism for the future of our planet.

For eons, female members of the Porcupine caribou herd have made the journey from their winter feeding grounds to their summer calving grounds—which happen to lie on vast reserves of oil. They once roamed borderless wilderness; now they trek from Canada, where they’re protected, to the United States, where they are not.

In April 2003, wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer and filmmaker Leanne Allison set out with the Porcupine caribou herd. Walking along with the animals over four mountain ranges, through hundreds of passes, and across dozens of rivers—a thousand-mile journey altogether, from the Yukon Territory to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and then back again—they reached a new understanding of what is at stake in the debate over drilling for oil.

More than a tale of grand adventure or an activist tract, however, Being Caribou is a “gripping, cinematic tale” (Los Angeles Times) with the “bite of a political tract” (Washington Post) about the power of wilderness and how it returns us to the roots of human instinct. On the caribou’s trail Heuer and Allison learn what is possible when two people immerse themselves in the uniquely wild experience of migration, discovering in the process a different way of being.

In My Green Manifesto, David Gessner embarks on a rough-and-tumble journey down Boston’s Charles River, searching for the soul of a new environmentalism.

With a tragically leaky canoe, a broken cell phone, a cooler of beer, and environmental planner Dan Driscoll in tow, Gessner grapples with the stereotype of the environmentalist as an overzealous, puritanical mess. But as Dan recounts his own story of transforming the famously polluted Charles into an urban haven for wildlife and wild people, the vision of a new sort of eco-champion begins to emerge: someone who falls in love with a forgotten space, and then fights like hell for it.

Considering everything from Edward Abbey’s legacy to Jimmy Carter’s sweater, weaving his intellectual quest with real adventure, Gessner points toward a scrappy environmentalism that, despite all odds, just might change the world. “Heartfelt and informed” (Boston Globe), My Green Manifesto is a spirited call to arms by a major figure on the vanguard of a new environmentalism.

WINNER OF THE PHILLIP D. REED MEMORIAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING ON THE SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENT

Beyond the oil-soaked pelican, beyond the oil-soaked beach, beyond the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entirely, there is a deeper story of sacrifice unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Reporters and government officials focused on the smallest part of it: oil gushed into the water for 153 days, then, on September 19, 2010, the well was capped. The story was over. But for David Gessner the unimaginable amount of oil spilled into the ocean was only the beginning.

In The Tarball Chronicles, Gessner eats, drinks, and talks his way into the heart of Gulf country—exploring the region’s birds, sea life, and ecosystems with the oceanographers, activists, and subsistence fishermen who call it home. Just how much, he asks, are we willing to sacrifice to keep living the way we do? Part absurdist travelogue, part manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles is a love song for the Gulf from an author who has “redefined what it means to write about the natural world” (Washington Post).

At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away.

A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnick’s story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are.

The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of people’s relationship to a world in transition.

When acclaimed author Deni Béchard first learned of the last living bonobos—matriarchal great apes that are, alongside the chimpanzee, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom—he was completely astonished. How could the world possibly accept the extinction of this majestic species?

Béchard discovered one relatively small NGO, the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), which has done more to save bonobos than many far larger organizations. Based on the author’s extensive travels in the Congo and Rwanda, this book explores BCI's success, offering a powerful, truly postcolonial model of conservation. In contrast to other traditional conservation groups Béchard finds, BCI works closely with Congolese communities, addressing the underlying problems of poverty and unemployment, which lead to the hunting of bonobos. By creating jobs and building schools, they gradually change the conditions that lead to the eradication of the bonobos.

This struggle is far from easy. Devastated by the worst military conflict since World War II, the Congo and its forests continue to be destroyed by aggressive logging and mining. Béchard's fascinating and moving account—filled with portraits of the extraordinary individuals and communities who make it all happen offers a rich example of how international conservation must be reinvented before it's too late.

Bonobos have captured the public imagination in recent years, due not least to their famously active sex lives. Less well known is the fact that these great apes don’t kill their own kind, and that they share nearly 99 percent of our DNA. Their approach to building peaceful coalitions and sharing resources has much to teach us, particularly at a time when our violent ways have pushed them to the brink of extinction.

Of Bonobos and Men is the account of acclaimed author Deni Ellis Béchard’s journey into the Congo to understand bonobos and to learn how to save them. Along the way, we see how partnerships between Congolese and Westerners, with few resources but a common purpose and respect for indigenous knowledge, have resulted in the protection of vast swaths of the rainforest. And we discover how small solutions—found through openness, humility, and the principle that “poverty does not equal ignorance”—are often most effective in tackling our biggest challenges.

Combining elements of travelogue, journalism, and natural history, this incomparably rich book takes the reader not only deep into the Congo, but also into our past and future, revealing new ways to save the environment and ourselves.

“How grateful I am for the chance to join this generous author’s lyrical, intimate, and revelatory conversations with birds!” —Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.”

"How grateful I am for the chance to join this generous author’s lyrical, intimate, and revelatory conversations with birds!” —Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.”