Milkweed Editions

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together indigenous wisdom and botanical science to argue that plants and people are meant to be in relationship. Each essay is an act of attention — to moss, to strawberries, to the grammar of animacy in the Potawatomi language. The book that made a generation rethink what it means to be a naturalist.

Rick Bass writes about the Yaak Valley of Montana — the wildest place in the Lower 48 — and the fight to protect it. Bass has spent decades arguing for the Yaak's wilderness designation. These essays are the sound of a man who won't stop.

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard in rural Georgia, surrounded by the remnants of the longleaf pine forest that once covered the South. Her memoir alternates chapters of family history with natural history of the ecosystem — poverty and beauty tangled together.

David Gessner paddles the Charles River from its source to Boston Harbor, arguing for an environmentalism rooted in joy and wildness rather than guilt and abstraction.

“Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.” Like a sled dog nose down on the trail, Ordinary Wolves pulls you without hesitation into a life different from what most will ever know—sub-freezing “no-sun winters,” the smell of seal oil at dinner, worrying about whether a moose could crash through the ground-level skylight of your sod igloo. But this wild world is the only one young Cutuk Hawcly has ever known. Raised on the Alaskan tundra with his brother, sister, and idealistic father a day’s sled-drive from neighbors, Cutuk has grown up fishing, hunting, and everyday living on the remote Kuguruk River. He aspires to the on-the-land intuition of hunter Enuk Wolfglove, yet when 12-year-old Cutuk visits the closest village—with its snowmobiles and bright nylon jackets—the native kids choke him in a headlock because he is white and “hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners…” As Cutuk grows up, the Arctic old ways and the modern world clash over and over. Which path to follow? Ordinary Wolves is fiction, but author Seth Kantner is no tenderfoot. His parents moved to the northern Alaska wilderness in the 1950s and his dad apprenticed to an Iñupiaq couple in Arctic survival, decades earlier than today’s many reality show survivalists (and yes, even before Dick Proenneke got fish-hungry). Cutuk’s story is at times funny and other times brutally raw, inspired by real people and real emotions in a landscape often overly romanticized. It shines firelight on the true, unapologetic Last Frontier we’ve been seeking since Jack London was just a wolf pup. The book earned some moose-sized praise when first published, yet many don’t know Ordinary Wolves outside of the Northwest. It’s up for statewide Alaska Reads programming this year, and we’ve heard from friends who’ve read it six-plus times and counting. A tenth anniversary edition is now out—it’s howling to be rediscovered.

Collected letters — to friends, enemies, editors, and the government. The private Abbey, funnier and more tender than the public one, still furious about the same things.

Growing up Iñupiat in the Alaska bush — subsistence hunting, snowmachines, and a childhood measured in seasons rather than school years. A memoir of a life lived closer to the land than almost anyone in modern America.

An anthology of nature writing by people of color — voices that have been present in the landscape all along but absent from the genre. Essential correction to a tradition that has been overwhelmingly white.

Raised in rural South Carolina on his grandmother’s farm, Lanham found kinship with the natural world, building new roots on the same lands upon which his ancestors were once enslaved. His memoir unspools across a series of poetic, yet unflinching essays about home, land, relationships, race, and, of course, birds that dispel the notion that it’s only the bold-named white naturalists of yore who deserve a spot in the classic nature-writing canon.

Remembering a teenage incident, Aimee Nezhukumatathil suggests responding to a would-be friend’s insult like an axolotl, the Mexican salamander that appears serene, yet “when it eats—what a wild mess—when it gathers a tangle of bloodworms into its mouth, you will understand how a galaxy first learns to spin in the dark, and how it begins to grow and grow.” Braiding the microscopic with the universal in her memoir essay collection, World of Wonders, the award-winning poet and American-raised daughter of a Filipino mom and Indian father writes of nature as an elemental part of who we are. With imaginative prose dipping from joyful to bittersweet, Nezhukumatathil reveals lessons about identity, race, love, and family distilled from the navigation of an indigo bunting, the echolocation of a narwhal, or the defensive moves of the touch-me-not plant. This beautifully illustrated little book is one of the best things ever to happen to nature writing.