Ecology & Conservation

The companion book to Jeff Johnson's film about retracing the 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Part surf trip, part climbing expedition, part environmental reckoning. Johnson sails, hitchhikes, and climbs his way to the edge of the world — and finds it being sold off piece by piece.

Aldo Leopold's collection of essays from the 1940s is the foundational text of the American conservation movement. Written from his weekend shack in rural Wisconsin, it builds from close observation of cranes and wildflowers to the land ethic — the idea that humans are not conquerors of the land but citizens of it.

Abbey's collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and provocations — distilled from his journals. Some are brilliant. Some are deliberately outrageous. All of them sound like Abbey talking after his third beer, which is exactly the point.

James Glover's biography of the man who founded the Wilderness Society and walked more miles in wild country than anyone of his generation. Marshall was a forester, a civil libertarian, and an indefatigable hiker who once walked 70 miles in a single day. The original wilderness advocate.

A collection of Leopold's wilderness writings, drawn from his essays, letters, and field journals. Complements A Sand County Almanac with deeper cuts — the conservation philosophy in earlier, rougher form.

To fully understand the modern American West, readers must dig deep into the lives, writings, and philosophies of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner. On the surface, the men couldn’t be more different: Abbey, an irreverent, hard-living wildman, and Stegner, a measured, buttoned-up professor. In this double biography, Gessner compares and contrasts the two icons, revealing unexpected commonalities and hypocrisies, giving the reader a new perspective on these two complex characters and their lasting impacts on the West.

Steven Rinella hunts a single buffalo in Alaska and uses that hunt to unspool the entire natural and cultural history of the species — from ice age migration to near-extinction to the strange politics of modern conservation. Part memoir, part natural history, part elegy for a continent that used to shake.

Long before her international fame and a New York Times obituary, O-Six was just another fuzzy wolf pup in Yellowstone National Park’s Northern Range, a descendant of the 1995 gray wolf reintroduction. Her story is brought to life in American Wolf, a work of nonfiction with all the hot-blooded howling of a Jim Harrison novel—romantic drama, bloody turf wars, and seething tensions of social hierarchy among mammals of all stripes, from the wolves themselves to ranchers, ecologists, wolf-watching guides, and elk hunters. Drawing upon thousands of written and multimedia field notes, writer Nate Blakeslee tracks the intertwined lives of O-Six, Yellowstone ranger Rick McIntyre (who documented her every move), and local Wyoming resident Steven Turnbull, a hunter rooted in the ideals of fair chase and living off the land. A 2018 Banff Mountain Book Competition winner, Wolf is a riveting must-read for all who believe in the call of a wilder West.

Terry Tempest Williams's essay collection about desire, wildness, and the body's relationship to landscape. The writing is sensual and fierce. Williams doesn't separate the erotic from the ecological — they're the same hunger.

Craig Childs visits the places where the planet's future is already visible — ice sheets, deserts, flooded coastlines — and reports back with the eye of a naturalist and the fatalism of a geologist. The earth has ended before. It will end again. Childs just wants to know what that looks like.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker reframes environmental justice through an Indigenous lens, arguing that the mainstream environmental movement has consistently failed Native communities. From treaty rights to pipeline protests, a clear-eyed history of who gets to define 'environment.'

Annie Proulx's epic novel traces two families across 300 years of North American deforestation. It begins in the forests of New France in 1693 and ends in the present, and its argument is both historical and urgent: we have been cutting trees since the day we arrived, and we have not stopped.

Justin Farrell's sociology of Teton County, Wyoming — the wealthiest county in America and a case study in what happens when the ultra-rich buy the landscape. Conservation as class privilege. Wilderness as real estate. A book that will make you uncomfortable.

Carolyn Finney examines why American wilderness has been coded as white space — and what that erasure has cost. Part history, part cultural criticism, part personal reckoning. Essential reading for anyone who thinks the outdoors belongs to everyone but hasn't asked why it doesn't feel that way.

Camille Dungy's anthology traces Black nature writing from the colonial era to the present. The poems challenge the assumption that nature writing is a white tradition. Dungy's introduction alone is worth the book.

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.

East of the Mississippi, the big cats of North America have been driven to extinction in every state except Florida, where a small population of panthers not only hangs on, but has made an improbable revival. Longtime Tampa Bay Times journalist Craig Pittman spent decades tracking the panther's story into muggy palmetto thickets and air-conditioned boardrooms to pen Cat Tale, an environmental exposé that reads like a hard-boiled detective novel. We’re talking about the Sunshine State, so there are alligator wrestlers, a bow hunter nicknamed Scuttlebutt, and many murky undrained swamps, but Pittman reports the only-in-Florida fixings with sharp wit and clear affection for his home. If you thought the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone was the only major wildlife recovery of late, Cat Tale will inspire you with its cast of heroes, from whistleblowers to biologists to the panthers themselves. Who doesn’t love a good comeback story?

Abbey's journals, published posthumously. Raw, unfiltered, sometimes ugly, always alive. This is Abbey without the craft — the notebook version of the man who wrote Desert Solitaire. Essential for anyone who loves his work and wants to see the machinery behind it.

Paul Kingsnorth's essays about giving up on mainstream environmentalism and finding something harder and more honest in its place. Kingsnorth argues that most green activism is just another form of progress worship. Uncomfortable, necessary, beautifully written.

Amy Irvine's response to Desert Solitaire — a woman's reckoning with Abbey's legacy, the modern West, and what it means to love a landscape that's being loved to death. Sharp, personal, and willing to take on the old man.

Edward Abbey spent two seasons as a ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s and wrote the book that defined the literature of the American desert. It's cantankerous, beautiful, politically furious, and deeply in love with red rock and silence. The chapter on floating the Colorado River before the dams is an elegy for a world that no longer exists.

Mark Spence's history of how America's national parks were created by removing the indigenous people who lived in them. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier — each park was somebody's home before it was nobody's. Essential and uncomfortable.

Bill McKibben argues that we no longer live on Earth — we live on a different planet, one he spells Eaarth, where the climate has already changed enough to make the old assumptions obsolete. Not a book about preventing disaster. A book about living in one.

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.

What happens when legendary environmentalist and Sierra Club founder David Brower is forced to spend time with a miner, a real estate developer, and a dam builder? Exactly what you’d expect: fiery arguments, ideological head-butting, and alpha-male posturing, all in the name the protection (or destruction) of our wild places. A tantalizing storyline when told by anyone, but when written by master wordsmith John McPhee, the book becomes a classic piece of environmental literature.

Terry Tempest Williams could write a grocery list that speaks truth to power. In this new collection of essays from one of America’s most devoted defenders of public lands, she examines the nature of erosion—on our riverbanks and desert mesas, but also on us. Is it destruction or metamorphosis when we’re shaped by the elements of wind and fire, time and truth? And what of democracy, weathered by storms? In these stories, we visit with the native peoples of Bears Ears National Monument, the owls that swoop by Williams’s porch, and protestors, politicians, and prairie dogs—singular characters, all. We consider policy and spirituality, the suicide of a brother, the rockslides of desecration. But even through the despair, these essays rise to a hymn, a summons to howl. Erosion is a tonic, like the landscape of the Colorado Plateau, of which Williams says: “One drinks deeply from this well-spring of wonder, especially in drought.”

Wild foods such as venison, foraged berries and greens, and gathered seafood made up nearly half of the American diet just two hundred years ago—to eat was to be wholly connected with seasons and place. Since then, they’ve become a luxury or even black market item, and today most of the developed world will never have the opportunity to eat anything truly uncultivated. Geographer and environmental anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva asks, “So many edible species and varietals have disappeared to standardization, uniformity, and predictable tastes. What pleasures are we missing?” In her global search for answers, she tries flash-frozen wood ants in Copenhagen (tastes like sour sprinkles), examines the relationship between hunting and conservation in the Congo, and ponders the future of lobsters on the Maine coast. Sensuous and ceaselessly curious, Feasting Wild is the next best thing to breaking bread around a campfire with John Muir and M.F.K. Fisher.

Elizabeth Kolbert's early climate reporting, before The Sixth Extinction made her famous. She travels to melting glaciers, drowning islands, and warming permafrost, building the case with the same calm, devastating clarity that defines all her work.

Terry Tempest Williams mosaic-making in Ravenna, prairie dog research in Utah, genocide aftermath in Rwanda. Three seemingly unrelated subjects braided into a meditation on pattern, destruction, and the human need to assemble meaning from fragments.

Abbey's sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang — more sabotage, more desert, more defiance. Written in the last year of his life and published posthumously. Not as tight as the original, but animated by the same furious love of the land.

Tristan Gooley teaches you to read the natural world — shadows, wind, animal behavior, plant growth — as a system of signs. The outdoors as a text, and Gooley as the translator.

Doug Peacock connects the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions to the modern biodiversity crisis. The sabretooth is the metaphor — we killed them, and we haven't stopped killing. Peacock at his angriest and most urgent.

Mark Woods spent a year visiting national parks while his father was dying. The parks become a framework for thinking about beauty, family, and what we preserve.

Yvon Chouinard's business memoir and environmental manifesto. How a blacksmith who made climbing gear in his garage built Patagonia into a billion-dollar company without abandoning his principles. The most influential outdoor business book ever written.

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.

Jordan Fisher Smith spent fourteen years as a ranger in the American River canyons — the land that was supposed to be flooded by Auburn Dam but never was. He write from a place of great knowing about a landscape caught between preservation and neglect, with meth labs, murders, drownings, and wildfire countered by moments of wonder.

Kelly Brenner's guide to the natural world hiding in urban environments — the ecology of cities, from sidewalk mosses to peregrine falcons nesting on skyscrapers.

Bill McKibben's memoir of a year spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline and learning to keep bees in Vermont. The activist and the beekeeper as parallel lives — one loud, one quiet, both essential.

Wade Davis's masterwork — the story of his mentor Richard Evans Schultes's botanical explorations in the Amazon, interleaved with Davis's own journeys through the same rivers and forests decades later. A double narrative about plants, indigenous knowledge, and the vanishing of both.

The scientific investigation behind The Serpent and the Rainbow — the ethnobotany of Haitian zombie powder, Vodou pharmacology, and the boundary between death and not-death. Academic but riveting.

Annie Dillard spent a year watching the natural world around a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. What she produced is less nature writing than nature theology — a mystic's journal of attention so fierce it borders on violence. The prose is extraordinary. The seeing is harder.

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.

Essays about the red rock desert of southern Utah — its ecology, its politics, its hold on the imagination. The desert as lover, as teacher, as the thing that won't let go.

Terry Tempest Williams watched the Great Salt Lake rise and flood the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge while her mother was dying of cancer. The book braids the two losses — landscape and family — into something that feels inevitable. Williams writes about grief the way Abbey writes about anger: without flinching.

Travels among indigenous cultures in Borneo, Haiti, the Amazon, and the high Arctic — each journey an encounter with a radically different way of being human. The fieldwork that fed decades of books and lectures.

This landmark exposé is the result of the nearly two decades that biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson spent in the weeds, studying the damaging effects of synthetic pesticide use on environmental and human health. Its release drew plenty of venom from chemical giants like DuPont, but it also led to a ban on the use of DDT and galvanized a surge in environmental activism that would, among other things, pave the way for the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

How diseases jump from animals to humans — Ebola, SARS, HIV, and the next pandemic. Quammen spent years tracking viruses through jungles and labs, and the book reads like a thriller because the threat is real. Published in 2012. Everything in it proved correct.

Dillard's essay collection — shorter and stranger than Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and in some ways more powerful. Each essay is an act of attention so concentrated it feels like prayer.

We know that public lands in the United States are under threat, but author Mark Kenyon shows us that they have been since the beginning of the republic. In his debut book, Kenyon lays out the contentious history of U.S lands and profiles some of the modern-day scuffles led by groups ranging from extractive energy corporations to mobs of gun-toting insurrectionists. That Wild Country will leave you better informed, more in love with public lands, and poised to step up and protect them.

Selected writing spanning the career — from The End of Nature to climate activism. The evolution of America's most important environmental writer, from quiet essayist to arrested protester.

Bass's manifesto for the Yaak Valley — the last wild valley in Montana, under constant threat from logging. Part nature writing, part plea, part rage. Bass has been fighting for this place for thirty years.

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.

The book that introduced climate change to a general audience in 1989. The argument was simple: by altering the atmosphere, we have ended the thing we called nature — the world that existed independent of human will. Everything since has confirmed it.

At their population height, an estimated fifty thousand grizzly bears lived in the Lower 48 states, ambling from Alaska to Mexico and the Great Plains to California’s coast. Over the nineteenth century, humans hunted Ursus arctos horriblis to extinction in most states, and by 1980 only a few hundred remained, mostly around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Endangered Species Act protection gave the bears a chance to claw back from the brink, and now more than two thousand grizzlies hang their hats in the American West, rubbing shoulders with the region’s dominant species, Homo sapiens, sometimes with deadly consequences. Informed by a lifetime of residing, reporting, and hiking in grizzly country, Montana journalist Robert Chaney investigates the growing clash in his broadly researched The Grizzly in the Driveway. With perspectives from mountain bikers, tribal leaders, biologists, technology experts, and North America’s strongest animal, Chaney offers a wholehearted, big-thinking primer on the dilemma of coexistence and the control of nature.

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.

Williams visits twelve national parks and writes about each one as a meditation on American identity, public land, and what we choose to preserve. Personal, political, and unapologetically in love with the idea of public wilderness.

Four misfits wage war on development in the American Southwest — burning billboards, cutting fences, and plotting to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. Funny, profane, and dead serious about the land it loves. The book that launched environmental direct action.

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” If you’re reading AJ, you probably live by this John Muir quote, and you definitely don’t need a brain scan or stress hormone report to convince you nature is a good, good thing. But author Florence Williams, a skeptical New Yorker at heart, asks a reasonable question: why? She takes us around the world in The Nature Fix, a wide-ranging nonfiction tour of the science behind nature’s effect on humans. Meet Japanese researchers analyzing the mental health benefits of “forest bathing,” neuroscientists in Utah mapping connections between adventure and problem-solving skills, and Korean immunologists studying how short bursts of nature enhance cancer-killing cells. From gritty urban park trails to the Idaho wilderness, it’s a heady, thought-provoking investigation that even minimalist Muir would have packed into the backcountry, snug between his bread and tea.

Many dream of the camping trip that never ends. Surely our best selves are found in nature, right? In Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness, a mother saves her daughter from pollution-induced asthma by moving to the Wilderness State, an experimental preserve where a small group of volunteers live nomadically as hunter-gatherers. The air is clean, the water runs clear, and the night sky sparkles. There’s also a Manual, capital M, a sort of Leave No Trace set of rules to keep the Wilderness State pristine, and Rangers for reinforcement. All effort is toward survival; when a person dies—from a cougar mauling, river crossing, or simply being left behind due to injury—there are no funerals. As years go by, the utopian vision oozes into disturbing desperation. Fans of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood will love this dark, all-too-real story of our relationship with nature and each other.

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 Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, knows how to build a fire. The Overstory has earned the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, thousands of impassioned reader reviews (both good and bad but mostly good), and, more important, the wholehearted love of the Lorax. In this novel (and in real life, too), the trees are as alive as the people—mulberries bleed, chestnuts groan, walnuts choke—and they create communities, transform the landscape, and talk nonstop: “We’d drown you in meaning” if only humans knew how to listen. Though massive as a redwood, Overstory’s tiniest moments whirl cinematically, like maple seeds spinning, searching for a spot to take root.

McPhee's portrait of the million-acre wilderness in the middle of New Jersey — a landscape most people don't know exists, populated by people who've been there since before the Revolution. Classic McPhee: the hidden world revealed.

The business philosophy behind Patagonia — environmental responsibility as a corporate practice, not a marketing strategy. A companion to Let My People Go Surfing, more focused on the supply chain.

The popular account of the Haitian zombie investigation — Vodou, pharmacology, and a Harvard ethnobotanist in over his head. The book that made Wade Davis famous, and the one he's been trying to live down since.

Abbey's collected essays — the best of his shorter nonfiction, from desert solitude to environmental rage to the pleasure of watching a rattlesnake. The one-volume introduction to Abbey's voice.

The Pulitzer-winning investigation into the current mass extinction event. Kolbert visits the sites where species are disappearing — coral reefs, rainforests, bat caves — and builds the case that we are living through the sixth great extinction, and we are its cause.

Roosevelt before the presidency — ranching in the Dakota Badlands, hunting, and recovering from the death of his wife. The landscape that made the conservationist president.

My dad, a law-abiding rural county detective, always surprised me with his frequent humming of “Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band: “Hey! What gives you the right? To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep Mother Nature in.” Yet while the urge to roam freely might be universal, the U.S. is veering sharply toward a fenced-in future. Ken Ilgunas earned a following with his 2013 Walden on Wheels, and thank goodness he’s back with This Land is Your Land: part polemic, part travel story across America, and part primer on the history of land use laws. The Swedes call it allemansrätten and in Great Britain it’s the “right to roam”—an average citizen’s license to wander on publicly or privately owned land. How often do you encounter “No Trespassing” signs while camping, hiking, or just walking around the block? Before Americans need a membership card to get outside, everyone who moves should read this book.

An indictment of how public lands in the West are managed — for ranchers, miners, and developers, not for the land itself. Ketcham names names and doesn't flinch. Angry, documented, and necessary.

Peacock walking off Vietnam in the American wilderness. The companion piece to Grizzly Years — less about bears, more about the war that sent him to the bears in the first place.

A thru-hike along the wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon — following the path that grizzlies, wolves, and caribou need to survive. Conservation biology on foot.

McKibben walks from his home in Vermont to his other home in the Adirondacks, through a landscape where conservation and community are working. The optimistic McKibben — rarer than the angry one, and just as persuasive.

Bass's memoir of moving to Montana's Yaak Valley and spending decades defending it. The personal story behind the activism — why a man from Texas chose the wildest place in the Lower 48 and refused to leave.

A memoir of regenerative ranching, wildness, and the rewilding of a life. Markegard raises livestock in partnership with the land — predators included.