forest

Bill Bryson is not a hiker. That's what makes this book work. His attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his old friend Stephen Katz is equal parts comedy, natural history, and honest reckoning with the American wilderness. Bryson is funny in a way that never undermines the seriousness of the landscape he's walking through.

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.

Kerouac's dark, boozy novel about a crack-up in a cabin on the California coast. Not the Beat celebration people expect — it's a book about a man coming apart, and the Pacific Ocean doesn't care. The descriptions of Big Sur's landscape are some of the most visceral he ever wrote.

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.

Kerouac's novel drawn from his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades and his subsequent travels. Rawer than Dharma Bums, and haunted by the solitude of the mountaintop. The lookout chapters are among the best things he wrote.

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.

Gary Paulsen is one of the all-time masters of children’s literature, and Hatchet is arguably his magnum opus. Ask any adult who read the book as a child and they’ll recount the violent plane crash in the rugged Canadian wilderness, 13-year-old Brian’s realization that he is the lone survivor, his panicked struggle to build a fire, and his ensuing fight for survival armed only with his wits and a trusty hatchet.

Conrad's novella about a journey up the Congo River is the most influential short work of fiction in the English language. Marlow's search for Kurtz is a journey into the center of colonial violence, human capacity for evil, and a darkness that has nothing to do with Africa.

Yossi Ghinsberg's account of being stranded alone in the Bolivian Amazon for three weeks after a backpacking trip went wrong. Starvation, parasites, hallucinations, and a rescue that came just in time. Raw survival narrative.

John Muir's journal of his first summer in the Sierra Nevada in 1869 — the trip that converted him from wanderer to prophet. The ecstasy is genuine. The prose is rapturous. The mountains are still there.

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.

There’s a vocal contingent of present-day adventurers who credit My Side of the Mountain with sparking a lifelong devotion to the outdoors. It’s the story of 12-year-old Sam Gribley, who runs away from home and builds a self-sufficient life in the wilds of the Catskill Mountains. He lives in a hollowed-out hemlock tree, captures and trains a falcon, makes pancakes out of acorns, and engages in other whimsical deeds that have captured the imaginations of generations of adventure-hungry kids.

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.

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.

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.

Three novellas set in Montana — hunting, fishing, and the landscape of the Northern Rockies rendered in prose so vivid it feels like weather.

In the honeysuckle-scented Tennessee summer of 1925, a pedigreed, professionally trained German shepherd is tapped to trade in his fugitive-chasing police work for life as a mountaintop guard dog. Whose ears wouldn’t perk up? This is the true life story of Smoky Jack, as told by his loyal companion Paul J. Adams. With Adams as a naturalist outdoorsman and Smoky Jack for protection, the two became the first caretakers of little-visited Mount Le Conte, nine years before the peak and surrounding hills became Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Together they spent nearly a year under towering hardwoods, red spruce, and massive hemlocks, exploring trail-less ridges and hollows, sniffing out bears and rabbits in the rhododendrons, guiding conservationists and hikers, and blazing paths that many of today's ten million annual visitors still use. Historical images hint of a unique, magical era in our country's past, and if dogs could whistle, one of Smoky Jack’s favorites surely would have been “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

Stay and Fight is land-loving, community-rooted fiction in the tradition of Wendell Berry, though with a little more guerrilla resistance and a lot more sex. Following her boyfriend’s notions of self-reliance, Seattle-raised Helen Conley buys twenty steep, densely wooded acres in Appalachia, but the boyfriend soon abandons her. To everyone’s surprise, Helen stays, inviting a local family, Karen and Lily and their baby boy, to move in and join forces. The resourceful local women butt heads with college-educated Helen and her Foxfire-like “Best Practices Binder”—“look for morels in the creek bed, oyster mushrooms smell like anise”—but together they build a ramshackle off-grid refuge. Years of hard labor, roadkill dinners, and isolation go by, but the outside world eventually comes knocking, then suddenly snarling. How far would you go to protect all that you hold dear? This is one fine rabble-rouser of a tale, as determined as the bite of a snapping turtle.

Off in the future, society has collapsed, leaving behind only a girl and her father as the last people on the planet. They live in an idyllic setting, the stuff of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dreams: a mountainside cabin near a lake, with loons and eagles and trout for neighbors. Together they pick blueberries, grow beets, and hunt and fish for food. The father teaches his daughter how to read the signs of nature, from the night sky to the painted turtle she keeps as a summer pet. Then one dark day, the girl discovers she’s all alone and far, far from home. The Bear has been a bookstore favorite from Miami to Santa Cruz and recently won a Banff Mountain Book Award. Some say it reads like a bedtime story, others feel it’s a post-apocalyptic parable, and I think it’s a little like oatmeal with peanut butter: simple yet satisfying, sticking with you long after you’re done.

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.

Working with green wood in the forest — from felling to finished object, using hand tools and traditional techniques. A manual for making things the slow way.

We first meet Nelson as a 13-year-old Boy Scout in the summer of 1962, his shirt and shorts squeaky clean, sash heavy with merit badges, bowlines impeccable. He strives to be loyal, brave, and kind—terms of the Scout Law. At Camp Chippewa in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Nelson’s the ideal citizen. But his overachieving doesn’t earn any friends until Jonathan, a popular scout, takes an unexpected interest in him. This panoramic coming-of-age novel strides across three American generations, from the echoes of World War I to today in Afghanistan, and from shattering tragedies to sweet first loves. There are times you want to look away from this book, and times you want to hold it close. Through it all, Camp Chippewa remains central, with its tidy tents and fields of lightning bugs. Can the moral compass of summer camp keep us oriented throughout our lives?

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.

Two obsessives in Borneo — one collecting tribal art, the other defending the rainforest. Their stories converge in a place that is being destroyed as fast as it can be documented.

The true story of Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 searching for a lost civilization — and the modern journalist who went looking for him. Grann's investigation into Fawcett's disappearance becomes its own kind of jungle fever.

Bass searching for evidence that grizzly bears still survive in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Part natural history, part quest narrative, part argument that wildness persists in places we've given up on.

Remember how as a kid you shimmied up maples or oaks or elms, never once imagining how as an adult you’d do less and less of this because people would look at you funny? Not only did he never stop, Emmy-winning cameraman James Aldred branched out as a career photographer focused on treetop perspectives; his Twitter account reads “jungle canopy specialist,” and you’ve probably seen his work on the BBC or in National Geographic. A high-spirited memoir, The Man Who Climbs Trees is an enthusiastic love letter to big trees in Borneo, Peru, Australia, Costa Rica, and Northern California, including the tallest known tree on the planet, a nearly 380-foot giant. The life of a tree-climbing artist is not all swaying in the breeze, however—there’s also the risk of cerebral malaria, rope system accidents, and over-curious harpy eagles. In Aldred’s descriptions, the trees are both settings and characters, and you’ll wonder why we don’t yet have a catchy phrase for charismatic mega-arboribus.

Theroux's novel about an American inventor who drags his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia. It goes wrong in every possible way. A dark comedy about American arrogance in the tropics.

A pack of wolves returns to Montana's Ninemile Valley, and Bass documents the collision between wildlife and ranching culture. Short, urgent, and partisan — Bass doesn't pretend to be neutral about wolves.

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.

A comic novel about a young fly-fishing obsessive in the Pacific Northwest who retreats to a cabin on an Oregon river and discovers that catching fish isn't the same as understanding them. The funniest serious fishing novel ever written.

Freeman Dyson designs starships at Princeton; his son George builds a kayak and lives in a treehouse in British Columbia. A book about two kinds of exploration — one into space, one into the wild — and the father-son rift between them.

A man-eating Amur tiger stalks a remote village in the Russian Far East, and a tracker is sent to kill it. Vaillant's narrative is both a thriller and a natural history of the world's largest cat. The tiger is the antagonist. The deforestation that drove it to hunt humans is the real villain.

A granddaughter returns to Taiwan to trace her family's story through the island's mountains, forests, and coastline. Geology, botany, and memory braided together. Quiet and precise.

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.

Deakin's exploration of Britain's woods — coppicing, swimming in forest pools, sleeping in hollow trees. The companion piece to Waterlog, trading rivers for trees.

Bass's journal of a Montana winter — wood-cutting, snowshoeing, and the particular silence of the Yaak Valley under snow. A small book about a cold season in a wild place.

Maclean's investigation of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that killed thirteen smokejumpers in Montana. Written in his eighties, published posthumously. The prose is as precise as his earlier masterpiece, A River Runs Through It, and the subject is more devastating — young men outrun by fire on a steep hillside.