nature

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.

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.

Le Anne Schreiber's memoir of leaving New York to live alone in rural upstate. A quiet book about solitude, observation, and what happens when you stop moving. The landscape is the Catskills; the subject is attention.

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.

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.

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.

Dillard's selected essays, drawn from across her career. The best introduction to her work — from Tinker Creek to the Arctic to the writing desk. The prose is a force of nature.

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.

Gooley teaches outdoor navigation without instruments — reading wind, water, trees, stars, and animal behavior. A book that makes you feel illiterate in a language you should have known all along.

Gooley on how to see the outdoors — not with instruments but with attention. Every walk becomes a reading exercise once you know what the trees, clouds, and puddles are telling you.

A full course in navigation without instruments. Every chapter is a revelation — how moss grows, why puddles form where they do, what the stars are telling you. After reading it, you'll never walk without noticing again.

“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.

The most advanced Gooley — how to read animal behavior, weather patterns, and landscape features to predict what's about to happen. Nature as a dynamic text, constantly updating.

Macdonald's essay collection after H Is for Hawk — swifts, wild boar, mushrooms, and the act of paying attention to nonhuman lives. Each essay is a small masterpiece of noticing.

The most recent Gooley — advanced natural navigation, from reading clouds to interpreting animal tracks. The outdoors as an endless curriculum.

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.

Essays on nature writing as a practice — the craft, the tradition, and the writers who defined it. A companion for anyone trying to put landscape into words.