Prairie & Plains

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.

Rick Bass writes about hunting, family, and the Texas Hill Country with the same lyrical intensity he brings to everything. Four generations of deer hunters, one landscape, and the question of what it means to take a life from a place you love.

The first volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows two young Texans who ride into Mexico in 1949 looking for a way of life that's already vanishing. The horsemanship is real. The landscape is merciless. The prose is some of the finest in the English language.

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.

Abbey's novel about a New Mexico rancher fighting the government's attempt to seize his land for a missile range. Less well-known than his desert nonfiction but equally defiant. The old man on the mountain is Abbey's purest fictional self.

Ian Frazier drove back and forth across the Great Plains for years, collecting stories, histories, and observations about the most overlooked landscape in America. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, missile silos, and abandoned towns — Frazier finds everything. A masterpiece of American nonfiction.

Gretel Ehrlich's novel set in Wyoming during World War II, when a Japanese American internment camp was built in the shadow of the Absaroka Range. Landscape and injustice, cattle ranches and barbed wire. Ehrlich writes Wyoming the way nobody else can.

Ian Frazier spent years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, befriending an Oglala Sioux man named Le War Lance. The result is a book about poverty, history, humor, and the resilience of a people who've survived everything America has done to them.

The second McCarthy border novel — a young man crosses into Mexico to return a wolf to the wild. The wolf doesn't survive. Neither does the old world McCarthy is eulogizing. The prose is as good as anything written in the twentieth century.

In the 30 years since this collection was released, Rick Bass’s name has become firmly lodged in American literature, especially in the canons of the environment and the West, yet too few know these three short pieces of fiction that stem from early in the petroleum geologist-turned-writer’s career. In “The Myth of Bears,” a wife tries to run away from her trapper husband and the harsh Yukon wilderness. With “Where the Sea Used to Be,” Wallis Featherstone and his dog Dudley search for oil in the Mississippi Delta: “Looking for the thing, the things no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love." And in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” a woman explores a fierce intimacy with her family’s land in West Texas. At only 189 pages, this is a book best read by headlamp under a brightly lit, starkly beautiful, unsentimental night sky.

Ehrlich moved to Wyoming to recover from grief and found a landscape vast enough to hold it. Ranch life, winter storms, and the particular silence of the high plains. One of the essential books about the American West.

Adventurers obsess over self-reliance and paring down, taking only what’s absolutely needed. Simplicity begets style, we like to say. Unless you’re living in a utopian commune, that is—then we roll our eyes at such wooly-headed minimalism. But what really happens when we strip away everything but the necessities? So asks Mark Sundeen in The Unsettlers, an observant investigation into the lives of three American families pursuing “radical simplicity,” where making dinner and even personal entertainment become adventurous. Can streamlined lives remain relevant? And hasn’t every other generation asked this question? There aren’t many answers here, only inquiries, which sounds heavy, but Sundeen and the people he profiles are bracingly smart, fun, and non-preachy. The Unsettlers asks us not to change our ways, but to pause and study the trail we’re on—good habits for any explorer.

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.

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.

“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter living with nomadic Kazakh herders. Who knew wrangling camels could be laugh out loud funny? Li, from northwestern China’s Altai Mountains, struggles to find anyone willing to take her on their journey to the remote and windy tundra. But her mother remembers a family that owes them money, and they quickly agree; Li will be free labor and an easy way to cancel the debt. With several hundred camels, sheep, horses, and cows, together they venture by foot and horseback into the frozen steppes, where the night temps dip beyond twenty below and shelter is a tiny underground burrow. Li is a darling guide, and she writes candidly, evoking the beauty and harshness that comes with this close-to-the-earth way of life. A bestseller in China recently translated into English, Winter Pasture is the most delightful book I’ve read all year.

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