5 Nonfiction Books about Nature and the Environment (Updated with 8 more books!)

by Jen Moyers (@jen.loves.books)

Update: It's been four years since I posted this list, and we've circled around again with our Reading Challenge. This year's category is "Book about the environment." Since then, I've continued to read in this area, hoping both to broaden and deepen my knowledge of books I can share with my students . . . and just to learn more. (I've marked new books with an asterisk.)

This year's Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge includes the category "Read a book (fiction or nonfiction) that addresses nature or the environment." This has been a goal of mine recently, as well, both because of my current teaching position at a school with an environmental science focus and because this is an area that feels increasingly important. Here, I'm sharing five nonfiction picks (plus some extras in the writeups!); I'll share some fiction choices soon!

Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Abbey's memoir, published in 1968, includes reflections of his time as a park ranger at Arches National Park. He's a character—sometimes quite cantankerous in his vision of the right way to approach conservation—and his writing is lovely and reveals a distinct opinion on our approaches to nature. Abbey is writing at a transitional time for the National Park Service and for the American definition of what it means to have access to nature while still preserving it.

*Nancy Castaldo's When the World Runs Dry: Earth's Water in Crisis (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

"What would you do if you turned on the faucet one day and nothing happened? What if you learned the water in your home was harmful to drink? Water is essential for life on this planet, but not every community has the safe, clean water it needs. In When the World Runs Dry, award-winning science writer Nancy Castaldo takes readers from Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, to Iran and Cape Town, South Africa, to explore the various ways in which water around the world is in danger, why we must act now, and why you’re never too young to make a difference.

"Topics include: Lead and water infrastructure problems, pollution, fracking contamination, harmful algal blooms, water supply issues, rising sea levels, and potential solutions."

This book is an engaging deep dive into important issues written in an informative, engaging way for young people. There are stories focused on the people affected by, for instance, the Flint, MI, water crisis, as well as realistic ways to identify problems and to help solve them. This is an important, timely read that I'll be sharing with my children and my students.

*Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Fans of Erin Brockovich should pick up Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, an amazing nonfiction book delving into a horrific instance of environmental negligence that impacts a town's water and causes the deaths of multiple children; Harr focuses on the machinations of the legal system that make justice so difficult to achieve.

Synopsis:

"After finding that her child is diagnosed with leukemia, Anne Anderson notices a high prevalence of leukemia, a relatively rare disease, in her city. Eventually she gathers other families and seeks a lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, to consider their options.

"Schlichtmann originally decides not to take the case due to both the lack of evidence and a clear defendant. Later picking up the case, Schlichtmann finds evidence suggesting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town's water supply by Riley Tannery, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods; a chemical company, W. R. Grace; and another company named Unifirst.

"In the course of the lawsuit Schlichtmann gets other attorneys to assist him. He spends lavishly as he had in his prior lawsuits, but the length of the discovery process and trial stretch all of their assets to their limit."

*Sabrina Imbler's How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Sabrina Imbler's How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures is an essay collection that weaves together Imbler's own memoir, centered on her identity as a queer, biracial woman, and her investigations into the lives of sea creatures ranging from the common goldfish to the Chinese sturgeon.

The blending of memoir and science essay allows Imbler to find unique connections that help her to illuminate both environmental and conservational concerns (and just some really cool animal stories) and the way she has come to understand who she is. Her writing is strong and compelling, beautifully evoking the lives of creatures that are often dismissed or misunderstood. I found this to be reminiscent of Sy Montgomery's writing (particularly How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals) and of Patrik Svensson's The Book of Eels.

*Nick Jans's The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (Bookshop.org)

I've been fascinated by the story of Timothy Treadwell since I watched Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man, so when I found this classroom set of books about Treadwell, I was eager to read it.⠀

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Interestingly, Nick Jans's account of Treadwell's life and horrific death differs quite a lot from Herzog's portrayal. Both points of view agree that Treadwell is, at least in part, responsible for his own death and the death of his girlfriend, but Jans is more forgiving of some of the decisions that Treadwell made. This is a thorough exploration of the forces that brought Treadwell to Alaska, of the ways that he interacted with bears and publicized those interactions, of his death, and of the aftermath.⠀

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Overall, this is a thoughtful book that raises interesting questions about the ways that humans interact with nature and of the impact that interaction can have.⠀

*Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

"Since everyone had told me I couldn't do both [botany and poetry], I'd chosen plants. [They] told me that science was not about beauty, not about the embrace between plants and humans" (Kimmerer 41).

I could have chosen any one of a thousand quotations here to represent the beauty and wisdom that saturates Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. (I seriously used SO many book darts!) Kimmerer's writing blends poetry and deep, scientific understanding; shares both Indigenous ways of knowing and the modern understandings that dovetail with tradition.

Kimmerer writes in essays which work well as standalones but also build on each other, so I took my time with this one but definitely built momentum as I processed her ideas. It's a lovely, challenging, illuminating read.

Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Kolbert's book examines the Anthropocene era, the current geological age in which human activity is the primary influence on our world. She examines unprecedented patterns of extinction and irreversible changes in nature, examining everything from bats to frogs to the coral reef in accessible journalistic writing that blends scientific discussions with her own reflections. It's a compelling, often horrifying, and incredibly important book. Kolbert is also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bookshop.org), a series of essays that approaches the climate crisis from a slightly different angle.

Nick Offerman's Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Offerman's book—which I highly recommend on audio!—is divided into three sections, all put together with a central quest given to him by Wendell Berry, a noted nature writer and novelist. Berry challenged Offerman to explore nature and to compare the outlooks of Aldo Leopold (his A Sand County Almanac [Bookshop.org | Libro.fm] is another great read) and John Muir. Offerman divides his book-form-response into three sections: a journey through Glacier National Park with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and George Saunders, noted writer; an adventure in England with James Rebanks who lives and writes of a pastoral, sustainable life style; and a cross-country trip in an Airstream with his wife, Megan Mullalley. The book is quite funny, of course, but it also shares a sincere and serious perspective on how we should be living in cooperation with nature rather than against it.

Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years (Bookshop.org)

Peacock, a companion of Abbey's (who wrote the aforementioned Desert Solitaire), retreated to nature after his service in Vietnam. As he worked through his recovery, he found a new home in and around grizzlies. While he never bonds with them or considers them to be his friends—this isn't that kind of book, thank goodness—he does develop a fascination with them and becomes an expert on their behavior and how they've been affected by humans. This is another book that considers the implications of conservation: it's a nuanced, moving portrait of both the world and of the author.

*Hannah Ritchie's Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

"Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year until decades pass and the world has been altered beyond recognition. . . . My job is not to do original studies, or to make scientific breakthroughs. It's to understand what we already know. Or could know if we studied the information we have properly" (5).

"Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it's having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference. We can shape the future, and we can build a great one if we want to" (9).

This was a revelatory book for me, one that offers an important, optimistic view of the fight against climate change and toward sustainability.

Ritchie's viewpoint is not, as she clarifies, one of "complacent optimism." Instead, she advocates for "conditional optimism," the idea that—while the situation facing our civilization is incredibly serious—there has been progress toward a sustainable planet, and there's hope for continued progress in the future.

The book's chapters, after the introduction laying out her viewpoint, each take on a different issue (air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing). In each chapter, Ritchie begins with a section "How we got to now," updates "where we are today," and then offers recommendations about what we can do to build on any progress that has been made. She also includes a section on the areas we often worry about that don't make all that much of a difference, systemically.

What I loved most about this book is how empowering it is. She never shies away from acknowledging the seriousness of each problem she considers, but she also discusses the ways that false or confusing media narratives have driven us to misunderstand the implications of some statistics (or the statistics themselves). Ritchie never makes light of how difficult some of the changes she recommends will be, but they are eminently realistic. This was just the book I needed to start off the year. I absolutely loved it. . . 

*Patrik Svensson's The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

5 Things about Patrik Svensson's The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World:⠀

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1. I'm not sure that I would have picked up this one if it weren't for Unabridged, but I L-O-V-E-D it. It is beautiful and moving and perfect. It would be perfect for book clubs! (We have a Discussion Guide available for it on Teachers Pay Teachers, if you're interested!)⠀

2. This book is about eels, but it's also about Svensson's relationship with his father, told through the lens of the author's childhood spent fishing for eels on their family farm. His memories are lovely, a tribute to the strength and surprising tenderness of his father, a working man who found time to connect with nature.⠀

3. Svensson sees the history of eels as a multi-faceted story involving Sigmund Freud and science, Rachel Carson and environmental science, and Günter Grass and literature. He teaches about the role of the eels in the first Thanksgiving and the ways that scientists over centuries have been drawn in by the mysteries of the eels' migration.⠀

4. Eels are a marvel, transforming through multiple stages in which they are—essentially—different beings with completely different characteristics, which contributed to the scientific lack of understanding of the species.⠀

5. Svensson's meditations on eels reveal the ways that they serve as a symbol, of culture, of industry, of a way of life.⠀

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I had no way of knowing how much I would love this book, but I'm so, so glad that I read it.

Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Bookshop.org)

Williams weaves together memoir and nature writing with gorgeous writing and truths highlighted by juxtaposing the environmental impact of changes in the Great Salt Lake (particularly on a bird refuge with which Williams has a deep connection) and the slow, agonizing death of her mother. Williams is asking some deep questions here about when we should use our scientific knowledge to intervene in natural processes, in whether those "natural" processes are natural or in actuality have been brought about by previous decisions and actions, and in what our role is as allies in choosing acceptance vs. resistance. This type of nonfiction is wonderful in its blend of the personal and the universal—it reminds me of another favorite, Patrik Svensson's The Book of Eels (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), which paired Svensson's relationship with his father (which involved a lot of eel fishing) and different facets of eels in our world.

*Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Wohlleben, a German forester, here shares his great knowledge in bite-sized essays that unveil the true marvels of trees and forests. He talks about the ways that trees support each other—sometimes sharing food or sending warnings about potential pests; the ways that well-intentioned human intervention can alter a near-perfect system; and the ways that trees have adapted—or tried to adapt—to a world whose pace of change far exceeds their own. It's a lovely work that reveals on every page the author's true love for his subject.

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