While there are plenty of ways to get out and connect with nature in person, reading can allow you to connect with the natural world in ways like never before. Below are some of our staff’s favorite picks about the environment that cover stories both fiction and non-fiction. Happy Reading!
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
With the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous scientist and botanist, asks questions of nature with the assistance of science. She brings these two concepts together as we embark on a journey where she argues that we must acknowledge and celebrate our relationship with the living world in order to awaken our ecological.
The Fate of Food by Amanda Little
Amanda Little, an environmental journalist and professor, investigates the race to secure the global food supply. She collects stories from those on the front lines of agriculture, climate change, and food science to understand how different food production methods could redefine sustainable food.
Overstory by Richard Powers
The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a work of activism that shares interlocking fables that range from eighteenth-century New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest. This story demonstrates how individuals see the world and how they are part of its unfolding catastrophe.
The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham
In The Home Place, readers meet extraordinary characters living in Edgefield County, South Carolina during the 1970s who fall in love with the natural world around on the same land that their ancestors were tied to by forced labor. This novel explores the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.
Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource by David Sedlak
Have you ever thought about how our water system is built and if it’s sustainable? We expect to turn on the faucet and receive an outpouring of clean water as well as pull out the drain to make dirty water disappear. David Sedlak dives into the underappreciated marvels of this engineering and how the challenges it faces can’t be solved unless we transform our relationship with water.
The Private Life of Plants by David Attenborough
Based on the popular six-part BBC program, this novel offers an intimate view of the natural world as Attenborough journeys through rainforests to home gardens showing us things we might never have suspected about the vegetation that surrounds us.