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Nature » Nature Writing
Most recommended books.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
“This book taught me that careful attention to the living world could be celebrated and explored with rich, sensual language. After sipping for the first two decades of my life on watered-down wine, here was a glass overflowing with blood-red delight. Each taste revealed new layers. I truly got drunk on her writing. After reading this book, there was no going back for me.” David George Haskell , Biologist
Findings by Kathleen Jamie
“ Findings , and her later books of essays, are suffused with wit and insight, conveyed in prose so clear, subtly balanced, and powerful that I often put down the book, temporarily stunned. Then I start reading again, with a huge smile of appreciation and admiration. She is renowned for careful observations and reflections that erase the boundaries between the so-called “natural” and human worlds. This erasure—or blurring—is especially important in Scotland, a nation that writers from elsewhere have repeatedly described through a romantic naturalist lens, seeking “wild” refuge and even claiming the landscape as their own.” David George Haskell , Biologist
The Peregrine by JA Baker
“Baker turned his bulging set of ornithological field journals into a 120-page prose poem. It’s astonishingly energy-filled.” Robert Macfarlane , Literary Scholar
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
“Abbey is full of passion, fury and contempt – a fiery fighter to shake up the sometimes over-tranquil atmosphere of nature writing.” Robert Macfarlane , Literary Scholar
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
” this book doesn’t directly address climate change. That’s one of the things I love about it. We so often hear about the Arctic in the context of threats: it’s disappearing, it’s changing, we’ll never see it again. I think it’s useful, though, to stop thinking of the Arctic only as a symbol of climate change and to remember it’s a real place. If we appreciate the Arctic for itself, maybe that makes it harder to write it off as an inevitable casualty of climate change………..I included Arctic Dreams on my list because it’s the only ‘science’ book I’ve read that’s really got close to my experience of doing science. It’s meandering and there’s no real structure; there are seriously pages and pages describing how ice melts in great detail. And then a meditation on musk oxen, and then some more ice melting. It’s all a bit of a mess, but there’s a real sense of wonder and gratitude and beauty that permeate the book.” Kate Marvel , Scientist
Browse book recommendations:
- Nature Writing
- Rocks & Minerals
- The Solar System & Space
Nature writing, celebrating and meditating on the non-human environment and our relationship with it, has a long literary pedigree, stretching back to the 18 th century. Beginning there, Lucy Newlyn discusses William and Dorothy Wordsworth , how brother and sister influenced each other’s writing and their commitment to writing about the every day and the sights and sounds of their environment. Laura Dassow Walls looks at Henry David Thoreau , an early advocate of simple living and ecology. T C Boyle chooses his best books on man and nature , and talks about why the Dodo didn’t have a chance and whether it really matters if lions, tigers and polar bears become extinct (it does).
Our nature interviews cover diverse parts of the world. Sarah Wheeler talks about the polar regions , and Michael Jacobs talks about the Andes . Paul Brassley discusses the English countryside and Hari Kunzru chooses his best books on the American desert .
Robert Macfarlane talks about wild places and Sara Maitland discusses silence . Jeremy Mynott looks at birdwatching and David George Haskell chooses his best books on trees .
More generally, Amy Liptrot chooses her best books on nature writing , Charles Foster his best nature books of 2017 , 2018 and 2019 , while M G Leonard chooses her the best nature books for kids .
The best books on Sense of Place , recommended by Patrick Galbraith
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion
The Crofter and the Laird by John McPhee
The Dark Months of May by Tom Pickard
Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky
Jock of the Bushveld by Percy Fitzpatrick
Novelists, non-fiction writers and poets all attempt to create immersive and atmospheric settings in their books—what is called a ‘sense of place’ in literary terms. Here, the British journalist Patrick Galbraith selects five books that explore and evoke a sense of place—including works by Joan Didion, Mark Kurlansky and John McPhee.
The best books on Natural History , recommended by David George Haskell
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston
Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australians and the Birth of Agriculture by Bruce Pascoe
A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn
Natural history can offer a “portal into wonder and astonishment,” says David George Haskell, the biologist and award-winning author of nonfiction works including Sounds Wild and Broken and The Forest Unseen . But natural history books, in the past, have also been guilty of reinforcing prejudices. Here he recommends five natural history books that celebrate the diversity of life.
The best books on Islands , recommended by Gavin Francis
'The Voyage of St Brendan,' in The Age of Bede edited by J.F. Webb and D.H. Farmer
Sea Room by Adam Nicolson
Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe by Diana Souhami
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will by Judith Schalansky
Generations of writers, explorers and armchair travellers have found a focal point of fascination in the idea of the remote island. Why so? Gavin Francis, the award-winning writer, explains the everlasting appeal of the lonely isle – and why the fantasy is at least as powerful as the salt-sprayed reality – as he selects five of the best books on islands.
The Best Books For Environmental Learning , recommended by Mitchell Thomashow
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore
The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
We are surrounded by nature but it’s easy to miss it and spend time either in our heads or on screens. Here Mitchell Thomashow, a longtime teacher of environmental learning, picks books to broaden our vistas and help us see the natural world with fresh eyes.
The best books on Summer , recommended by Melissa Harrison
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The Go-Between by L P Hartley
To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing
Summer by Ali Smith
The Hill of Summer by J A Baker
Temperatures ratcheting, tinderbox conditions, a pressure cooker atmosphere… summer is a handy literary shorthand for rising tensions. But in the natural world, summer is a quiet time when the flowers die back and the fruits and seeds are ripening. Here, Melissa Harrison—the novelist, nature writer and podcaster—recommends five of the best summer books, for those who like to read in step with the seasons.
The best books on Tides and Shorelines , recommended by Adam Nicolson
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Photographic Guide to the Sea & Shore Life of Britain & North-west Europe by Alex Rogers, Benedict Hextall & Ray Gibson
The Presocratic Philosophers by G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven & M. Schofield
Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot by P. H. Gosse
Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and other writings by Tim Robinson
The tidal zone is among the most vital and dynamic environments on Earth, but also one of the least well known. Here, the author Adam Nicolson explores formative works on the subject that have informed his book, The Sea Is Not Made of Water .
Fresh Voices in Nature Writing , recommended by Jessica J. Lee
The Way Through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning by Long Litt Woon, translated by Barbara J. Haveland
Significant Other by Isabel Galleymore
Out of the Woods by Luke Turner
Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear
The Grassling by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
Writing about nature and landscape need not be stuffy or traditionalist. Jessica J Lee, editor of The Willowherb Review— a literary journal dedicated to diversity in nature writing—recommends five books that offer a breath of fresh air: encompassing the whole of life, from sex in the woods to birding in the city.
The Best of Nature Writing 2019 , recommended by Charles Foster
Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth
Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age by Rupert Sheldrake
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie
The Way Home: Tales From a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle
Time Song: Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn
What do we talk about when we talk about nature? Almost everything, says the academic and bestselling author of Being a Beast, Charles Foster. Here he selects five of the best works of nature writing in 2019; books that seek to connect us more deeply with the non-human world.
The Best Nature Books of 2018 , recommended by Charles Foster
Our Place by Mark Cocker
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes
A Light in the Dark: A Winter Memoir by Horatio Clare
Swifts in a Tower by David Lack
The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence by Neil Ansell
There has been a rash of books about epiphanic incursions into wilderness—but the best nature writing digs too into the complexities of our relationship with the natural world, says Charles Foster, the bestselling author of Being A Beast . Here, he discusses the best nature books of 2018.
The best books on Predators , recommended by Nick Pyenson
The Year of the Whale by Victor B. Scheffer
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
A Primate's Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky
Eye of the Albatross: Views of the Endangered Sea by Carl Safina
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
The predators that stalked our ancestors have been marginalised to the brink of extinction, but these animals still fill us with awe, says Nick Pyenson. They play a vital role in life on Earth, and we need to understand them if we are to survive.
Laura Dassow Walls on Henry David Thoreau
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau
Stress and Freedom by Peter Sloterdijk
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Again and again we return to the question: how should we live? To Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century author, philosopher and naturalist, the answer was simplicity itself. Here his biographer Laura Dassow Walls selects five key texts that explore the Thoreauvian way of thinking.
The Best Nature Writing of 2017 , recommended by Charles Foster
Swimming With Seals by Victoria Whitworth
Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello
Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and their Effects on our Bodies, Brains and Health by Rupert Sheldrake
Islander: A Journey Around Our Archipelago by Patrick Barkham
The Seabirds Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers by Adam Nicolson
Sales of nature books have been booming, but only the most exacting of authors get right to the heart of our own interconnectedness with the natural world, says Charles Foster, bestselling author of Being A Beast . Here, he chooses five of the best books of nature writing published in 2017.
The best books on Trees , recommended by David George Haskell
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock
The New Sylva: A Discourse of Forest and Orchard Trees for the Twenty-First Century by Gabriel Hemery & Sarah Simblet
Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters by David Hinton & Zhuangzi (aka Chuang Tzu)
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
‘The wood that frames our houses, holds up our furniture, and gives us paper arrives with signs of its ecological history purged.’ We’re a long way from the campfire where our relationship with trees got going. Here, David George Haskell takes us back, deep into the forest.
M G Leonard recommends the best Nature Books for Kids
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Author M G Leonard talks about the importance of getting our children engaged with the natural world. She recommends her favourite nature books for kids.
Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing
Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
The Drowned World by J G Ballard
Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot
The Orkney Book of Birds by Tim Dean and Tracy Hall
Amy Liptrot, whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.
The best books on William and Dorothy Wordsworth , recommended by Lucy Newlyn
William Wordsworth: The Major Works by Stephen Gill (editor)
The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Pamela Woof (editor)
The Gang by John Worthen
The Gift by Lewis Hyde
Dorothy Wordsworth, Writer by Pamela Woof
William Wordsworth probably did not get his greatest creative impetus from solitude, but from his extremely close relationship with his sister, suggests Oxford scholar Lucy Newlyn
The best books on Silence , recommended by Sara Maitland
The Desert Fathers by Translated by Helen Waddell
Reflections On A Mountain Lake by Ani Tenzin Palmo
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
Modern Western societies often seem to be intolerant of silence. Why should this be? And is there any alternative? The author of “A Book of Silence” explains
The best books on Wild Places , recommended by Robert Macfarlane
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
Robert Macfarlane, author of an acclaimed trilogy of books about landscape and human thought tells us about the intrepid, sometimes misanthropic writers who inspired his own investigation of wilderness. He chooses some of his favourite books of nature-writing.
The best books on The American Desert , recommended by Hari Kunzru
The Diary and Itinerary of Francisco Garcés by Francisco Garcés
The Desert by John C Van Dyke
Scenes in America Deserta by Reyner Banham
I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me by Trevor Paglen
The novelist Hari Kunzru explains his fascination with the Mojave desert – a mysterious, forgotten place full of secret military sites where the silence feels like a physical weight on one’s ears
The best books on Man and Nature , recommended by TC Boyle
The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen
Out of Eden by Alan Burdick
Playing God in Yellowstone by Alston Chase
The Tiger by John Vaillant
The Beast In The Garden by David Baron
The novelist and nature lover T C Boyle tells us about delicious dodos, angry tigers, snakes on planes and why Viagra saves rhinos.
The best books on The English Countryside , recommended by Paul Brassley
The Making of the English Landscape by W G Hoskins
Alternative Agriculture by Joan Thirsk
Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay by George Ewart Evans
Akenfield by Ronald Blythe
The Death of Rural England by Alun Howkins
The English countryside on a sunny summer's day is one of the most beguiling places in the world to be. But how has it changed since the Black Death? Is there still a meaningful difference between urban and rural society? Rural historian Paul Brassley talks us through the best books to get a fuller understanding of England's green and pleasant land.
The best books on The Andes , recommended by Michael Jacobs
The Condor and the Cows by Christopher Isherwood
The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming
Patagonia: A Cultural History by Chris Moss
The White Rock by Hugh Thomson
Devil in the Mountain by Simon Lamb
The respected author and prominent Hispanist examines the history and people of The Andes. Selects and reviews five great reads, including classics from Isherwood and Hemming
The best books on Birdwatching , recommended by Jeremy Mynott
Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey
John Clare by Jonathan Bate
A Bird in the Bush by Stephen Moss
The Birds by Aristophanes
What drives people’s passion for birds and birdwatching? For Jeremy Mynott, it’s as much about us as it is about them. He recommends the best books on birds and birdwatching.
The best books on The Polar Regions , recommended by Sara Wheeler
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie
The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky
The Ice by Stephen J. Pyne
The acclaimed author discusses the Polar Regions. She says an African In Greenland is the best book ever written on Greenland – the story of a man from Togo who went there in the 1960s
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About This List
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Country files: nature writers on the books that inspired them
Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald, Kathleen Jamie and other contemporary writers choose the books that made them fall in love with the natural world
- Robert Macfarlane: ‘Britain’s wild places are vital to our imaginations’
Helen Macdonald The Goshawk by TH White (1951)
TH White’s tragic and beautiful memoir of his attempts to train a young goshawk in 1936 is a story that works in counterpoint to my own in H Is for Hawk , and it still tugs at my heart. It wasn’t just a literary inspiration. Deep down it fuelled my own compulsion to train a goshawk after my father’s sudden death. When I read it as a child I understood that it was about a man running to a hawk to escape from something. Back then I didn’t know anything about White’s violent, loveless childhood, nor his struggles with his sexuality. I didn’t know why he was running. But I knew he was hurting. And when my father died and I was hurting too, some part of me remembered that a goshawk was something to run away to.
You don’t have to unconditionally love a book for it to inspire you. The Goshawk is a painful read, and I still find White’s relationship with his hawk very difficult to bear. But it helped me to think more clearly about how we unconsciously use nature as a mirror of ourselves, and how suffering is so often brought about not through evil, but through carelessness and ignorance. Despite his capacity for great joy and love for many things, including the natural world, White was never given the tools to know how to properly love or care for things, including himself.
His confiding authorial voice is in large part what also makes The Goshawk a magnificent read, and it was this that motivated me to move away from the objective, authoritative tone of much writing about nature to try to write a book that was more reflexive, made up of voices that were not always full of certainty, that were sometimes contradictory, not always obviously my own. Because, ultimately, White’s honesty about his relationship to the English landscape and his hawk, however distressing and often self-deceiving, was the book’s greatest inspiration to me. Laying bare the grounds of our emotional attachments to the natural world – or our lack of them – is of crucial importance in our age of ecological disaster. The Goshawk is a touchstone in this regard: a work that spurs one to think deeply about why and how we assign value to things that are not us.
Helen Macdonald is the author of H Is for Hawk (Vintage Classics).
Robert Macfarlane The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
There isn’t much of what you might call nature left in Cormac McCarthy’s best-known novel. There isn’t much of anything, really: just asphalt, ash, shattered buildings and the inevitable, indestructible shopping trolley. Organic life has all but vanished. Even the colour green has gone extinct. Language is burnt back to a rubble of grunts and fillers: uh-uh, OK, yeah. This is “nature writing” at its asymptote, with only the act of utterance keeping it from pure black zero.
McCarthy might seem a cussed choice, then, as the most inspirational writer of place that I know. But there it is. His bleakness is bracing. And his earlier novels are ornate where The Road is minimalist. I’ve read them all several times (except Suttree , which beats me still). For years I kept a notebook titled “CM” into which I copied phrases and paragraphs from his novels: “All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert.” I watched what he did with commas, or their absence: “As they went down the valley in the new fell dark basking nighthawks rose from the dust in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights.” I admired his treatment of poverty and labour, and how he scourged sentimentalism but refused to banish beauty: “This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.”
McCarthy’s novels are filled with watchers and hunters, from the Indian scouts of Blood Meridian through the wolf-trackers of the Border Trilogy , to the father in The Road , “glassing” the terrain ahead of him with binoculars, knowing that under such circumstances foresight is fate. His characters read landscapes intently, because their life or the life of another often depends on that scrutiny. They excel in hard, sharp sentences of seeing.
But his characters also channel thoughts and visions that far exceed their terms of perception. McCarthy carries out audacious acts of cantilever, extending his sentences with clause after clause until they are cranked out over nothingness: “Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether.” Such passages are written with a pen of iron dipped in Old Testament ink, and they trace out a cosmic baroque. They are not to everyone’s taste, but they are to mine.
McCarthy’s great subjects are the brute indifference of matter and the brute indifference of people: “I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why god ain’t put out the sun and gone away.” He shows us that writing about “nature” – whatever on earth we mean by that word – can help us see the shadows as well as the light.
Robert Macfarlane’s most recent book Landmarks is out in paperback from Penguin next week.
Mark Cocker The Journal, 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau
This is the largest single-volume edition of the diary that Thoreau kept for nearly a quarter of a century until the year before his death in 1862, aged just 44. Even so, it covers only 10% of the original 7,000-page and 2m-word document.
I have a relationship to it unlike any other book, my copy being littered with annotations and a private index for key passages. I think of it more like a living organism, a quality Thoreau himself noted of his own favourite texts. A “truly good book”, he wrote, “is something as wildly natural and primitive … as a fungus or a lichen”. With the exception of field guides that I use outdoors, The Journal is the only book that I have laminated to protect it from constant wear, and I see it as a kind of field guide for life.
Its inspiration is to both the naturalist and the author, occupations that are integrally linked through Thoreau’s astonishing powers of observation. He could stand so still that animals would mistake him for a part of the landscape, climbing upon him to feed or perch. Eyewitnesses in his native Concord described how they would find him, Socrates-like, completely absorbed in some act of contemplation. At the end of day he would be in exactly the same place as when first spotted, and still watching.
Thoreau recognised the deep links between this quality of seeing and his art. In an 1852 entry he describes how he had two notebooks, one for poetry and another for commonplace facts, but he acknowledged the difficulty in keeping them separate, because “the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry”.
He was equally alive to the manner in which physical engagement with the natural world (work, walking, exertion etc) had a direct impact on one’s prose. “I find incessant labour with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, the best method to remove palaver out of one’s style,” he wrote. Instead of palaver, what you get in Thoreau is always robust, precise and fundamentally true. In our age when the substance of nature writing has often been supplanted by style, The Journal seems all the more important.
Although it is pre-eminently about Thoreau’s observations of wild nature, for me this New England diary is also a powerfully political work. And it means much – more even, perhaps? – to someone from the Old World, where land is almost never land, but property. The Old English see place and the living animals and plants upon it through a dense layer of other processes that are about ownership, control, class, money. They impose a deadening gauze over our senses and our sense of place like a cataract over the eye. Thoreau writes not about ownership, but about belonging. To read him is to be liberated from all that stuff and to recover the republican and democratic greatness of our connection to the whole of life.
Mark Cocker is the author of Crow Country (Vintage Classics).
Stephen Moss Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop (1949)
Not many novels have a bird – or in the case of Adventure Lit Their Star , a pair of birds – as their hero. Little ringed plovers are small, slender waders with a black face-mask and conspicuous yellow eye-ring. At first sight they may not seem very special. But for me they are, as they were for the nature writer Kenneth Allsop.
Little ringed plovers colonised Britain either side of the second world war. But they didn’t nest on some remote mountain or offshore island, or under the protection of a nature reserve. Instead, they chose what Allsop memorably dubbed “the messy limbo that is neither town nor country” – the west London suburbs where I grew up.
Allsop, who later found fame as a campaigning Fleet Street journalist and face of TV current affairs, wrote Adventure Lit Their Star when he was a cub reporter in the late 1940s. Not surprisingly, given his own wartime experiences, the story revolves around a young RAF pilot recovering from TB. He joins forces with two young lads to foil the attentions of a dastardly egg-collector, who is intent on stealing the eggs of these very rare birds.
The book was published in 1949, but after good reviews and a literary prize for its author it was soon forgotten. I stumbled across it as a teenager in the early 1970s, and was instantly captivated. The opening chapter is a tour de force of nature writing, rarely matched before or since. Allsop traces the night-time flight made by hordes of migrating birds as they cross the Channel, on the last leg of their epic journey back to Britain from Africa. In a brilliant and original twist, he imagines them as squadrons of aeroplanes returning home from a nocturnal sortie.
Soon after reading the book, I found my own little ringed plovers, in the vast concrete amphitheatre of a reservoir being built a stone’s throw from where the novel is set, on the outskirts of London. As I watched these birds flying around the digging machines – they nest on bare gravel, so that their eggs and chicks are camouflaged against predators – I could really appreciate the way Allsop described their behaviour. This was a man who spent time watching wild creatures, and understood what made them tick.
Later, I read his collected Daily Mail columns, In the Country . The book was so full of wisdom and insight that I forced myself to read it as slowly as possible, so as not to reach the end. Another reason I was reluctant to finish was that I knew that, soon after the book was published, the author took his own life. He was just 53 – younger than I am now.
Yet I cannot be too sad when I think of Allsop; for his wonderful writings have inspired not just me, but a host of other nature writers and environmentalists. He makes us want to continue fighting for the wildlife and places he cared for so much, and about which he wrote with such effortless charm.
Stephen Moss’s latest book, Wild Kingdom: Bringing Back Britain’s Wildlife , is out now (Square Peg).
Tim Dee The Redstart by John Buxton (1950)
The common redstart is the most beautiful bird I know. Not every birdwatcher would agree, but surely none think badly of this bright-painted little chat. They are always good to see. Males (in spring, this very day across Britain) have ash-grey backs, brick-red fronts, soot-black throats and, above their friendly round faces (their eyes are like living blackcurrants), a pearl-coloured fringe that floodlights the whole bird. Females are drabber, having work to do beyond looking dreamy, but they share the redstart’s best and defining feature with their mates. They cannot see it themselves but both carry behind them a warm red tail. Every second, as if counting time, they tremble or quiver or flirt these feathers and they pulse with various toasted orangey-reds.
John Clare, best of all bird poets, knew redstarts as firetails. Their tail also lends the bird its common name. In Middle English stert means tail. Linnaeus and later taxonomists were bewitched by the same and alighted on Phoenicurus phoenicurus for the bird’s scientific name, meaning red-tail red-tail, as if its mobile brilliance summoned both observation and appreciation. Add to this, the salve of the bird’s silverily song that sounds (to me) like a glance of sunshine on a rainy path, and their migratory lifestyle that takes them from among the dusty feet of dung-coloured camels in the Sahel of central Africa (where I saw them last winter) to the salad-fresh oak woods of the hanging combes of western Britain (where, on Exmoor, I saw them last week); and I hope I might find some followers for my best bird.
For the most beautiful bird, the most beautiful bird book I know. Its author is dead, it is long out of print, its science is superseded by more recent ornithological studies, but John Buxton’s The Redstart from 1950, a slim and sketchy New Naturalist monograph, has ignited most of my bird bonfires since I read it in Bristol Central Library as a neophyte birder fresh in from a fleeting encounter with a migrant firetail. Buxton’s book taught me a lot about how the birds live and what they do. It also showed me a way to think about birds and a way to write about them. Captured by the Germans early in the second world war, Buxton was an amateur bird man, a poet and a literature don. He started watching a pair of redstarts that flew through the wire to breed in the grounds of the Bavarian camp in which he was held prisoner. He ended up recruiting other captives as co-observers, securing paper and pencils from his captors, and watching the two birds for 850 hours over three months in the spring of 1943. His book is written with a clear-eyed understanding born of these efforts but it is also something altogether other. The birds’ modest but assertive commitment to their own purpose, and their free flights through the wire, oblivious to the “skeletal multitude” of men, operated on Buxton such that he wrote, undercover as an ornithologist, a book about the limits of knowing and the value of this, and the impossibility of total capture, and the great boon of loving a bird beyond the pages we might write about it or the names we might call it.
Tim Dee is the author of The Running Sky and Four Fields .
Melissa Harrison A Black Fox Running by Brian Carter (1981)
This book by the Devon author, artist and columnist Brian Carter probably had a greater influence on my development as a writer than any other. It was published in 1981 and I read it – or rather, it was read to me – in 1982, when I was seven. I must have reread it a dozen times or more since then. Eventually the pages fell out of my paperback so I tracked down a first-edition hardback, which, rather pleasingly, arrived signed.
My mum had a beautiful reading voice, and every night before bed she led us through Tolkien , Alison Uttley , Laurie Lee , Lark Rise to Candleford , the Miss Read books and many others; but it was the Devon writers, Henry Williamson and Carter, who had the greatest effect on me. We spent our summer holidays on Dartmoor, so these were places I knew intimately, and loved; to hear them given such luminosity and significance left me longing to do the same one day.
There’s no getting away from the fact that A Black Fox Running is about talking foxes. New readers should know, too, that these foxes approve of fox-hunting: it is, to them, “the good death” (snares, spades, gas and gins being other options). It is also quite mystical: one fox has visions, there is a benevolent vulpine deity, and some passages are steeped in the kind of fuzzy, pantheistic spirituality that would usually make me wince.
And yet it rises effortlessly above these potential hazards; the quality of the writing and the depth and clarity of Carter’s imagination turning it into something almost inexpressibly beautiful. His vision of Dartmoor as a complex living ecosystem is extraordinary; he seems to be able to hold everything in his mind at once, from a fox kennelled under bracken in the lee of a dry-stone wall, to an old poacher rumpling the ears of his half-mad dog, to a feather lost by a buzzard drifting down to dimple the surface of a stream – all of it, human and non-human, happening at once and with equal significance. His prose slips subtly from lyrical description to earthy humour, its rhythms sunk deep into my DNA as something to aim for, if never achieve.
Carter died last year, having contributed to every edition of West Country newspaper the Herald Express since the early 1980s. Long before I ever put pen to paper, even in secret, I wrote to him care of his publisher; I hope it reached him, although he didn’t reply. Amid the letter’s embarrassing effusiveness is this: “There is a muscular, unsentimental quality to the language – a combination of sparseness and rich description, and a sense, at all times, of the bigger landscape and the movement of the seasons behind the vivid, small details – which has become, for me, the epitome of nature writing, perhaps of descriptive writing itself, and something I would give anything to be able to capture myself one day.”
Melissa Harrison is the author of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (Faber).
Kathleen Jamie Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard (1982)
Question: can there be a nature writing, in prose, that honours the natural world, but which is also great writing? It seems not. It would seem that, for great literature, “nature” is not enough. There has to be some transformation, a novelistic approach.
However, the minute we start with the novelistic approach, then the natural world is lost. “Nature” again becomes a mere backdrop to human actions, however well observed, and whatever we are writing ceases to be “nature writing”. This is a problem nature writers, as writers, must grapple with. Nature writing matters, but by definition can’t be great literature. Tough.
But we can go to the poets. I love those poets who can do the acute natural observation then carry it onto the page in transformed, imaginative works which seem to synthesise the two (nature and imagination ) without relegating the “nature” to a backdrop. Even before we had the notion of “ecopoetics” we had DH Lawrence , James Wright , Norman MacCaig , Alice Oswald , among many others. But for prose?
I can’t remember how I discovered the short pieces of Barry Lopez and, especially, Annie Dillard . Dillard’s collection Teaching a Stone to Talk was a revelation. “Living as Weasels” is a flight of only 1,500 words. The horrifying “The Deer at Providentia” not much more. “Eclipse” is genius, again a few thousand words. That’s how “nature” is encountered by most of us, who can’t spend a year crawling in bushes, who have to get home of a night to make the kids’ fish fingers. Short encounter, short form. The UK seemed to have abandoned it, but the essay was alive and well in the US.
Seriously liberating was Dillard’s note: “This is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.”
So there was the solution, and it was to do with form not content. Get in, say what you have to say, get out. Admit you are a sensory, thinking being. Do some serious noticing. There is no such thing as “objectivity”.
Thank you Annie Dillard.
Kathleen Jamie is the author of Sightlines (Sort of Books).
Sean Borodale Joseph Beuys: Coyote by Caroline Tisdall (1976)
In May of 1974, German artist Joseph Beuys made one of his most important artworks, I Like America and America Likes Me . Wrapped head to foot in dark felt he was conveyed by ambulance on a stretcher from Kennedy airport in New York to the René Block Gallery. Thus “insulated from America”, for seven days Beuys inhabited the gallery space with a wild coyote, partitioned from visitors by a chain-link fence. Caroline Tisdall ’s photographs in her book Coyote record: “long, calm, concentrated, almost silent days of dialogue between two representatives of two species together in the same space for the first time … it came to mark an area of freedom for the protagonists, ambiguously caging the spectators.”
Beuys was greatly influenced by educationist Rudolf Steiner, who in the 1920s foresaw the catastrophic collapse of bee populations within the context of intensive mechanised farming. “You’ll begin to understand the life of bees,” wrote Steiner in Bees: Nine Lectures on Bees (1923), “once you’re clear about the fact that the bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love … Perhaps you noticed something about the entire nature of beekeeping, something, I would say, of the nature of an enigma.” Steiner’s environmental politics were at the root of Beuys’s democratic ideas for inclusive participation in creativity. Beuys founded his Political Party for Animals, stood for the German Green party and planted 7,000 oak trees across the city of Kassel. Art, for Beuys, was “the sole, revolutionary force capable of transforming the earth, humanity, the social order”.
Beuys’s crossing of boundaries between two species, for me, shares affinities with beekeeping: the gallery, the hive’s wooden box; the interventions at the hive; Beuys’s prompting of the coyote into new patterns of behaviour. Insulated from the world at large, concentrated into the flight range of a colony of bees, my notes for my book Bee Journal accumulated as a counterspirit to everything I read of gaiacide: nature as the site of crisis. By containing his encounter with America to time spent with a coyote, Beuys insulated himself in an acutely observed dialogue.
The coyote performance and Steiner’s lectures inform my own questions around art practice and the environment. “You should not believe for even a moment that whatever exists somewhere in nature is without certain powers,” Steiner reflected. The line of my walk between the house and the hive over two years grew resonant; its physical wearing of a path, the visible evidence of purposefulness.
Sean Borodale is the author of Bee Journal (Vintage Classics).
Dave Goulson Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell (1954)
When I was about eight years old my dad gave me a copy of Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell, and I was instantly hooked. It describes an expedition to Africa to capture rare animals for zoos. I couldn’t believe that anyone could make a living by doing something that was so exciting. I soon devoured it, and then all of his other books, but I was particularly captivated by his descriptions of his idyllic-sounding childhood on the island of Corfu in the 1930s in My Family and Other Animals . He describes his excursions in search of turtles, mantises, snakes and all manner of other exotic-sounding creatures, precursors to his zoo-collecting days. He even had a pet donkey that went with him everywhere, festooned in bundles of jam jars tied together with string to transport home his finds. The beasts he captured all ended up inhabiting his bedroom, loosely contained in a series of home-made cages and tanks, or escaping to wreak havoc on the nerves of his long-suffering mother.
I tried to model my own life on his childhood adventures. I grew up in rural Shropshire where the wildlife was comparatively mundane. Despite my best efforts I could not persuade my parents to buy me a donkey so I had to settle for a bicycle, but otherwise I did my best to emulate Durrell. My bedroom was filled with fish tanks and home-made cages containing newts, caterpillars, sticklebacks and a toad named Norman. For a while I even had a pet magpie that followed me around.
When Durrell grew up he made his expeditions all over the world in search of elusive animals, and eventually set up his own zoo on Jersey to contain them. Obviously catching rare animals for zoos is no longer acceptable or desirable, so I had to modify my original plan of continuing in Durrell’s footsteps. Instead, I have been lucky enough to make a living as a scientist, studying the ecology and behaviour of rare creatures in the wild, sometimes travelling around the world to find them. My speciality is bees rather than the larger beasts that Durrell captured; small but vitally important creatures that help to put food on our plates and do their best to ensure that the world is full of flowers. I focus on bumblebees, thecolourful, furry and endearingly clumsy relatives of the domestic honeybee. Bees don’t really lend themselves to living in a zoo, so instead I bought a farm in France and converted it into a nature reserve, awash with flowers and alive with the buzzing of bees and the scampering, rustling and chirping of a myriad of other creatures.
Sitting outside on a summer’s evening, I often wonder how different my life might have been if my dad hadn’t given me that first book.
David Goulson is the author of A Sting in the Tale (Vintage Classics).
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‘The messy limbo that is neither town nor country’
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We're Living Through A Golden Age Of Nature Writing
Digital fatigue and environmental disaster have, paradoxically, lead to a resurgence of books on the power and meaning of the great outdoors. Here are some of the best
At a moment of personal crisis in her own life, British writer Olivia Laing walks the length of the river Ouse, the stretch of water where more than sixty years ago Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Over the course of a week walking from source to the sea she traces the memories of the writer's life that lurk beneath the surface of the water, and in turn grapples with her own ghosts.
You might recognise the striking cover from seeing it dotted around tube carriages and airport terminals a few years ago. This award-winning book tells of how, in a moment of grief after her father's death, Macdonald spent £800 on a goshawk and tried to train it. Released in the same year as Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with The Feathers, it begun a trend of books which look to animals and nature for answers on life and death.
The Quietus co-founder Luke Turner's debut novel opens in the wreckage of a relationship as he comes to terms with being bisexual. Against the backdrop of the Epping Forest, which Turner has grown up in the shadow of, Out Of The Woods fuses the history of the forest with the winding paths and dead-ends of Turner's own life. In doing so it achieves that tricky balance of feeling both deeply personal and totally universal.
One of the most popular examples of the new nature trend, Liptrot's book finds her returning to her hometown of Orkney as alcoholism threatens to engulf her life. By swimming and walking the sparsely populated island, its patterns of rebirth are a symbol of perseverance and growth. In coming home she finds a way back to herself.
Water is both a mysterious and unknowable entity and a soothing tonic in Deakin's book about swimming through the British Isles. From the water he gains what he calls a "'frog's eye view" of the country, after incidents like being stopped and held by water bailiffs in Winchester and mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands. This fresh perspective from water also offers a reflection of his own life.
Distressed at capitalism and meaninglessness of life in modern cities, environmentalist George Monbiot retreats to rural Wales. The result of is a compelling case for the peace to be found from a simpler life and the solace that can be found in nature. A book that will have you longing to escape the rat race in favour of gulping some fresh air.
One the country's foremost nature writers, this book marked a departure for Richard Mabey who moved to a new part of the country following a bout of depression. There he renegotiates his longstanding relationship with the outdoors. The result is a book that sings with the restorative joys of nature.
Solnit is mesmerising when writing on anything, be it Trump's election or mansplaning. This collection of essays is no different and finds a common theme in moments of uncertainty and change. In one standout, she ponders the fate of tortoises, threading together a memory of riding one in a zoo with their modern fate in our crumbling environment. Throughout, history, nature and Solnit's memories collide to create something meditative and stirring.
14 Fabulous Contemporary Lady Nature Writers
The greatest—and greenest—women’s history month reading list.
Photo by Rawpixel /iStock
By Katie O'Reilly
March 11, 2021
This story has been updated from its original version, published on March 8, 2017.
As with the rest of the literary canon, men have more or less dominated the sphere of American nature and environmental writing. This is perhaps due to old-fangled notions of nature experiences as uniquely male rites of passage, as well as the idea (specious though it might be) that domestic obligations preclude female writers from embarking on far-flung adventures. Chances are, the well-documented gender byline gap plays a role too. History, however, shows that women have for centuries explored the natural world on the page—and to great effect.
With rich diversity in voices, attitudes, and styles, their essays, memoirs, novels, plays, reportage, and poetry have done much to expand the traditional definitions of nature writing. For evidence, look no further than Annie Dillard’s faith-centric Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ; Kathleen Jamie’s Findings, which documents the author’s attempts to reconcile family life with her birding passion; Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost , which presents the endeavor of losing oneself in nature as a kind of Zen rebirth; or Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us , which reveals the poetry inherent in marine biology. Few have observed New England landscapes with the observational genius of Mary Oliver, or captured the essence of the desert like Ellen Meloy. Women writers also have effectively sounded the alarm on environmental havoc, as proven in Carson’s Silent Spring and Terry Tempest Williams’s many literary admonitions against nuclear testing. By highlighting marginalized viewpoints, many other women writers have helped expand the nature writing genre beyond Walden Pond’ s boyish concerns. Think Alice Walker, whose poetry recalls the stamp slavery and oppression left on sharecropped land in the South; Louise Erdrich, whose novels helped bring Native writing into the mainstream limelight; and Ursula K. Le Guin, whose fantastically utopian fiction, while set largely in space, provide Earth lovers with ample food for thought.
Such writers paved the way for a new and burgeoning wave of female authors whose work continues to inform and inspire conservation endeavors—and to entertain and inspire greenies who like to read. For Women’s History Month, we’d like to recommend 14 outstanding contemporary writers. Each of these women’s words can make us reconsider or better appreciate our relationship to the natural world. So, go find an alfresco reading spot (or at least a place with a view of the great outdoors), and dig into literary fare from the following ladies.
For three years, Deborah Cramer trekked from the south end of the earth all the way into the icy Arctic, following the 19,000-mile migration of a type of tiny sandpiper called the red knot. Red knots are particularly imperiled by climate change, and they survive on the eggs of horseshoe crabs—primordial animals whose blue blood, it turns out, serves a crucial biomedical role: detecting bacterial contamination in human vaccines, and thus safeguarding human health. In 2015’s The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey , Cramer not only unpacks this science but also recounts her extraordinary odyssey. The book, Cramer’s third, serves as a riveting travelogue, a tribute to red knots’ tenacity, and an argument for the interconnectedness of species—the author eloquently reveals how the health and well-being of a tiny bird and an ancient crab mirrors that of humankind. It’s also a work of philosophy: One of the book’s central questions asks whether species should have to prove their financial worth to humankind. With an urgency not unlike that displayed in Silent Spring , Rachel Carson’s landmark reveal of the impact of DDT, Cramer proves that when the mostly unknown little avian creature hurts, we hurt too. For more on that, check out Cramer’s New York Times op-ed .
What exactly do animals teach us about our humanity? That’s the question driving Alison Hawthorne Deming ’s Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit . Through linked essays, Deming traces humans’ relationship with animals since the beginning of our species—when they served as food, clothes, gods, and companions. In our post-industrial world, however, Deming theorizes that we have diminished not only the physical but also the spiritual presence of animals—in art, symbolism, and more. Whether observing wildlife in the desert near her Arizona home, along the American East Coast, or in Africa, Deming comes back to the same conclusion: By better honing our animal-awareness, humans can hope to reverse (at least some of) our planetary destruction and make “the next leap forward in our evolutionary story.” Fun facts: Deming is the great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the author of five other books and six poetry collections, including Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress —a cultural history of and elegy to the cottage industries and ways of life we’re losing on a swiftly changing planet—forthcoming this fall from Counterpoint Press. Check out some of her masterful verse s in Orion.
Camille Dungy ’s Black Nature holds the distinction of being the first collection to anthologize nature writing by African American poets. Dungy’s selections—including work by Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Natasha Trethewey, as well as several emerging writers—not only broadened the concept of African American poetics but also helped change notions of who writes nature poetry. Dungy posits that Black people have been writing about the natural world for centuries; most, however, didn’t have the luxury of venturing to a mountain to find themselves. As people become increasingly aware of the cataclysmic effects of environmental degradation, Dungy points out that more are addressing nature in the traditional spirit of Black writers—taking the interconnectedness of economics and class politics into account. The author of three poetry collections, Dungy’s mesmerizing essay collection, 2017’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers , documents her own travels as a poet-lecturer with a small child in tow—covering her experiences of mothering, illness, and race divides. Get a taste of Dungy’s sharp, thoughtful writing via this Ecotone essay about her quest to find chicken and waffles above the Arctic circle.
In 2014’s White Spaces, Black Faces , academic, backpacker, and former actress Dr. Carolyn Finney amassed her vast knowledge of environmental history, cultural studies, geography, and race to theorize on our broader cultural understanding of the “great outdoors” and argue that unwritten rules continue to determine who can enjoy safe access to outside spaces. Looking toward the future, Finney’s book also highlights the work of African Americans opening doors to greater and more equitable participation in conservation and adventure endeavors and reveals the perceived and real ways in which American nature has long been racialized. She continues to write about ongoing issues of racialized nature (check out this searing Guardian piece on Christian Cooper and George Floyd from last summer).
Rahawa Haile not only became one of a small handful of African American women to successfully complete the Appalachian Trail; the thirtysomething wrote candidly about her often harrowing 2016 experience in Outside . Along the 2,190-mile trail, she also left books by Black authors in trail shelters. “These were writers who had endured more than I’d ever been asked to, whose strength gave me strength in turn,” Haile wrote on Buzzfeed in 2017. “I wanted to show them beauty from heights that a history of terror had made clear were never intended to be theirs.” Since completing her thru-hike, the Eritrean American has given a number of interviews and presentations about her personal experience on the AT—inspiring hikers of color, queer hikers, and women throughout the world. Keep an eye out for her hotly anticipated first book, In Open Country , forthcoming from Harper this September, in which Haile will explore what it means to move through America, and the world, as a Black woman.
The author of 10 nature books (including a poetry collection), Barbara Hurd also volunteers for her local watershed group, which monitors western Maryland’s Savage River. A self-proclaimed “river monitor,” Hurd makes a habit of listening for quieter signals of disruption among plants and wildlife—the complexities of atonal birdsong, for instance, or the sense of foreboding that arises when a flock of geese, soaring overhead, suddenly plunges to water. This is abundantly evident in Hurd’s personal, meditative prose, which draws parallels between her own sphere and the natural world, offering up rich explorations of literature, family, science, place, and the waning phenomenon of attentiveness itself. Her 2016 essay collection, Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies , calls on readers, too, to engage in deep, habitual listening, “to turn … the ear, that lonely hunter, and put it closer to the ground.” It’s for our own good, Hurd writes, and for the sake of the planet too. Hurd’s latest, The Epilogues: Afterwords on the Planet , just released from Standing Stone Books, is a reflection on the human condition in the face of a heating planet. The compassionate, eminently wise collection honors all that is managing to survive without the help of heroes.
In 2018, Latria Graham wrote an essay for Outside detailing the challenges of being Black in the great outdoors. The vivid, vulnerable piece chronicled Graham’s realization during college that virtually no Black outdoors person's words had entered the literary canon (at least, not at her Ivy League alma mater). “My body could not endure the erasure of my ancestry, of the adventurer within me.” It also plainly identified African Americans’ barriers to entry in national parks (time, money) and called for a reframing of the conversation about whom the outdoors is for. Following the essay's publication, countless readers reached out to Graham, seeking her advice on how to stay safe in spaces where nonwhite people haven’t historically been welcome. She never wrote back—because she had no idea what to say—until the aftermath of 2020’s racially charged and revolutionary summer, when she released Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream . In this searingly honest essay, Graham reveals what she didn’t feel readers were ready to hear two years prior—that all too often, all the equity measures and protective mechanisms Black people have created for themselves aren’t enough. “Sometimes they will kill you anyway.” The piece itself is a force of nature—Graham meditates on how the fears embedded in her genes determine her relationship to the one space where she says her chronic depression tends to ebb and suggests that people of color venturing outside is itself a political act—that while she, nor anyone else, can protect Black and brown adventurers, “the more we see, the more we document, the more we share, the better we can empower those who come after us.” Check out Graham’s expansive repertoire of analysis on culture, foodways, sports, books, nature, and more.
A plant scientist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, poet/botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer has taken to the page to explore her Indigenous heritage and also to reveal how living beings such as squash, sweetgrass, and salamanders offer us important lessons—if we only learn to listen to them. In her most recent book, 2013’s Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants , Kimmerer eloquently makes the case that by observing and celebrating our reciprocal relationship with the natural world, one can gain greater ecological consciousness. As a scientist, Kimmerer is a proponent of the somewhat marginalized “ Traditional Ecological Knowledge ” approach, also known as “Indigenous Knowledge” and “Native Science.” TEK encompasses the worldviews and traditions of Indigenous people concerning ecology, spirituality, and human and animal relationships. To see this belief system in action, look no further than this Earth Island Journal article , in which Kimmerer tells the story of an epic paddling adventure, and meanwhile unpacks the compelling Indigenous history of the Onondaga Nation.
For evidence that environmental writing can be anything but dry, check out Amy Leach ’s genre-bending essays. These whimsical explorations of animal kingdom phenomena—exploding sea cucumbers, fainting goats, the relationship between gods and donkeys—pose important questions about our kinship with the wild world. They’re also quite the trip; Leach muses on whether light holds meaning for jellyfish and tapeworms, and with Seussian flair, points out that not all of the insects one sees in the water are water insects. “Some may be bamboo insects that fell off their bamboo, or shore insects that got washed off their shore.” Her first collection, 2013’s Things That Are , serves to expand perceptions of our animal neighbors and rekindle our communion with them too. For a taste of Leach’s prose—a standalone species in itself—check out her essay about the celestial daydreams of an amateur astronomer in Tin House . We can’t wait to get our hands on The Everybody Ensemble , out this fall from FSG. A collection of essays, praise songs, poetry, philosophy, and whimsical (yet scientific) escapades into nature, it subtly posits that a call to joy is requisite if we are to truly take care of the earth and everything in it.
The author of numerous award-winning environmental books, Kathleen Dean Moore is perhaps best known for integrating philosophical reflection into personal experience. While her early creative nonfiction focused on the cultural and spiritual values of the natural world, her more recent work centers around the ethics surrounding climate change. Along with Michael P. Nelson, she published 2011’s Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril , a compendium of testimonies from world and religious leaders about our obligations to future generations. Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change , published in 2016, takes on the questions about why, exactly, it’s wrong to wreck the world, asking readers, “What is our obligation to the future? What can anyone do? What are the stories and ideas capable of lifting those who deeply care, inspiring them to move forward with clarity and moral courage?” A multimedia artist, Moore also collaborates with concert pianists during performances, bringing music to her messages about global extinction and the inherent moral imperative. Fitting, then, that her latest, Earth’s Wild Music , just released from Counterpoint, celebrates the call of loons, howl of wolves, shriek of frogs, bellow of whales, and laughter of children in this “time of terrible silencing.” Moore’s stunning essays lament and celebrate these songs, calling on readers to rise to defend them and their performers.
By day, Nadia Owusu works in urban planning and policy, incorporating issues of environmental justice into cityscapes and conservation proposals. In her off time, she writes, marvelously, about grief—grief for her parents (she was abandoned by her Armenian American mother, and her Ghanian father died when she was young), for places (she has bounced around the globe, among various family members), and for the natural world, so revered by her ancestors and so denigrated by our modern-day obsession with growth. In Orion ’s “ Fatherland ,” Owusu attempts to make sense of her complex identity, and of the series of upheavals she’s experienced, which shift into focus as she makes sense of her own reaction to the UN’s 2018 bombshell climate report. She named her eagerly anticipated memoir, released earlier this year from Simon & Schuster, Aftershocks , after “the earth’s delayed reaction to stress.” Images of earthquakes and their aftermath recur throughout the luscious and unsettling narrative—through which Owusu wills herself onto firmer ground.
Are you a fan of playfully irreverent, raw writing? And/or of Behind the Music –grade thru-hike realness? Carrot Quinn ’s punky first book, Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart is not your old-school titan-of-the-trail navel-gazing. Rather, it’s a colorfully detailed, emotionally resonant account of her trek across the Pacific Coast Trail back in 2013, rendered with distinct anarchist flair. We’re looking forward to her upcoming release: The Sunset Route: Freight Trains, Forgiveness, and Freedom on the Rails in the American West , Quinn’s adventure memoir about shaking off her hardscrabble Alaska childhood by traversing the country by freight trains—sleeping in fields under the stars, foraging in dumpsters, and attempting to heal as she rattles through forests and deserts.
Ana Maria Spagna spent months traveling to the Panamint Range, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascade Range to meet the ordinary people—primarily Indigenous women—undergoing extraordinary endeavors to reclaim ancestral lands from the private companies seeking to capitalize on them. The result is 2015’s Reclaimers , in which Spagna, the author of five other books, renders visible the typically invisible struggles and triumphs of these tenacious underdogs. Spagna’s words are now more relevant than ever—and they’re also funny, relatable, and often joyful (check out her colorful Sierra essay on wildfires in the Pacific Northwest). In Ecotone , nature writer Brian Doyle writes, “I remember the first time I read a passage from Ana Maria—it was in a magazine in which all the other stuff was careful and remote and only news, and her essay was sharp and blunt and had mud and sawdust in it.” For evidence, see Spagna’s recent ode to road trips, Americana, and the music of the late Sharon Jones, published shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, on Terrain.org . In Spagna’s latest, 2018’s whimsical and surprising Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going , she takes wild road trips, returning home to her mountain valley in Washington State to muse on rootedness, yearning, ambition, sonder, and home. It’s a powerful reminder to love what we have while still imagining what it is we want most for ourselves and the world.
Kao Kalia Yang may not immediately strike readers as a nature writer, per se, but she writes poignantly of the intersections between environment and war. Her critically acclaimed memoir, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir , recounts her family’s harrowing escape from war in Laos—where she witnessed the mass death of honeybees as a result of American “yellow rain” bombs. Yang portrays the consequences of US intervention in Southeast Asia and the stark transition from life in the rainforest to refugee camps in Thailand, and then, to concrete public housing projects in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her most recent release, Somewhere in the Known World : A Collective Refugee Memoir tells the true stories of 14 refugees—prescient subject matter at a time when the most massive human migration since the last ice age is underway because of climate change.
Katie O'Reilly is Sierra's adventure and lifestyle editor. Follow her on Twitter @katieowrites .
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Oak Spring Garden Foundation
10 Must-Read Women Nature Writers
March 22, 2021 emily ellis.
Writing about nature and the environment - whether a nonfiction discourse on climate change, or a poem about the petals of a peony - can help foster a deeper understanding and appreciation for the natural world. Inarguably, some of history’s most impactful nature writing has come from women: legendary writers like Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver and Leslie Marmon Silko who have helped us see the world, and our place in it, in new ways.
To celebrate Women’s History Month, we’ve compiled a list of ten must-read women writers whose work explores plants, wildlife and the environment, ranging from historical to contemporary.* After you’ve scrolled through this list of historical women writers, head over to our new The World in Her Words exhibit to peruse the writing from six talented modern-day women who are inspired by the natural world.
A woodcut by Utagawa Kuniyoshi illustrating Chiyo-ni’s famous haiku, Morning Glory. Public Domain.
Fukuda Chiyo-ni (1703-1775)
A Japanese poet and Buddhist nun, Fukuda Chiyo-ni is known as one of the greatest haiku poets of all time. She began writing haikus (a short form of Japanese poetry) as a child, and by her late teens, her work was well known across Japan. While she was influenced by renowned haiku poet Matsuo Bashō, she also developed her own unique writing style, helping to pave the way for other women haiku poets in a previously male-dominated art.
The unity of humans and nature was a theme in much of Fukada’s work. One of her best-known poems is “Morning Glory” - one of several haikus she penned about the flower:
morning glory!
the well bucket-entangled,
I ask for water
Anne Spencer (1882-1975)
Anne Bethel Spencer in her wedding dress, 1900. Public Domain Image.
Anne Spencer was not only one of history’s most significant women nature poets, but a librarian, educator, gardener, and civil rights activist. Although she lived the majority of her life in Virginia, she was close friends with Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois. Her Lynchburg, VA home served as a gathering space for Black intellectuals, artists and activists throughout her life.
Nature and gardening featured prominently in Spencer’s work, along with themes of race and religion. She published 30 poems during her lifetime, and was only the second Black poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). Her home and garden in Lynchburg are now a museum and public garden - a perfect day-trip for Virginia residents in search of education and inspiration.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)
Photo: The Library of Congress
OSGF founder Bunny Mellon was so fond of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay that she used to keep a collection of her poems beside her bed. Books by the poet and playwright feature prominently in the Oak Spring Garden Library; fittingly, since much of Millay’s work centered around plants and nature.
Millay became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, at the age of only 31. She was popular during her life time for her riveting readings as well as for her progressive political stances, frank portrayal of both hetero and homosexuality, and her descriptions of female experience and expression. Along with her contemporary Robert Frost, she was considered one of the most skilled sonnet writers of the twentieth century.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890 - 1998)
Photo: Friends of the Everglades
Journalist and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas is now known as “the mother of the Everglades” for her efforts to protect the fragile Florida wetlands. As a young woman, she moved to Florida to work at what is now The Miami Herald . It wasn’t until the 1940s that she developed an interest in researching the ecology and history of the Florida everglades and the threats posed to them by development. Her 1947 book, Everglades: River of Grass, helped show the biodiversity and beauty of an area that many people had considered worthless. Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her conservation work in 1993, and would continue fighting for the everglades until her death at the age of 108.
Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)
Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Scientist and writer Rachel Carson’s best known work, Silent Spring , led directly to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. A marine biologist, she began her career in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries before becoming a full time writer following the publication of her bestsellers The Edge of the Sea, The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind in the 1950s. It was the 1961 publication of Silent Spring , however, that firmly put her in the history books; the book described the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment, bringing international attention to the devastation being wrought by chemicals like DDT.
Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
Photo: the Poetry Foundation
One of history’s greatest nature writers, poet Mary Oliver passed away just two years ago in 2019. Her work focused on quieter, overlooked aspects of nature such as motionless ponds and ants crawling over peony petals. Much of her poetry featured the plants, animals, and landscapes of New England, where she lived for most of her life.
Oliver was heavily influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay as a young poet. Like Millay, she won a Pulitzer prize for her work, along with other major awards. Oliver was called the country’s best-selling poet in a 2007 New York Times article - an indication of how her poetry helped people connect with and appreciate the natural world.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1945 - )
Photo: www.clarissapinkolaestes.com
Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an author, jungian psychoanalyst, and a cantadora (keeper of old stories) whose writing is influenced by her training as a psychologist and by the oral traditions she was raised in. Of Native American and Mexica Spanish descent , and grew up in a rural village near the Great Lakes, where was immersed in the oral tradition of old mythos and stories as well as ancient forms of healing, much of which centered around plants and animals. She is best known for her acclaimed 1992 book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, a collection of nature-centered myths, stories, and folktales taken from different traditions that are intended to help women reconnect with the world around them and with their wilder selves.
Leslie Marmon Silko (1948 -)
Photo: Arizona Memory Project
Novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko was a major contributor of the Native American literary and artistic renaissance, which began in the late 1960s. Of Mexican, Laguna Pueblo, and Anglo-American descent, much of her writing draws on Laguna myths and story-telling traditions and centers around the alienation of Native Americans in a white society. She is best known for her acclaimed 1977 novel Ceremony , the story of a World War II veteran who returns to his Laguna Pueblo Reservation and reconnects with the people, plants, and animals of his home.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (1953 - )
Photo: www.robinwallkimmerer.com
A writer, botanist, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer is considered a must-read author both for plant lovers and others who wish to broaden their understanding of our world. She is the award-winning author of Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003) and the recent bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass (2020) , which “embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers.” A proponent of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, her interests as a writer and scientist include restoration of ecological communities as well as the restoration of human relationships to land.
Carolyn Finney
Photo: Middlebury College
Author, storyteller and cultural geographer Caroyln Finney may be the youngest writer on this list, but her ground-breaking work - which centers around diversity and inclusion in outdoor spaces - is sure to go down in history. Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (2014) examines the environmental legacy of slavery, racial violence, and segregation while also celebrating contributions that Black Americans have made to the environment. Finney speaks frequently (digitally and in person) about issues related identify, difference, creativity, and resilience, challenging people to question whose stories frame or are left out of environmental institutions and issues. Check out her current schedule of speaking events here .
This list represents only a fraction of great women writers, historical and contemporary, whose work explores nature and the environment. Other writers to check out include (but are not limited to) : Barbara Kingsolver, June Jordan, Audre Lourd, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Gene Stratton-Porter, Mary Austin, Nan Shepherd, Kathleen Dean Moore, Ursula Le Guin, Annie Dillard, Ann Haymond Zwinger, Jane Goodall, Octavia Butler, Emily Dickinson.
*Special thanks to BCCF greenhouse manager Caitlin Etherton for her help with this post!
14 Books About Nature by Women Writers
Reading Lists
Inclusive stories about our relationship with the natural world that subverts patriarchal norms.
I remember when I first sought out nature writing. My predominant sense of who got to be a nature writer—who got to take the adventure and arrive home transformed—was as cliched as anyone else’s, and for good reason. I had never known any women nature writers, nor read them. Nor could I find them easily. Decades later, when I sought out “best of” nature writing and adventure writing lists in order to prepare my syllabi for nature writing classes, these lists were still predominantly composed of white men. I had to hunt to enhance my own reading and awareness before I could offer an expanded sense of nature writing to my students.
The root causes of nature writing’s white, patriarchal norm are unsurprising: being out in nature for a prolonged time often takes resources, a perceived sense of safety, and the masculine sensibilities of the historic publishing machine that thrusts a nature writer into the canon. Academia often reinforces the historical canon, and certain texts, like Thoreau’s Walden , become sacred. Kathryn Schultz addresses the Thoreau Problem brilliantly in her essay “ Pond Scum .” “Like many canonized works, it is more revered than read,” she writes, as she points out that our reflexive, ill-informed hero worship may be misplaced. We live in a time when we need different heroes, more compassionate and inclusive ways of thinking about our relationship with the natural world.
Women have always taken adventures and developed expertise about the natural world, but their books, if written or published, have rarely made it into the nature writing cannon. We can change that, as well as a sense of who can feel comfortable in wild spaces and join conversations about nature, conservation, and adventure, and we should.
Here are my reading recommendations, as a start:
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid—a devoted gardener and sharp observer—always integrates a stunning sense of the natural world in her books. A Small Place dives into the problematic, colonial mindset of tourism, and forever changed the way I think of the ethics of travel. This is essential reading for developing a critical sense of how to move—or not move—in the world.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
I hope to one day live in a world where the hero worship and reading of Carson eclipses that of Thoreau. Silent Spring is—perhaps similarly to Walden—referenced more than it is read, and reading it, though unsettling, is an eye-opener. Carson knew the danger of capitalism colliding with chemistry, and the impact of man-made compounds on the environment, and she wrote about it with grace and courage. Written in the ‘60s, this book will convince you of the danger of pesticides, and of Carson’s importance in shaping our collective environmental conscience.
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
No one has ever written about a rural junkyard in Georgia—and the slash pine forests—with more color, skill, and heart. The New York Times called Ray the next Rachel Carson, but she is under-read. Ray offers a crucial take on the intersection between class and a conservation mindset in this ecological memoir that traces her origins and the essential flow between person and place.
Guidebook to Relative Strangers by Camille Dungy
Dungy is a revered nature poet and professor, and I love reading her in essay form. Guidebook is a travelogue, a series of personal essays written largely to her daughter about the past and present, and how to move within it. When I teach this book, students respond to Dungy’s exploration of how it feels to move in the world and outdoors, especially after becoming a mother.
Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille
I’ve heard it said that Labastille out Thoreau’d Thoreau—building her own small cabin in the Adirondacks and pursuing a vigorous outdoor life as a guide and conservationist. Woodswoman , one of LaBastille’s several books, traces her journey to self-reliance and the deepening of her relationship with the Adirondacks. LaBastille is a ’70s feminist and an outdoor icon who shouldn’t disappear from our literary consciousness.
Seam by Tarfia Faizullah
Faizullah is a poet, Fulbright scholar, the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, and a fearless writer who looks closely at the experience of women, especially women caught in the throes of trauma and war. In Seam , poet Natasha Tretheway says “we confront the past and its aftermath in the lives of women interrupted by violence and brutality and loss.” Faizullah has an eye for the natural world, and this comes through in the work.
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
Is anyone better at writing birds on the page? No. I once heard Macdonald read a piece about a baby albatross taking flight; it made me cry and laugh. Macdonald knows how to tell a story, and she also knows how to reach a sublime place in her writing—where things feel awful and wonderful, all at once. Vesper Flights is an essay collection, always in conversation with the natural world, birds, nostalgia, the countryside, and time.
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
I admire the wonder-forward way Nezhukumatathil writes and creates community. Engaging with the natural world doesn’t have to be a doom-filled task, and she makes space for joy and beauty. These are essays about the ways the natural world can sustain and inspire us.
Paddling My Own Canoe by Audrey Sutherland
Sutherland is a little gruff, practical, and full of moxie. Despite her limited time and resources, and four kids at home, Sutherland is eager to get out and swim her way into an adventure and meditation about a woman’s relationship with the natural world. Featured: ecology, survival, and solo female adventure in Hawaii.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
You already know this one, and you already love it, and for good reason. I’ve heard Kimmerer speak about how important a shift she made when she allowed herself to move from a purely scientific way of writing into first person narratives that honor emotion and feeling. Braiding Sweetgrass feels like the feminine corrective to a way of looking at natural resources—it prioritizes gratitude instead of dominance, and explains a more tender way of relating to the environment, yoked with illustrative stories from Kimmerer’s life.
Some Say the Lark by Jennifer Chang
Chang, a professor, editor, and poet, gave one of the most affecting nature lectures I’ve ever heard, on race and the pastoral form. She’s a brilliant thinker, and there’s often a spark in her poems, a valid anger in the margins. The poems in Some Say the Lark explore loss, the self, broken systems, and motherhood.
Rising by Elizabeth Rush
Rush’s book came early in the contemporary climate discussion, and her prose is lush and dark. A lyrical collection of accounts that show climate change is not a future phenomenon, but it’s already happening, and the worsening situations on the coast that have long been problematic.
A Natural History of Cumberland Island by Carol Ruckduschel
Ruckduschel is known for many things—her habit of eating roadkill, her storied existence on a barrier island, but also her thousands of necropsies of sea turtles and extensive knowledge of the natural world. Her book on the natural history of Cumberland Island is a life’s work of serious study. This is a scientific reference text, but beautiful in its wholeness and lived perspective.
Upstream by Mary Oliver
This book is stunning, the lyric payoff of decades of sustained study. Upstream is a series of lyric essays on place. Oliver’s “Ode to Provincetown” was early in its eulogistic tone for nature writing, and it’s a masterclass in avoiding righteousness.
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Camille Dungy's Black Nature holds the distinction of being the first collection to anthologize nature writing by African American poets. · Rahawa Haile · Ana
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