by Rachel Carson (1962)
Originally released in 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use, sparking a revolution in environmental awareness and directly spurring the creation of the EPA and the banning of DDT.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together.
Peter Wohlleben
Are trees social beings? In The Hidden Life of Trees, forester Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland. Wohlleben reveals that trees communicate through subterranean fungal networks.
Merlin Sheldrake
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Sheldrake provides an exhilarating journey into this hidden realm.
Tim Dee
"In this book, Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and both their natural and human histories. These four fields-walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing-play central roles in the sweeping panorama of world history and in the lives of individuals. In Dee's telling, a field is never just a setting for great battles or natural disasters, though it is often this as well. A field is the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life, especially when looked at, contemplated, worked in, lived with, and written about. Dee's four fields, which he has known and studied for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his private garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie in Little Bighorn, Montana, and a grass meadow in the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild"--