The selections below have been chosen for their readability and historical importance. Included are some out-of-print books which can be bought easily and cheaply through abebooks.com and Amazon.com.
Anthologies
Nature writing anthologies are convenient sources of further readings. The first three in this list are those that I use most.
This Incomperable Lande [sic], 1989, edited by Thomas J. Lyon, contains a 60-page bibliography of primary works and 15 pages of secondary sources. Most of Lyon’s selections are complete rather than excerpted. The 92-page introductory essay is the best I’ve read.
The Norton Book of Nature Writing, 1990, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder, contains 126 short samples by 94 English and American authors.
The Book of Naturalists: An Anthology of the Best Natural History, 1944, edited by William Beebe, contains works from Aristotle to Darwin to Rachel Carson.
From Blue Ridge to Barrier Islands: An Audubon Naturalist Reader, 1997, edited by myself and former ANS president Tony White, targets the Mid-Atlantic region.
At Home on this Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s Nature Writing, 2002, edited by Lorraine Anderson and Thomas S. Edwards, is a remarkably rich collection by a diverse set of American women writers.
Major Problems in American Environmental History, 1993, edited by Carolyn Merchant, is a brilliant collection of primary material augmented by modern critical and historical essays.
American Environmentalism: Reading in Conservation History, third edition 1990, edited by Roderick Nash, is the most popular conservation anthology.
Art & Nature: An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry, 1992, selected by Kate Farrell, is a delight of poetry and pictures from all over the world.
A Book of English Pastoral Verse, 1975, edited by John Barrell and John Bull, contains selections from Edmund Spenser through William Butler Yeats.
Orion, an illustrated magazine, includes poetry, nature essays, conservation articles,
and book reviews.
Nature Writing
(chronological order , emphasis on our region)
Bartram, William. Travels, 1791. Bartram’s accounts of back-country travel, places, and peoples remain entertaining and informative.
Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biographies, 1831. This text accompanying Birds of America is full of entertaining episodes and interesting natural history facts and even more interesting fictions.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature, 1835. Emerson’s complex, philosophical, yet moving essay was read by nearly all educated Americans of the time. It influenced writers including Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, 1854. Thoreau’s masterpiece describes the seasons at Walden Pond. Conceived as a handbook for transcendentalist living, it is as significant for insights into human nature as for natural history interpretation.
Burroughs, John. Wake Robin, 1871. Burroughs was the 19th century’s most popular nature writer. Wake Robin includes “Spring at the Capital” derived from his experiences in Washington, D.C.
Hudson, W. H.The Naturalist in La Plata, 1892, and Far Away and Long Ago, 1918. In my judgment, this Englishman is the finest prose stylist among nature writers. He obtains pictorial and emotional effects with a style so unobtrusive that the experience feels first hand rather than secondhand. Most of Hudson’s books are available used on the web.
Muir, John. The Mountains of California, 1894. This first book by the writer-naturalist and founding leader of the Sierra Club was put together from magazine articles written largely to gain support for Yosemite National Park. Perhaps Muir’s best-organized and best-written book, it contains some of his most memorable essays including “The Water-Ouzel.”
Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain, 1906. Set in a near-desert valley on the eastern edge of the Southern Sierra Nevada, these short storylike sketches capture the essence of the landscape and its plants, animals, native peoples, and Euro-American newcomers. The book is one of the period’s many place-based writings by American women, including Sarah Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)—about coastal Maine—and Dorothy Scarborough’s The
Wind (1925)—a West Texas novel.
Beebe, William. Jungle Peace, 1918. Beebe finds peace in the wet tropical forest around the research station he was establishing in British Guiana.
Beston, Henry. The Outermost House, 1928. Beston describes a year on Cape Cod’s Great Beach.
Williamson, Henry. Salar the Salmon, 1935, and Tarka the Otter, 1927. The fictionalized stories of a salmon and an otter in Devon, England, these two novels preach conservation messages with maximum emotional impact while communicating natural history information.
Carson, Rachel. Under the Sea Wind, 1941. Carson is at her poetic best in this, her first book. Each chapter is a separate narrative, which personifies a particular bird or fish to explain its life history and ecology. Unlike Carson’s more popular The Sea Around Us whose science has been transformed by new discoveries, Under the Sea Wind’s natural history remains true.
Halle, Louis. Spring in Washington, 1947. Halle follows the progress of spring from January to June. His intensity and philosophical bent add depth and emotional content to this finely written book.
Teale, Edwin Way. North with Spring, 1951. One of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s four books of seasonal travel throughout America.
Carr, Archie. The Windward Road, 1956. Carr was a herpetologist who established the turtle conservation programs throughout the Caribbean. Set in Costa Rica, The Windward Road won the John Burroughs Medal of Nature Writing in the same year that one of its chapters “The Black Beach” won an O. Henry award.
Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey, 1957. The journey is evolution, and never has it been more effectively communicated than in these personalized, fictionalized stories.
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire, 1968. A renowned counterculture figure, Abbey is best known for his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Desert Solitaire is a collection of sketches and stories of Abbey’s time spent in and around Arches National Park in eastern Utah.
Skutch, Alexander. A Naturalist in Costa Rica, 1971. A botanist by training, an ornithologist by preference, and a Costa Rican farmer by necessity, Skutch’s saintlike life and the depth of his personal philosophy made him a well-loved figure to the nature-reading public.
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974. A Pulitzer Prize winner. Never has so much meaning derived from simple natural facts such as the flight of a mockingbird or the winter sunlight on the landscape.
Warner, William. Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay, 1976. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is the personal narrative of Warner’s study of the Bay.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard, 1978. Matthiessen joined New York Zoological Society mammalogist George Schaller on a trek into Tibet to study the behavior of wild goats and, with luck, see a snow leopard, one of the rarest of all the cats. Wonderful descriptions of the mountain landscape coupled with observations of the local peoples break the personal tension between two very private people.
Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams, 1986. Lopez explores the Arctic observing, recording, and meditating on what he sees.
Horton, Tom. Bay Country, 1987. A Baltimore Sun feature writer, Horton writes about the Chesapeake Bay’s contemporary natural and human history in sketches as diverse as the working of the Blue Plains sewage plant and the migration of eels from tributary uplands to the Sargasso Sea.
Rogers, Pattiann. The Dream of the Marsh Wren, 1998. Rogers explains her approach to writing using old and new examples of her poetry. In the process she narrates the personal stories behind the poems.
McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World, 1998. Made up of five of McPhee’s previous books, this Pulitzer Prize winner carries the reader across America in an exploration of geologic history, meeting along the way many intriguing characters.
Carroll, David M. A Swampwalker’s Journal: A Wetlands Year, 1999. Carroll’s long-term wood turtle survey in Vermont provides the setting for my personal favorite of the past decade. The unbecoming title belies the marvelously written mix of scientific reporting, nature observations, and personal conservation philosophy.
de Waal, Frans. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist, 2001. Comparing human and ape culture de Waal teaches us about ourselves.
Alison, Jane. Natives and Exotics, 2005. One of the best recent novels examining the interconnection between natural resource exploitation and social problems, Natives and Exotics focuses on a family’s migrations over several generations from Scotland during the land enclosures, first to the Portuguese Azores, then to a colonial Australian sheep station, and finally to 1970s Ecuador.
Conservation Literature
(chronological order)
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, 1823. This novel is the first systematic American investigation of exploitation and conservation of wildlife, forests, and farmland, and the meaning of the replacement of Native American-inhabited wilderness by Euro-American agricultural settlers. It is Cooper’s genius to represent this transition as tragic though inevitable. Cooper’s moving description of the killing of passenger pigeons led to bird protection laws.
Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature, 1864. Often referred to as the first conservation book, it studies human impact on the environment in Europe, the Near East, and America. Although it is long and heavily footnoted, it reads well if the reader is interested in history and historical interpretation.
Comstock, Anna Botford. A Course of Nature Study, 1911. This still usable collection of lesson plans for teaching natural history has remained in print since first publication. It was part of a program to keep people down on the
farm by interesting them in nature, and an integral part of the Countryside Movement led by Liberty Hyde Bailey at Cornell.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, 1949. Viewed by many as the most important and influential text of the environmental movement, the Almanac is also one of the finest examples of American nature writing.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, 1962. Possibly the most important book of the 20th century, Silent Spring awakened the nation to the dangers of pesticides; it should be required reading for everyone.
Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb, 1968. This Stanford biologist brought attention to the debate on the effects of overpopulation on development, public health, and the prospects for building a sustainable society.
Reisner, Mark. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 1986. In a uniquely ironic style, Reisner exposes the false hopes for an irrigated Eden in the West, the failures of dam-building programs
of the Bureau of Reclamation, and the water grabs of Los Angeles.
Gore, Al. Earth in the Balance, 1992.
The best-selling environmental book of the Rio Conference period. Gore’s mantra, “we mustmake the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization,” is a call for coordinated worldwide action, for which he suggests a “Marshall plan for the environment.”
Wilson, Edward O. The Diversity of Life, 1992. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning style, Wilson explains how life became diverse and why this diversity should be preserved.
Diamond, Jared. Collapse, 2005. This Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist analyzes the causes of the collapses of ancient and modern societies and discusses their relevance to today’s world.
