Environmental books worth reading: eight classics and modern nature books

The environmental books that last tend to do one thing very well: they change what the reader notices. Rachel Carson made a generation notice the silence where birdsong should be. Aldo Leopold made people see a farm as a community of soil, water, plants and animals. Merlin Sheldrake makes you think about the fungus under your feet. If you read only one, make it Silent Spring, which is short and still relevant more than sixty years on.

Below are eight books in four groups: the classics, the living world, extinction and change, and one novel. They are nature books in the broad sense, about how the living world works and what people are doing to it, and none of them needs a science background. For books on warming itself, our list of climate change books covers the science, the solutions, the politics and two climate novels.

The list at a glance

The classics

Two of these books helped shape the modern environmental movement, and the third is well on its way to the same standing.

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962). Carson was a marine biologist who had worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and already had a following for her books about the sea. Here she documented how DDT and other synthetic pesticides, sprayed widely after the Second World War, moved through soil, water, insects, fish and birds, and she raised hard questions about human exposure. The chemical industry attacked her, but a presidential science advisory committee largely supported her findings in 1963, and the book is often credited with helping to launch the modern environmental movement. Some critics still blame it for restrictions on DDT in malaria control, a charge many historians and public health researchers dispute. Its wider lesson, that new substances tend to be released first and studied later, still holds, as our piece on nanomaterials in food and packaging found.

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold (1949). Leopold, a forester and wildlife ecologist, bought a worn-out farm on the Wisconsin River in the 1930s and spent weekends restoring it with his family, sleeping in a converted chicken coop they called the Shack. The first part of the book follows that land month by month; later essays range across the continent and end with "The Land Ethic", which argues that our idea of community should extend to soils, waters, plants and animals. Leopold died in 1948 helping to fight a fire on a neighbour's land, and the book appeared the following year. Some passages on hunting and game management now read as dated, but the essays are beautifully made, and they influenced almost everyone else on this list.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013). Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Braiding Sweetgrass weaves together the two ways of knowing she brings to her work: plant science and Indigenous teaching. She writes about wild strawberries, pecans, the "Three Sisters" of corn, beans and squash, and the idea of an honourable harvest, taking only what is offered and giving something back. The book found a very large readership years after it first came out, much of it by word of mouth. Readers who want data may find it too gentle, but no other book here does as much to show what a different relationship with land might look like day to day.

The living world

These three books are about how other organisms live, and each one is a little more rigorous than the last.

The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben (2015). Wohlleben, a German forester who managed a beech forest in the Eifel region, describes trees as social beings that warn each other with scent, share sugars through fungal networks and keep an old neighbour's stump alive. It is short and charming, and makes an easy first step for readers who have never thought hard about a forest. Its language is deliberately human, with trees cast as parents, friends and neighbours, and some forest scientists have objected that it stretches the evidence, especially on how much trees cooperate underground. Read it for wonder and for questions, then check the science elsewhere.

Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake (2020). Sheldrake, a biologist whose doctoral research in Panama focused on the fungal networks that link plant roots, takes in yeast, lichens, psychedelic mushrooms and mycelium grown into building materials. He writes with obvious delight but is careful to flag where the evidence runs out, including on the popular idea of a "wood wide web" through which trees share resources. It suits readers who enjoyed Wohlleben and want a more rigorous next step. It also shows why fungi matter so much to soil health and to how soils hold carbon, a subject we looked at in what soil carbon science can promise.

An Immense World, Ed Yong (2022). Yong, a science journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic, borrows the idea of the Umwelt, the sensory bubble each animal lives inside, and works through smell, sight, touch, heat, sound, echolocation, and electric and magnetic fields. The effect is to make the reader's own senses seem narrow. Its final chapter turns to light and noise pollution, arguing that people are flooding other animals' worlds with signals they never evolved to handle. It is long and dense with detail, and best taken a chapter at a time.

Extinction and change

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert (2014). Kolbert takes the five great mass extinctions in the fossil record as her frame and argues, case by case, that humans are now causing a sixth. Each chapter centres on one creature or place, from Panama's frogs struck by a fungal disease to the vanished great auk, the Sumatran rhinoceros and the acidifying waters off an Italian island. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2015. Some readers find its reporter's restraint bleak, since it offers few remedies, but no book on this list makes the scale of current change clearer.

Readers who want to go further can try David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo (1996), a longer and more technical account of why species vanish from islands and fragments of habitat. Kolbert's own Under a White Sky, on our climate list, picks up where this book leaves off, with the people trying to engineer their way out.

Fiction

The Overstory, Richard Powers (2018). The Overstory follows nine people, each marked by a particular tree, whose lives converge on the fight over old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. One of them, a botanist ridiculed for claiming that trees communicate, mirrors real arguments in forest science. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019. It is long, and some readers feel the characters serve the ideas a little too obviously, but it does something the non-fiction cannot: it makes the lifespan of a tree feel real. Read it after Wohlleben or Sheldrake and the science will feel familiar.

For something shorter, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012), about monarch butterflies wintering in the wrong place, is a gentler novel about the living world under strain.

Reading them as a set

Read in order of publication, these books trace a widening and then a narrowing of attention: from Leopold's single farm to Carson's chemistry spreading through whole food webs, to Kolbert's view across geological time, and back down to the very small, with Sheldrake's fungi and Yong's senses. What they share is the conviction that paying close attention to other living things is where good environmental decisions start.

How we chose

We looked for books a general reader can finish and enjoy, across several ways of seeing nature: science, memoir, Indigenous knowledge and fiction. We also favoured books that are widely read, reviewed and taught.