I love a lot of natural history writing, most of it decades to centuries old.
This older forum topic: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/favorite-nature-writers/1405 and a few similar threads touch on a lot of those authors and a few things that are only a few year old, but I’m wondering who I should be reading who is writing now? What would you recommend that was published in the last year or two?
Thank you!
I just finished a very compelling non-fiction account about two women botanists who ran the entire Grand Canyon in 1938 and made a huge contribution to science: Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny (2023). It won multiple literary awards.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff currently being published under the banner of “environmental history” rather than “natural history” or “nature writing”. The shift here is from observing nature to reflecting on how our relationships with the natural world have changed over time.
I would have to think about specific recommendations (a lot of my reading here has been shorter-form essays/articles rather than books), but for browsing purposes, there is a collection of information about relevant titles here: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/collection/16234
(Full disclosure: I was employed for a time as a copyeditor at the institute that organized this project; however, none of the material there represents my own work, nor do I receive any monetary gain from page views or book purchases that might result.)
I also like the reviews at https://inquisitivebiologist.com for finding interesting reading material on nature topics.
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
I just came to say this. It is natural history writing but so much more as well. Fantastic book. I just finished it last night.
And the best part is, serviceberries grow all over North America (and probably other places too).
The genus Amelanchier is widely distributed across North America, Europe, and western Asia. There are pockets of their population extending into Central Asia as far east as Lake Baikal.
These are just a bit outside the “last year or two”…
Chasing Plants by Chris Thorogood (2022)
The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World by Oliver Milman (2022)
An Immense World by Ed Yong (2022)
These are clearly outside the timeframe, but worth reading (IMHO)…
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
The Plant Messiah by Carlos Magdalena (2017)
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren (2016)
Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks (2002)
Two slightly older books I’d recommend:
“A Thousand Trails Home” by Seth Kantner, 2021, Mountaineers Books. Seth is a phenomenal writer and photographer who has lived a unique life even for an Alaskan, growing up in a remote part of the Brooks Range in a sod hut with parents who practiced a subsistence life. They and their Native friends taught him and his brother respect and keen observational powers, but times are changing fast, for their way of life and for the caribou. It’s a fascinating and, at times, very tough read. His photographs are gorgeous.
“Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay” by Marilyn Sigman, 2018, University of Alaska Press. Marilyn is another gifted writer and with this book she won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing. (Full disclosure, Marilyn and I are friends going back to our years in graduate school in the wildlife program at the Univ. of Alaska. I always knew she had a great book in her and this was a pleasure to read).
Tom Mustill - How To Speak Whale (2013)
https://www.tommustill.com/how-to-speak-whale
"“A thrilling investigation into the pioneering world of animal communication, where big data and artificial intelligence are changing our relationship with animals forever.”
Really neat stuff! Life on the planet is on the brink of an interspecies communication breakthrough. Another example of such, humans gaining greater understanding of long-ongoing interspecies/interkingdom communications, e.g. mycorrhizal communication.
“Flesh speaks; wood listens.”
+++++++++++++++++++
Older book.
One River - Wade Davis (1996)
https://daviswade.com/book-one-river
“In the 1940s, biologist Richard Evans Schultes uncovered many of the secrets of the rain forest, relying not only on his own prodigious investigations, but on the wisdom passed down by local tribes. Thirty years later his student, Wade Davis, followed in his footsteps. Two interwoven tales of scientific adventure bring to life the riches of the Amazon basin and bear witness to the destruction of its indigenous culture and natural wonders over two generations.”
Davis’ finest work, and a wonderful in-depth introduction to Richard Evans Schultes.
Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014) won lots of awards. It’s more biography than nature writing, but both. I liked even better her essays published in Vesper Flights (2020).
Interestingly, that book helped me finally to understand my childhood. At one point she wrote, “Hawks aren’t social animals like dogs or horses; they understand neither coercion nor punishment.” Suddenly, my rage over a fairly normal childhood had an explanation.
Seirian Sumner’s Endless Forms (2022) is an excellent and colorful account of wasp evolution, behavior, and diversity in language that’s easy for most readers to understand. She takes the reader through several aspects of wasp life from hatching to death, describing little-known details like how solitary wasps keep their babies clean with antibiotics and how social wasp society isn’t nearly as orderly as most think. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in nature or biology as wasps play such a major role in our biosphere and many of the ideas she discusses can be applied to fields outside of entomology.
Another, older wasp book I recommend is Justin Schmidt’s The Sting of the Wild (2016). This is one of the first books I read that really got me into studying wasps and their relatives. Schmidt is the lovable madman who developed the Schmidt sting pain index, a scale of sting pain that sorts out the several dozen species of bees, ants, and wasps whose stings he experienced firsthand. His book details the reasons how and why these insects developed stings and why their stings are so different, touching on evolutionary biology and ecology. The book includes a list of the sting ratings he had experienced up to that point, including short and flavorful descriptions of each that only a true sting connoisseur could make (a yellowjacket’s sting is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”).