The best books for awakening to a vital, exuberant, living kinship with the more-than-human world

Robin, a co-editor of the Kinship series with me, has become well-known for her book Braiding Sweetgrass, which was a New York Times bestseller. Robin’s popularity is based in part on her unique ability to bridge the worlds of Western science (she has a PhD in botany) and indigenous wisdom (she’s a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation). For those looking to dive deeper into her work, Robin’s first book Gathering Moss is a gleaming green gem of a book, full of stories that will pull you into wondrous microcosms of relation. This is a book about the value of paying attention, and how doing so can change you. You’ll never see moss the same way again, and you may never see the world the same way again.

Entangled Life is purportedly about fungi and recent discoveries related to communications and exchanges among the massive mycorrhizal networks (the so-called “wood-wide web”) that exist beneath our feet. But the biology in this book quickly leads to mind-blowing existential questions about symbiotic relationships and what it means to be human. Sheldrake gifts readers with fascinating glimpses of a world that exists largely beyond our sensorial capacities yet enables nearly all of life as we know it to emerge, diverge, and converge. Living beings are constantly communicating, and sometimes communing, in ways that not only make us possible but “make questions of our categories… Our bodies, like those of all other organisms, are dwelling places. Life is nested biomes all the way down.”

I benefited immensely from this book by Tyson Yunkaporta, an Indigenous Australian academic and storyteller—or, to use his words, a “yarner,” someone who actively listens and weaves various conversations together. Yunkaporta critiques settler colonial culture while providing tools for reflecting on the patterns within nature and how attending to these might lead us to behave differently. Peppered with a fair amount of the author’s own journey in reclaiming his ancestral knowledge, the book takes its name from mnemonic symbols that were traditionally drawn in sand. Yunkaporta expresses a compelling cosmovision as well as techniques for countering individual and cultural narcissism, reminding readers that living with land is a collective journey of becoming good kin.

Hailed as a “new genre of nature writing,” Mueller’s book is species-specific, dwelling upon the lives and deaths of salmon, yet the subject matter could apply to any creature that has become a commodity within late-stage capitalism. Mueller contrasts the Norwegian farmed-salmon industry and the increasing mechanization and reduction of living beings to things with wild salmon populations and Native people’s perspectives from the Pacific Northwest. Critically, he dares to take on the perspective of salmon, sprinkling memorable and moving vignettes throughout the book, helping readers imagine the world from a salmon’s-eye-view. This work of interspecies empathy is a rare and welcome contribution to thinking about personhood through a lens that is other-than-human.

I first met Graham when I was a PhD student attending a conference on religion & animals. He is a person who seems drawn to and across boundaries of scholarship, and though this book is scholarly, it’s also a totally accessible overview of the ways in which animism is not some primitive ideology but, rather, core to human experience and cultures all over the world. Harvey provides a careful treatment of historical and contemporary animist perspectives, nonhuman personhood, and the formation of animistic sensibilities. He details how animism fosters a constant dialogue between humans and non-human persons—a kind of social, spiritual, and ecological conversation that is continuously negotiated. Animism is not a thing of the past; it’s a way of life that is vital to a viable future.