I’m a published author specializing in nature, travel, and wine writing, and I have been an organic farmer for nearly two decades on an award-winning estate in France. I’ve written four books about the transformation of our organic farm. In my latest, Cultivating Change, I explore how biodiversity helps us address climate change and how important it is to the health of the land. It is also a human story; like the books below, stories are key to bringing these subjects to life. My list is women authors, not because I set out to do that, but because these books are beautiful, intuitive, and deep, like the women who wrote them.
I wrote
Cultivating Change: Regenerating Land and Love in the Age of Climate Crisis
I love, love, love this book. What a gem, a prayer of love to plants and nature, a dense but light book of ‘indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants’ as it says in the sub-title.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a decorated Professor of Botany, a mother, a writer of grace, power, and elegance, a keeper and sharer of indigenous wisdom, and an overall generous human being. If there is one book you read this year, let it be this. It filled my heart with joy, hope, and wonder. I loved her other book, Gathering Moss, too.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
Dr. Suzanne Simard is also a professor of Forest Ecology, but like Robin Wall Kimmerer (above), she has created a readable and personal book about her subject. Her research, undertaken over decades, set out to prove that trees communicate and cooperate and that they help each other, both within a species and between different species.
Her gripping story includes how she overcame a Male Chauvinist work environment and proved that a weed-killed monoculture was far from the most optimal way to manage forests. Her book is a reminder of how little we know of the incredibly complex biosphere we are privileged to be part of.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery
“Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that the world is a web of stories, connecting us to one another. [The book] carries the stories of trees, fungi, soil and bears--and of a human being listening in on the conversation. The interplay of personal narrative, scientific insights and the amazing revelations about the life of the forest make a compelling story.”—Robin Wall…
Elizabeth Kolbert is a respected science writer. In this book, she pieces together hard facts, historical background, and personal stories to help us understand the 6th extinction currently underway.
This deeply researched book doesn’t just leap to blame climate change (which is a factor) but looks at this loss of biodiversity through a much wider lens of humankind’s impact on our environment. Kolbert is a gifted writer and entertainer who finds ways to bring humor to this dark subject.
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions of life on earth.
Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Elizabeth Kolbert combines brilliant field reporting, the history of ideas and the work of geologists, botanists and marine biologists to tell the gripping stories of a dozen species - including the Panamanian golden frog and the Sumatran rhino - some already gone, others at the point of vanishing.
The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most…
This beautifully illustrated book is a biodiversity manifesto. Mary Reynolds is an Irish garden designer who became the youngest woman ever to win a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. Her biggest contribution to gardening is her new initiative to bring biodiversity to gardens through this book and her organization, We Are The Ark.
Her mission is to move people from being gardeners to being guardians. Echoing a message in my latest book, Mary says we can’t wait for politicians to change things; we can start right away, in a back garden or a window box for apartment dwellers. This is an uplifting book that offers magical prose and illustrations. It guides the reader through how to rewild your patch (or your community patch/ school/ shared space), no matter the size, and why transforming from gardener to guardian is so crucial to us all. The book’s title, ‘ARK,’ stands for Acts of Restorative Kindness and is an invitation to be kind to the earth and yourself.
“Reynolds gives us a much-needed reason for hope. The gardener, the conservationist, the city planner,and the nature lover will all be inspired for this wonderful book shows how thousands of even small wildlife friendly gardens can provide habitat for embattled wildlife around the world.” —Jane Goodall, Phd, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace
Individuals can’t save the world alone. But if millions of us work together to save our own patch of earth—then we really have a shot. How do we do it? With Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK). An ARK is a restored,…
This book by Isabella Tree is the story of how Isabella and her husband, Charlie Burrell, transformed their massive 3500-acre farm in England (100 times the size of our organic farm in France) from an intensively farmed operation that was losing money into a conservation haven and an icon of rewilding or ‘wilding’ as Isabella has termed it. Questions remain about exactly how this model can work without subsidies and/or a heavy emphasis on tourism (they are less than 2 hours drive from London and offer glamping and more) and where/how serious food production fits into this picture.
That said, the other model of intensive farming at Knepp failed both economically and environmentally. Wilding at Knepp is far kinder to the land and the wider environment. It’s economically successful, employing far more people than it did as an intensive farm, and the environmental benefits are off the charts. This book is an important and engaging read.
'A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation's salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope' - Chris Packham
In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.
Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize.
My book is a powerful memoir that follows my partner and I as we increase biodiversity on our organic farm in France, become empty nesters, and rewrite our love story.
I explore food, biodiversity, relationships, yoga, climate change, and transformation through engaging stories and inspirational nature writing in France and beyond.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
