Bathsheba Demuth is a historian and prize-winning writer, interested in how people, ideas, places, and other-than-human species intersect in the far north. Her interest in these subjects began when she was 18 and spent several years in the Yukon, mushing huskies, hunting caribou, fishing for salmon, and otherwise learning to survive in the taiga and tundra. Now, when not in the Arctic, she lives in Rhode Island, where she is a professor at Brown University.
If you grew up in a culture prone to separating “nature” and “people” into two separate categories, Braiding Sweetgrass is a gateway into thinking beyond this binary. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a botanist, brings Indigenous and western scientific knowledge traditions together to show how plants and animals are our oldest teachers. Braiding Sweetgrass is a tour, at turns humorous and profound, through the lives of strawberries, algae, squash, goldenrod, bays, and ponds – and the people who live with them. Both a collection of essays and a field guide to creating a generous, reciprocal relationship with the communities of people and other beings we live with, Kimmerer is an invigorating read the first time through and a wise companion years down the line. Kimmerer is such a generous presence it only seems right to think of her book as opening onto the varied world of Indigenous relations with what is so insufficiently called “nature” in English. Linda Hogan’s The Radiant Lives of Animals, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done are two of many places to turn next.
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…
Arctic Dreams is a classic, and for good reason. At a sentence level, it’s hard to surpass Lopez’s powerful, precise evocations of places, people, and the relationship between the two. It is also bracingly unsentimental but generous, curious, and suffused with profound moral insights into the nature of being alive, all told through explorations of Arctic places and pasts. Along the way, Lopez guides you through the natural histories of caribou, polar bears, sea ice, and the Arctic from many kinds of human histories, from Inuit to shipwrecked Europeans. It’s a book that teaches you how to see the world more fully, and why you’d want to. Arctic Dreams is a kind ancestor to Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, and shares moral exactitude with Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, two other books that care deeply and differently about our relationship to the worlds we dream and make.
'A master nature writer' (New York Times) provides the ultimate natural, social and cultural history of the Arctic landscape.
The author of Horizon's classic work explores the Arctic landscape and the hold it continues to exert on our imagination.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
Lopez's journey across our frozen planet is a celebration of the Arctic in all its guises. A hostile landscape of ice, freezing oceans and dazzling skyscapes. Home to millions of diverse animals and people. The stage to massive migrations by land, sea and air. The setting of epic exploratory…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
Many of us ground our relationship to nature and ecosystems through animals: a pet, the songbirds at our feeder, a glimpse of an urban coyote or deer, a favorite species. This short, profound, joy-filled book offers glimpses into the world of bowhead whales, leopard seals, river dolphins and so many others. But it doesn’t stop with natural history, as fascinating as the walrus whiskers and spinning dolphins in this book are: Gumbs teaches us about each species so they can teach us about our own societies. The result is so poetic it begs to be read aloud, and an exuberant but never sentimental eye for living with a sense of wonder and justice. And if Undrowned leaves you wanting more whales, take a look at Rebecca Gigg’s Fathoms and Nick Pyenson’s Spying on Whales.
Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to…
Trace is a masterful combination of history, personal voyaging, and explorations of geological time, blended together in a powerful vision of American landscapes suffused with politics, loss, and memory. Savoy takes us from the San Andreas Fault to the U.S. capital, through national parks and a plantation in South Carolina, attentive in each place to the meetings of natural history and human pasts marked by race, colonization, and migration. Savoy’s prose is luminous, her historical eye unsparing and keenly attuned to what erodes away. It’s a hard book to summarize, but if you live in the United States, will teach you how to see the country from the stones to the sky. And if you finish it wanting more works blending personal narratives with evocations of place and history, take a look at Jennifer J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest and Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town.
Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land.
Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her―paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples…
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica — the GR20, Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath — to challenge what it means to grow old. Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The…
Any discussion of how people and nature relate to each other in the twenty-first century will come up against the issue of climate change. And there are so many good books to read on the topic – Elizabeth Rush’s Rising comes right to mind, or the collection All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson. What Tale of Two Planets offers is a global perspective on rising seas, changing seasons, and damaging weather through genres from poetry to prose to fiction. Each author brings clarity to the science and politics of climate change, but the sections here are also portraits of love for place and community. If you’ve never read a book on climate change before, it’s a great start; if you’ve read them all, there’s something new and beautiful here.
Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live.
In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced. In the course of this work, one major theme came up repeatedly: Climate change is making already dire inequalities much worse,…
Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years.
The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans--the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia--before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.
