The best books about our human relationship with the natural world

I love this grand biography of a somewhat forgotten man who was one of the most famous figures of his time (second only to Napoleon). After reading this illuminating book, I now view him not only as a great naturalist and explorer but as a visionary whose ideas were prescient—including his anticipation of the ravaging effects of human-induced climate change.

I loved meeting—within the book—Darwin, Goethe, Ernst Haekel (who coined the word ecology), Jefferson, Thoreau, and so many others whom interacted with the great polymath, Humboldt. This book has had a profound influence of my own writing about the natural world.

I feel the same about this book as Barry Lopez—who wrote a most wonderful introduction—when he notes that throughout his reading of the text, he often had to take a break to walk outside; the writing was just so stimulating.

Appealing to me as a poet, this is a slim book—about 90 pages—really a meditative essay that I return to again and again. I am fascinated by the originality of the author’s thought process, his supple prose, and his discussion of the polarities that exist between cultivated nature and wildness.

One singular sentence in this book (“The wood waits…”) has such resonance for me that I chose it as an epigraph for a book of my own.

I have admired Macfarlane’s exquisite prose through book after book, though this book, his second, holds a special place in my heart.

Having lived for 10 years in the UK—on a rather wild peninsula—I have traveled through some of the landscapes the author describes with a passion that is personal, universal, precise, and magical. I share with Macfarlane a love for what he calls “the lost words,” as well as a reverence for words he has “found” in this book: beechwood, moor, river-mouth, ridge, and holloway.

I am drawn instantly to a writer who begins a book with, “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood.” It was a joy to travel with this eloquent writer as he rediscovers wildness, a search I imagine as possible, day by day.

So much to learn about trees!

After reading this novel, I discovered Powers’ list of 25 (out of many more) books that influenced him while he was writing the book. Now I have read a significant share of these books too, and I have incorporated fascination and facts in my own writing. This novel, perhaps more than any other I have read, has led me to examine the vast and disturbing question that seems to haunt Powers—our alienation from nature, why? To question this, I feel, suggests a search that may lead to the “new story” our culture needs.

Powers is a brilliant writer, and I admire his ability and finesse to weave together an extraordinary cast of characters, factual and historical material, and a reverent feeling for another form of life: trees.

As I was working on my last book, this book had a permanent place beside my desk. Each day I would read a chapter—each chapter beginning with a poem detailed on the page with Chinese characters, followed with a translation by Hinton. “Poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself .” Sweet words to a poet, and so begins this book.

I have always admired the rivers-and-mountains tradition of ancient Chinese poetry, but I lacked a full enough understanding of the concepts—embedded in language—underlying the tradition. Hinton supplies this and more.

The poetry of Tu Fu is enlightening, as is Hinton’s commentary, and I found this book to be perhaps the most creative “biography” I have read. I now look with a closer eye at our own Western view of our place on this planet, this living, breathing earth, part of the unimaginable beauty of the Cosmos.