Why am I passionate about this?

At a time when people are claiming to “believe” in science or not, books that incorporate science into their personal narratives make it clear that science isn’t a religion—it’s just there for the understanding. Using the natural world to understand humanity (or the lack of it), makes me believe that there are ways humans can be part of the world instead of pretend-masters of it. Each of these books tells a story about identity, growth, self-awareness (or the lack of it) while digging deeply into the earth that sustains us, confounds us, surprises and delights us—as well as sometimes breaks our hearts. I am an author of many books, an editor at Diagram, and a professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.


I wrote

Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

By Nicole Walker,

Book cover of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

What is my book about?

In this book, Nicole Walker moves from the non-disaster of Y2K, the personal disaster of her baby born prematurely, to…

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The books I picked & why

Book cover of Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene

Nicole Walker Why did I love this book?

Fire & Water does not make a spectacle of climate change. While global warming and environmental damage may be the catalyst for many of the stories, the weight of the stories is in the way the characters encounter new challenges, reconsider their relationships to each other and to their environment, and discover the wonder in the world around them, even as it changes. These stories fly us like a kite in hurricane-force winds through the gamut of emotions brought into specific relief by the devastating realities of climate change. As the climate crisis becomes more real, these stories steeped in realism are pertinent and necessary, heart-breaking and beautiful.

By Mary Fifield (editor), Kristin Thiel (editor),

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Fire & Water as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Fiction. A Sámi woman studying Alaska fish populations sees our past and future through their present signs of stress and her ancestral knowledge. A teenager faces a permanent drought in Australia and her own sexual desire. An unemployed man in Wisconsin marvels as a motley parade of animals makes his trailer their portal to a world untrammeled by humans. Featuring short fiction from authors around the globe; FIRE & WATER: STORIES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE takes readers on a rare journey through the physical and emotional landscape of the climate crisis--not in the future; but today. By turns frightening; confusing; and…


Book cover of Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Nicole Walker Why did I love this book?

Robin Wall Kimmerer published Gathering Moss before her now-gone-viral Braiding Sweetgrass. This book is slightly more technical than Braiding Sweetgrass. I told my daughter, who had to take Biology this summer so she could take Engineering III in the fall that she could probably just read Gathering Moss and get an A in the class. 

But the book is no textbook. Kimmerer guides us through the world of how moss interacts with other plants, evolves, and reproduces with such careful attention, lucidity, and detail that the connections she makes to how humans interact and evolve and reproduce are as clear and self-evident as they are exciting and surprising.

By Robin Wall Kimmerer,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Gathering Moss as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.

In this series of linked personal essays, Robin Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating…


Book cover of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds

Nicole Walker Why did I love this book?

Marco Wilkinson writes about his mother who moved from Uruguay to the States, who he knows well, and his father, who he doesn’t. Wilkinson understands his childhood and complicated adulthood as a story intertwined with the plants he’s learned about. In Madder, the narrator details plants’ xylem and their weediness, their Latin names, and their unpredictable growing habits while peeling away the internal systems of his own plant-like self. Wilkinson pairs plant with human to show how growth, thirst, rootedness, and supportive nutrients make for resilient bodies.

Wilkinson takes such care, too, to pull back the weeds and to pull them apart—Thanks to his careful attention to every part of the plant, I can see through the plant as well as inside the workings of the plant. I am physically in the body even though I get that it’s a big metaphor for the mind.

By Marco Wilkinson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Madder as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Madder, matter, mater-a weed, a state of mind, a material, a meaning, a mother. Essayist and horticulturist Marco Wilkinson searches for the roots of his own selfhood among family myths and memories.

"My life, these weeds." Marco Wilkinson uses his deep knowledge of undervalued plants, mainly weeds-invisible yet ubiquitous, unwanted yet abundant, out-of-place yet flourishing-as both structure and metaphor in these intimate vignettes. Madder combines poetic meditations on nature, immigration, queer sensuality, and willful forgetting with recollections of Wilkinson's Rhode Island childhood and glimpses of his maternal family's life in Uruguay. The son of a fierce, hard-working mother who tried…


Book cover of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here

Nicole Walker Why did I love this book?

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s first book, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir taught me how memoir can be compiled through multiple lenses—one that invites into the author’s self-view and another through which you can learn about place and environmental degradation. With two (or more) questions, who-I-am becomes complicated and textured. Antonetta’s new The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here illustrates that understanding ourselves comes only through looking at those selves through other texts, other people, our current understanding of ourselves, science, place, and our childhood’s vision of the world.

Antonetta takes quantum entanglement, her grandmother’s Christian Science beliefs, and her own account of spending summers at the shore in a small hut with her family whose history of mental health—and professional accomplishments—is complexly textured. In a section called “The Problem of the Past,” Antonetta describes the behavior of photon particles. In the double-slit experiment, if you send one beam of light through a double slit into a mirror, that beam’s photons behave as a particle but if you send a second beam of light, you can retroactively show that both behave as waves. Physicists call this first beam’s change in point of view “delayed choice.” This metaphor drives the central question of the book. If you look at the past, it is bound to behave differently than if you look at it head-on. The key, she seems to argue, is to look at the past and present simultaneously, recognizing that light can behave both as a particle and a wave—it’s the memoirist’s job, through the double lens, that we can not only see both, but hold the idea of different qualities and different identities simultaneously in our minds.

By Susanne Paola Antonetta,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

At their family’s New Jersey seaside cottages, Susanne Paola Antonetta’s grandmother led seances, swam nude, and imaginatively created a spiritualist paradise on earth. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Antonetta chronicles how in that unique but tightly controlled space, she began to explore the questions posed by her family’s Christian Science beliefs, turning those questions secular: What is consciousness? Does time exist? And does the world we see reflect reality? In this book, scientific research, family story, and memoir intertwine to mimic the indefinable movements of quantum particles.

Antonetta reflects on a life spent wrestling with bipolar disorder,…


Book cover of Environment

Nicole Walker Why did I love this book?

Rolf Halden makes reading about the environment fun. He is a microbiologist working at the Arizona State University’s Center for BioDesign. He is working to invite people to pay attention to the lifestream of the chemicals and other substances humans invent and then dispose of without a thought. For example, at the water treatment plant, he discovered piles of contact lenses because people just throw them in the toilet. Just throw them in the garbage can people. Plastic is still bad news on land but it’s even worse in our waterways.

Halden himself didn’t think of the results of his own contact-lens throwing away until he visited the treatment plant. By recognizing that humans will be humans, he advocates for us trying not to make stuff or use stuff that can’t be easily dissolved in the environment because it’s nearly impossible to know where all this human-made stuff goes or what happens to it. And, if we do find out, the answer isn’t always good.

By Rolf Halden,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Environment as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

What is the environment, this elusive object that impacts us so profoundly--our odds to be born; the way we look, feel, and function; and how long and comfortable we may live? The environment is not only everything we see around us but also, at a lesser scale, a hailstorm of molecules large and small that constantly penetrates our bodies, simultaneously nourishing and threatening our health. The concept of oneness with our surroundings urges a reckoning of what we are doing to 'the environment,'…


Explore my book 😀

Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

By Nicole Walker,

Book cover of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster

What is my book about?

In this book, Nicole Walker moves from the non-disaster of Y2K, the personal disaster of her baby born prematurely, to the larger disasters of climate change and the pandemic. Walker takes disasters and tries to plumb their depths, figure out the science behind them, understand what to do about them. When that fails, she cooks, where she feels she has a modicum of control but when investigating the science of what our agricultural practices do to the environment, even that modicum of control dissolves.

As the world seems to fall apart around her, the science behind climate change, cooking, respiratory Synyctial Virus, and Covid, she comes to realize it’s the pleasure of cooking with and for others that mitigates the disaster and turns it into something more manageable—something we might call regular life.

You might also like...

Elephant Safari

By Peter Riva,

Book cover of Elephant Safari

Peter Riva Author Of Kidnapped on Safari

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Peter's book list on the otherness that few get to experience

What is my book about?

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…

Elephant Safari

By Peter Riva,

What is this book about?

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…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in mental disorders, nthropocene, and environmentalism?

Mental Disorders 181 books
Nthropocene 21 books
Environmentalism 197 books