10 books like Encounters with the Archdruid

Chad Montrie has written a series of books exploring the unsung corners of environmentalism. Actually, that’s not fair. He’s explored the center of environmentalism – the activism of the poor, the working class, the average people who have fought to protect their families, their homes, their health. In To Save the Land and People, Montrie takes us into the hollows of Appalachia, where disempowered people did everything they could – even to the point of destroying bulldozers and threatening violence – to protect their communities. Montrie’s work reminds us of the struggles in Cleveland’s disempowered neighborhoods, where efforts to improve the environment often go unnoticed and lead to few successes. 

The history of politics can be dry stuff. But Frank Zelko is a natural storyteller – and a gifted historian. His subjects, Greenpeace and the men and women who formed it, provide access to the evolution of North American environmentalism from the 1960s through the 1980s. In vivid detail, Zelko narrates the drama at the heart of the Greenpeace strategy, the “mind bombs” that would activate citizens around the globe to stop whaling – at least mostly. Zelko makes us feel the urgency among these activists, their fear of nuclear testing, and their love of whales. Even among this relatively small group of activists, however, personality conflicts and philosophical differences reveal the difficulty of creating and maintaining a countercultural organization. For many of these folks, organization is not their thing. But action was. And throughout, Zelko’s fine-grained narrative reminds us that individual action is at the heart of all political… show more.

The subtitle to Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands is Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City, and it’s Sullivan’s adventures exploring the vast New Jersey wetlands that make the book so entertaining. But Sullivan is right to use the word “wilderness” to describe the 32 square miles of swamp, landfills, and rusting industrial debris along the Hackensack River where it flows into Newark Bay just five miles from the Empire State Building in New York City. Like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, the Meadowlands have been abused and degraded for centuries but also show the resilience of nature and how people’s attitudes toward it have changed. “Now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-bill grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs,” Sullivan writes, “even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.” Sullivan’s loving description… show more.

Of all the changes in environmental politics since the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, perhaps the most perplexing – and disappointing – is the Republican turn away from environmental protection. From the Reagan Administration through the Trump regime, the Republican Party has staked the claim not just to passivity toward environmental regulation but has engaged in an all-out assault on government protection of the human and nonhuman environment. Turner and Isenberg make sense of this policy turn, emphasizing the roles of libertarian ideologues, multinational corporations with a stake in the status quo, and rural Americans who tired of federal intrusions in their lives and livelihoods. As aspects of the urban crisis have eased, and specific places like the Cuyahoga River have improved, environmental activists would do well to figure out how to make environmental protection bipartisan once again.

We backyard veggie growers owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Native Americans who passed on to us their protein-rich maize, squash, potatoes, and beans. One beneficiary was that great contemplative gardener Henry David Thoreau who tended a bean field on the shores of Walden Pond at Concord, Massachusetts. "What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them and this is my days work," he wrote. He still does not disappoint – even after 160 years. 

A normal high school in Wisconsin disappears, along with everyone in it. Stranded on an alien planet, the accidental voyagers must figure out who (or what) they’re up against, how best to survive, and whether there’s any way to return. Meanwhile on Earth, their stunned families struggle to cope with what they’ve lost.

The Woods, my favorite comic series of all time, is split into nine volumes, and the first hits the ground running. With Lord of the Flies-level social politics and a high body count, this sci-fi saga is not for the faint of heart.

This book combines the author's love of nature with adventure. Ornithologist Caroline van Hemert takes a 4,000-mile journey into the Alaskan Wilds and it is both a story of deep immersion into the wild and a story of challenging yourself. Biology is focused on the wonder and complexity of life and what I love about this book is that it celebrates the beauty of the natural world. The author does this through immersion into nature and by deciphering it. Through her intense personal nature contact, she yields unexpected surprises that enhance the beauty of the world. 

Biology can be mentally and physically challenging as a profession, and there is no guarantee of success. More often than not the path does not follow a clear route. It thins out and leads to no discovery. However, along the way, there is the beauty of the physical wilderness, the natural world, and nature… show more.

At times, what we most need is a deeply researched, carefully argued, and exhaustively covered history of a topic. Turner provides that essential guidebook to wilderness politics after the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Cutting through slogans and ideology, Turner shows pragmatic strategies, evolving practices, and the political nature of wilderness. I turn to The Promise of Wilderness whenever I want to know what happened and why it mattered. And also, because Turner sees wilderness activism as a key component to modern democracy, a lesson in engaged citizenship—and that inspires me. 

Five women go away on a corporate retreat in remote bushland and one of them goes up missing. All of Jane Harper’s books are brilliantly written but in this one, I enjoyed the duplicities and simmering tensions between the characters as well as trying to work out who the real villain was in this slow-burn mystery.

Another profound critique of “civilized” values. Thoreau is like Plato in that he always drills down to bedrock truth: What is it that makes for a good life? Individually and collectively? Be prepared for longueurs. Those who want a pithier critique along more contemporary lines might enjoy the works of the late Ivan Illich, especially Tools for Conviviality.