10 books like Gathering Moss

This is the correct history of the United States told from an Indigenous perspective. Spanning four centuries of violence, genocide, and devastation of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and economies, this book debunks the myth that the United States was formed as a democracy for all. Dunbar-Ortiz chronicles how the Doctrine of Discovery made the conquest and subjugation of Indigenous peoples a holy war.  She writes like a poet, squeezing lots of material into a small space—an essential read for those who want the truth about our country. Debbie Reese (Nambé Pueblo) and Jean Mendoza adapted the book for young people in a 2019 edition.

While studying wildlife, I often slept on a polythene sheet on the floor of a tropical rainforest. In the velvet blackness, I would look down on the tracery of glowing fungal threads everywhere in the leaf litter of the forest floor. In my memory they blend with night flights over human cities: bright trunk roads and byways among the packed ranks of houses, all in a wide and sparkling network. And so it is with the fungal kingdom described here. A vast aspect of life on Earth is revealed that is almost entirely invisible to the naked eye, yet makes life work in all its parts, including us. It's the rich but easy-read kind of book that makes you say, 'well I never!' on every page, from sheer wonder at seeing how fungi join things up in a living world of near-infinite complexity.

Another author of wide-ranging intellect, Pollan takes us through the history of the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato from the viewpoint of the plants. The chapters on the apple and the tulip are my favorites. Pollan has me looking at my favorite flowers in new ways – rose and peony, in his view, are Dionysian flowers, “deeply sensual” while the tulip is Apollonian, all clarity and order. But beauty, as defined by the Greeks, is when “Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance,” thus the most beautiful flowers are “the ones that partake of their opposing elements.” Pollan’s brief history of flowers ends with an idea that forms the basis of my work: “There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it–right there, in a flower–the meaning of life?”

Before becoming a published writer, I was a lawyer litigating primarily large, multi-district environmental insurance coverage cases. I became familiar with the many ways by which we damage our precious natural resources, be it groundwater or soil or the air we breathe. Beginning with Rachel Carson, we have rich literature that speaks to the degradation of the planet, including the devastating changes wrought by global warming. The stories in this anthology speak to the physical and emotional topography of our current climate crisis, from a Sami woman who studies fish populations to a Wisconsin man contemplating the animals who make his trailer a portal to a world unsullied by humans. Fish & Water is a smart collection on a topic we ignore at our peril.

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.

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… show more.

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… show more.

Water is essential to all of us, not just Native peoples, but all people, plants, animals, and all life on our planet. This book with its gorgeous illustrations celebrates Indigenous-led movements to protect water and preserve our future. It's a call to action that urges each one of us, no matter how young, to champion justice for the environment. Lindstrom's words flow like water and carry us to the conclusion that there is hope if we all accept responsibility for the caretaking of our planet. 

Matthew Hall’s book offers a good formulation of the problem—Western philosophy has treated plants as things, not as living beings—and a nice overview of alternative (non-Western and, above all, Indigenous) approaches to plants that do not fall into the same trap. I have on many occasions vehemently disagreed with Hall’s recommendations that we should treat plants as persons, not least because of the problematic (and, ironically, very Western) heritage of personhood. But it is a wonderful entry point into the topic of plants and philosophy.

Monica Gagliano gives us a enchanting peek at the complexities, consciousness, and subjectivity of plants, as well as at her own story as a woman scientist, who is one of the pioneers in the field of plant intelligence. Weaving together her biography with the life of plants in a creative mix of “phytobiography,” the author shows how working “on” plants is also always working “with” them. We collaborate and communicate, Gagliano suggests, across species and biological kingdom boundaries, and it is on this unknown terrain that her scientific discoveries of plant learning or plant bioacoustics are made. Although Gagliano is not a philosopher by training, the account she offers in Thus Spoke the Plant opens new and exciting vistas in the philosophy of plants.