Here are 64 books that The Big Burn fans have personally recommended if you like
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All my life, I’ve been aware that there are many layers to reality, many of which are human fabrications. Some are physical, like roads. Some are social, like healthcare. But the ones that control our lives the most, and that determine our global outcomes (poverty, war and ecological degradation for example), are ideological. The most powerful of these is our economic system. If we are to address the meta-crisis, I feel passionately that we need to be able to question and reimagine the economy. All the books I’ve chosen have been really important in helping me to think differently about things we usually take for granted.
I love this book because of how beautiful and hopeful it is. The author pulls together amazing stories from her life to gradually weave an understanding of the meta-crisis we find ourselves in. I was captivated by the way she contrasts her family’s indigenous American culture with our modern approaches to both science and the economy.
I love Robin’s prose, which is exquisitely written. But perhaps what I value the most is the fact that she writes with optimism, giving me the courage to get up every day and think about how to put her wisdom into practice.
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…
By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
When historian Douglas Brinkley said he intended to write a trilogy of thick environmental books, comedian Jon Stewart quipped, "How many trees will you kill to do it?" But Brinkley's gift is no joke. He did our world a remarkable service by writing this encyclopedia of American conservation.
Despite profiling great presidents, a lesson I learned repeatedly from Brinkley is how much conservation history has been driven by everyday Americans caring about a part of the country and acting.
From New York Times bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley comes a sweeping historical narrative and eye-opening look at the pioneering environmental policies of President Theodore Roosevelt, avid bird-watcher, naturalist, and the founding father of America’s conservation movement.
In this groundbreaking epic biography, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our “naturalist president.” By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor. This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World…
The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
While I’ve always known about John Muir, this book explores how he was a product of his evangelical Christian upbringing, and while Muir rejected much of that, he channeled his religious fervor into protecting nature. This is something that I never really thought about—how our background culture can have such a profound influence.
Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards, yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores…
By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
From this bracing and brilliant biography, I learned about how John Wesley Powell went on an epic Western discovery adventure and became inspired to challenge thousands of years of Anglo dogma about rain, rivers, land, and how humankind must live with them.
Basic conservation is such a part of American life today that, like gravity, which Newton gets credit for discovering, we forget the genius it first took to conceptualize it. No one is more foundational to conservation than one-armed Grand Canyon explorer Powell. His story is here told by an admiring author, Wallace Stegner, who understood that genius because he was one.
From the “dean of Western writers” (The New York Times) and the Pulitzer Prize winning–author of Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, a fascinating look at the old American West and the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it
In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner recounts the sucesses and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of…
By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
This is an engrossing tour of public lands from Terry Tempest Williams, a poet and essayist who is an American treasure. From this beautiful and vivid book, I realized spiritual connections between human beings and nature, between past and future, between the soul and the earth.
America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.
From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that…
The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
This short book completely changed how I think about nature and our place in it. This book provides a new framework for thinking about how modern Americans might be able to work with the natural world instead of against it. I also loved the concise but thought-provoking insights that Richard White provides.
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with the river has been central to Pacific Northwesterners' competing ways of life. It is in this way that White comes to view the…
The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
I love the grand sweep of the history of humans in North America. It strethes all the way from the Pleistocene to the 21st century. Dan Flores provides a thought-provoking assessment of the complex relationship Americans have with wild animals and puts this into the larger framework of environmental history.
In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness.
Distinguished author Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America-a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by…
The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
This really reshaped my thinking about Wilderness. I’d always thought that the main idea of Wilderness was to preserve a pristine environment, but Paul Sutter shows that the origins of the Wilderness movement were focused on getting away from cars—that the wilderness movement was more about providing a place to escape from modernity than preserving the ecosystem.
In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programs brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places…
I grew up on a dairy farm on the outskirts of a town with about a hundred residents. I remember walking to town with my sister and two brothers to buy candy and rent a VHS movie from the tiny grocery store. My first job off the farm was doing dishes at the local café, where my father and the other farmers would drink coffee and read the newspaper at table 10. These experiences shaped me as a person and hooked me on small-town living. I believe it’s the people in the smallest of towns that have the biggest of hearts.
I’ve lived in Montana for over twenty years, so any books related to Montana get my attention. This book in particular, however, is so much more than just a memoir about growing up in the wilds of Big Sky Country. It’s a beautiful and poetic masterpiece that pays homage to the tiny towns and quirky community members that gave Ivan Doig a sense of home and family as a child. I enjoyed reading the familiar names of towns and mountains that I’ve grown to love during my time in Montana, and I especially appreciate how Doig shows us that the size of people’s hearts is more important than the size of their town.
National Book Award Finalist: A “beautifully written, deeply felt” memoir about growing up in the American West (Los Angeles Times).
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us, but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family.
I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
Dorothy M. Johnson wrote three short stories that were made into Western movies: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Hanging Tree; and A Man Called Horse. But this collection is a light-hearted visit to her childhood, growing up near Glacier National Park. A quick but delightful read to balance out some of the chewier reading I’ve suggested.
"[When You and I Were Young, Whitefish is] a lighthearted look into the life of a growing Western town in the early twentieth century. These fresh, jaunty tales of youth radiate good humor." -American West
