The 31 Best Nature and Environment Books

Some of these books started environmental movements; others simply watched a hawk or a mountain very closely for a long time. Pulitzer winners share the shelf with quiet field journals and recent science bestsellers.

1. 1
   Silent Spring

   Rachel Carson's 1962 book documenting the harm done by synthetic pesticides such as DDT.
   1000pts
2. 2
   The Song of the Dodo

   David Quammen's 1996 book on island biogeography and extinction.
   772pts
3. 3
   The Outermost House

   Henry Beston's 1928 account of a year spent in a cottage on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.
   695pts
4. 4
   The Snow Leopard

   Peter Matthiessen's 1978 account of a 1973 trek in the Nepalese Himalayas with biologist George Schaller.
   695pts
5. 5
   Gathering Moss

   Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2003 natural and cultural history of mosses, winner of the 2005 John Burroughs Medal.
   648pts
6. 6
   The Wild Places

   Robert Macfarlane's 2007 book of journeys to wild places in Britain and Ireland.
   534pts
7. 7
   Entangled Life

   Biologist Merlin Sheldrake's 2020 book about fungi and the networks they form.
   534pts
8. 8
   Ring of Bright Water

   Gavin Maxwell's 1960 account of living with otters on the west coast of Scotland.
   534pts
9. 9
   The Hidden Life of Trees

   German forester Peter Wohlleben's 2015 book on how trees communicate and share resources, translated into English in 2016.
   463pts
10. 10
    The Sea Around Us

    Rachel Carson's 1951 natural history of the oceans, winner of the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
    463pts
11. 11
    This Changes Everything

    Naomi Klein's 2014 book arguing that tackling climate change requires changing the economic system.
    463pts
12. 12
    Braiding Sweetgrass

    Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2013 essays joining Indigenous knowledge with plant science.
    463pts
13. 13
    Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

    Annie Dillard's 1974 book about a year of close observation in Virginia's Blue Ridge, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
    463pts
14. 14
    The Sixth Extinction

    Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 account of the human-caused mass extinction, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
    463pts
15. 15
    H Is for Hawk

    Helen Macdonald's 2014 memoir of training a goshawk after her father's death, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize.
    463pts
16. 16
    An Immense World

    Ed Yong's 2022 book about how animals perceive the world through their senses.
    463pts
17. 17
    The Peregrine

    J. A. Baker's 1967 diary-style account of following peregrine falcons through Essex winters.
    379pts
18. 18
    The Control of Nature

    John McPhee's 1989 book on human attempts to hold back rivers, lava and debris flows.
    379pts
19. 19
    Desert Solitaire

    Edward Abbey's 1968 account of his seasons as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah.
    379pts
20. 20
    My First Summer in the Sierra

    John Muir's 1911 book based on his journal of the summer of 1869 in California's Sierra Nevada.
    379pts
21. 21
    The Living Mountain

    Nan Shepherd's book about walking the Cairngorms, written in the 1940s and published in 1977.
    379pts
22. 22
    Collapse

    Jared Diamond's 2005 study of how environmental damage contributed to the failure of past societies.
    379pts
23. 23
    A Sand County Almanac

    Aldo Leopold's essay collection, published in 1949 after his death, which sets out his idea of a land ethic.
    278pts
24. 24
    Arctic Dreams

    Barry Lopez's 1986 book on the landscape, wildlife and peoples of the far North, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
    278pts
25. 25
    The Uninhabitable Earth

    David Wallace-Wells's 2019 book on the consequences of global warming, expanded from his 2017 New York magazine article.
    278pts
26. 26
    Walden

    Henry David Thoreau's 1854 account of the two years he lived in a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
    0pts
27. 27
    The End of Nature

    Bill McKibben's 1989 book on global warming, written for a general readership.
    0pts
28. 28
    Refuge

    Terry Tempest Williams's 1991 memoir joining the flooding of a Great Salt Lake bird refuge with her mother's cancer.
    0pts
29. 29
    Wilding

    Isabella Tree's 2018 account of rewilding the Knepp Estate farm in West Sussex.
    0pts
30. 30
    A Life on Our Planet

    David Attenborough's 2020 book reviewing the decline of the natural world during his lifetime, released with a Netflix documentary.
    0pts
31. 31
    Never Cry Wolf

    Farley Mowat's 1963 account of observing wolves in the Canadian subarctic.
    0pts

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