# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published November 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-31-best-nature-and-environment-books*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Silent Spring** — score 1000/1000
   Rachel Carson's 1962 book documenting the harm done by synthetic pesticides such as DDT.
2. **The Song of the Dodo** — score 772/1000
   David Quammen's 1996 book on island biogeography and extinction.
3. **The Outermost House** — score 695/1000
   Henry Beston's 1928 account of a year spent in a cottage on the Great Beach of Cape Cod.
4. **The Snow Leopard** — score 695/1000
   Peter Matthiessen's 1978 account of a 1973 trek in the Nepalese Himalayas with biologist George Schaller.
5. **Gathering Moss** — score 648/1000
   Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2003 natural and cultural history of mosses, winner of the 2005 John Burroughs Medal.
6. **The Wild Places** — score 534/1000
   Robert Macfarlane's 2007 book of journeys to wild places in Britain and Ireland.
7. **Entangled Life** — score 534/1000
   Biologist Merlin Sheldrake's 2020 book about fungi and the networks they form.
8. **Ring of Bright Water** — score 534/1000
   Gavin Maxwell's 1960 account of living with otters on the west coast of Scotland.
9. **The Hidden Life of Trees** — score 463/1000
   German forester Peter Wohlleben's 2015 book on how trees communicate and share resources, translated into English in 2016.
10. **The Sea Around Us** — score 463/1000
   Rachel Carson's 1951 natural history of the oceans, winner of the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
11. **This Changes Everything** — score 463/1000
   Naomi Klein's 2014 book arguing that tackling climate change requires changing the economic system.
12. **Braiding Sweetgrass** — score 463/1000
   Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2013 essays joining Indigenous knowledge with plant science.
13. **Pilgrim at Tinker Creek** — score 463/1000
   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.
14. **The Sixth Extinction** — score 463/1000
   Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 account of the human-caused mass extinction, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
15. **H Is for Hawk** — score 463/1000
   Helen Macdonald's 2014 memoir of training a goshawk after her father's death, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize.
16. **An Immense World** — score 463/1000
   Ed Yong's 2022 book about how animals perceive the world through their senses.
17. **The Peregrine** — score 379/1000
   J. A. Baker's 1967 diary-style account of following peregrine falcons through Essex winters.
18. **The Control of Nature** — score 379/1000
   John McPhee's 1989 book on human attempts to hold back rivers, lava and debris flows.
19. **Desert Solitaire** — score 379/1000
   Edward Abbey's 1968 account of his seasons as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah.
20. **My First Summer in the Sierra** — score 379/1000
   John Muir's 1911 book based on his journal of the summer of 1869 in California's Sierra Nevada.
21. **The Living Mountain** — score 379/1000
   Nan Shepherd's book about walking the Cairngorms, written in the 1940s and published in 1977.
22. **Collapse** — score 379/1000
   Jared Diamond's 2005 study of how environmental damage contributed to the failure of past societies.
23. **A Sand County Almanac** — score 278/1000
   Aldo Leopold's essay collection, published in 1949 after his death, which sets out his idea of a land ethic.
24. **Arctic Dreams** — score 278/1000
   Barry Lopez's 1986 book on the landscape, wildlife and peoples of the far North, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
25. **The Uninhabitable Earth** — score 278/1000
   David Wallace-Wells's 2019 book on the consequences of global warming, expanded from his 2017 New York magazine article.
26. **Walden** — score 0/1000
   Henry David Thoreau's 1854 account of the two years he lived in a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
27. **The End of Nature** — score 0/1000
   Bill McKibben's 1989 book on global warming, written for a general readership.
28. **Refuge** — score 0/1000
   Terry Tempest Williams's 1991 memoir joining the flooding of a Great Salt Lake bird refuge with her mother's cancer.
29. **Wilding** — score 0/1000
   Isabella Tree's 2018 account of rewilding the Knepp Estate farm in West Sussex.
30. **A Life on Our Planet** — score 0/1000
   David Attenborough's 2020 book reviewing the decline of the natural world during his lifetime, released with a Netflix documentary.
31. **Never Cry Wolf** — score 0/1000
   Farley Mowat's 1963 account of observing wolves in the Canadian subarctic.

Tags: nature, books, environment, nonfiction, climate