|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Summer is here, and that means it’s time to enjoy the outdoors – and maybe learn about it as well. If you’re looking for some ideas for environmental reads that will inspire, entertain, or educate, here’s my green-themed summer reading list.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My top pick for environmental reading. As a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to consider whether we can be caretakers rather than plunderers of the land. Reciprocity – the idea that if we restore nature, it will restore us – may be a foreign idea in Western culture, but it has the potential to heal much of what plagues our society today. This is a book that, if you let it, will change how you think about your relationship with the earth.
California Against the Sea: Visions For Our Vanishing Coastline by Rosanna Xia. Every Californian – actually, every West Coaster – should read this book. Rosanna Xia, a Los Angeles Times environmental reporter, asks the question: as climate change and sea level rise threaten the California coast, will we learn to adapt to a changing future, or will we insist on believing that in a fight against the ocean, we can emerge victorious? And as we make hard choices about where and how to protect our communities, will we prioritize the most vulnerable among us, or will we allow those with the most power to determine our course of action? Xia examines communities and landscapes up and down the coast to explore the problems – and the potential solutions – that California will continue to grapple with for decades to come.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. This is a fun, fascinating and enlightening read. If the word “fungus” makes you think primarily of mushrooms, think again. Sheldrake introduces us to how fungi interact with all living things on a deep, structural level; more than 90% of all plant species depend on mycorrhizal fungal networks for survival, and these networks enable plants to communicate with each other. This book also contains chapters on truffles and “magic mushrooms.” Still, I found those sections far less interesting than the exploration of how fungal networks behave (it turns out that slime molds are experts at finding the shortest path through a maze or an IKEA store). Read this book for a new appreciation of how little we really know about nature!
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. In the modern American food system, we have become so divorced from the origins of our food that it can sound crazy for a family to decide to consume only locally-produced food for one year. But that is exactly what novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family resolved to do when they relocated from urban Arizona to a plot of farmland in Appalachia. This book combines a discussion of US food and agricultural policy with an entertaining and humorous chronicle of this family’s adventures in farming. Kingsolver’s narrative is interspersed with her teenage daughter’s recipes and her husband’s sidebars on topics like urban farming and breadmaking, making for a lively and fun read as well as a call to action for all of us to think harder about whether we really need those bananas that traveled thousands of miles to reach us.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Elizabeth Kolbert documents, through case studies in different areas of the globe, how our planet is currently undergoing a die-off of species comparable to the five previous extinction events (including the one that killed the dinosaurs). Will we wake up to the reality of the human-caused biodiversity crisis in time to change course? Despite the dark theme, this book is entertaining and informative, taking us into fascinating ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon rainforest. Read this book so that you will fall in love with these disappearing species and understand at more than an intellectual level why we must save them.
Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming by Liz Carlisle. Not many will have heard of this book (published by Island Press), so let me be the first to tell you that you should read it. In just a few decades, we have become so used to the modern way of farming – giant fields of monoculture, doused with fertilizers and pesticides and increasingly reliant on genetically modified seeds – that “traditional” farming methods seem as outlandish as traveling by horse and buggy. But in many places around the country, farmers – many of them Indigenous and people of color – are reconnecting with their roots and showing us how readily the vitality of the soil can come back. Read this book if you’re in need of hope!
What are your favorite environmentally-themed books? Tell me in the comments!
Atherton police arrest two men for allegedly trying to meet up with a 14-year-old for sexApril 3, 2026 10:38 am
Redwood City attorney sues ‘First Amendment auditors’ after Menlo Park disputeApril 2, 2026 11:31 am