Recently, and to much engagement-baiting fanfare, the New York Times published its list of the best books of the 21st century. As with any such list, it was riddled with omissions, both benign (whither Anthony Doerr, Madeline Miller, and Lauren Groff?) and insidious (outrageously, not a single Native American author made the cut). I was irked to note that only one nonfiction book about nature and/or the environment appeared on the list, the worthy H Is for Hawk. I love George Saunders, but did he alone pen three books that were better than anything anybody wrote this century about climate change?
Anyway, the Times’s cynical exercise got me wondering — if an outlet was to compile a list of this century’s best nature/environment books, what would be on it? On the platform formerly known as Twitter, I threw out some suggestions of my own, and solicited others from the gaggle. Some of those books are compiled in this post.
In acknowledgment of the totally subjective and half-baked nature of this endeavor, a note about what this list is not — namely, anything definitive. I haven’t read all of these works, and some that I have wouldn’t be on my personal list, despite their critical acclaim and commercial success. This is merely to say that, if the New York Times were, hypothetically, to pull together the century’s best nature/enviro books, these are twenty-five of the titles I might expect to see on it, or would advocate for if someone asked me (no one would).
*I’m excluding my own books and those of other Slackliners, but they’re obviously the best, and you should read them here.
Okay, enough preamble! Forthwith, and in no particular order (and with sincerest apologies to everyone I left out — again, I can’t understate the inadequacy of this utterly non-definitive list!):
—THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, Elizabeth Kolbert
—SPILLOVER, David Quammen
—The DEATH & LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES, Dan Egan
—BRAIDING SWEETGRASS, Robin Wall Kimmerer
—WILD SOULS, Emma Marris
—WILD NEW WORLD, Dan Flores
—IMMENSE WORLD, Ed Yong
—THE HOME PLACE, J. Drew Lanham
—UNDERLAND, Robert Macfarlane
—THE DREAMT LAND, Mark Arax
—RISING, Elizabeth Rush
—BELOVED BEASTS, Michelle Nijhuis
—THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH, David Wallace-Wells
—FLOATING COAST, Bathseba Demuth
—OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE, Nick Estes
—ON TRAILS, Robert Moor
—MEET THE NEIGHBORS, Brandon Keim
—BECOMING EARTH, Ferris Jabr
—ENTANGLED LIFE, Merlin Sheldrake
—FATHOMS, Rebecca Giggs
—THE OUTLAW OCEAN, Ian Urbina
—THE INVENTION OF NATURE, Andrea Wulf
—SOIL, Camille Dungy
—BRAVE THE WILD RIVER, Melissa Sevigny
—FIRE WEATHER, John Valliant
—THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST, Jeff Goodell
Alert me to egregious omissions and/or nominate your personal favorites in the comments!
Image: Elisha Brown Bird, Wikimedia Commons.
