The best environmental books we’ve read in 2024

We published 30 book reviews this year and read many more. And out of all the books we’ve read, here are a handful of our favorites. You’ll find a mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did!

Nicole Emanuel

NICOLE EMANUEL is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work brings together animal studies, weird studies, queer ecology, and other interdisciplinary fields. She earned an MA at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2021 and completed a double major in Biology and English at Macalester College in 2016.

Whether you are craving a jolt of righteous fury, or a sympathetic caress, or simply a reminder that “You Belong to the World,” as Carrie Fountain asserts in the opening poem, you will find them all within this book, which has been so beautifully curated and introduced by Limón and given a lovely physical form by the venerated independent publisher Milkweed Editions. There is an oft-repeated idea that the aim of art should be to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and You Are Here does both things, amply.

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the novel Arroyo Circle, forthcoming from Green Writers Press in October 2024. Her most recent book is the prize-winning collection of short fiction, Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, from Black Lawrence Press. Other books include the novels Float, which swirls around conceptual art, bankruptcy, and plastics in the ocean, and Addled, a social satire. Her crime memoir is Stamford '76, A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s.

North Woods

“Shivers of lust passed through his elytra as he found her scent grow stronger,” and there we are, in the head of an Elm Bark beetle, one of many POVs in the thoroughly enchanting novel North Woods by Daniel Mason.

During racial segregation in the South, florists refused to sell flowers to Black people. In Soil, The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, author Camille T. Dungy writes that instead they cut and sent flowers from their own gardens for weddings and funerals. “Black people grew their own beauty and dug in and continued digging wherever and however digging was needed.”

Gene Helfman, PhD, is an animal behaviorist turned conservation biologist. His 2021 novel, Beyond the Human Realm, about love, loss, and redemption among killer whales, won two national awards for animal fiction. His most recent eco-fiction work, Fins, A Novel of Relentless Satire, is a shark-friendly humorous parody of the sharksploitation horror genre.

Playground

Richard Power’s Playground is the pinnacle of writing in the eco-lit genre. It is filled with wonder, friendship, love, the dangers of an all-knowing and manipulative AI bot, incredible descriptions of and reverence for marine life (especially coral reefs), and accurate biology as seen from a mystical viewpoint. The characters are rich and complex and conflicted, their lives intertwined with a Polynesian paradise lost to resource extraction, then slowly recovering, only to be threatened again by “progress.” All converge on an unforgettable climax. I’ve been recommending this book without hesitation to friends. My wife just finished it and thanked me for passing it on.

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Midge Raymond

Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novels Floreana and My Last Continent, the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English, and, with John Yunker, the suspense novel Devils Island.

Arroyo Circle

An unforgettable cast of characters, drawn together by loss and by living on the edges of a society ravaged by climate change and Covid. Yet in a world where lives change in an instant, what prevails in this remarkable and inventive novel is compassion, hope, and the wonders of nature. At once haunting and witty, vivid and ethereal, ARROYO CIRCLE is a beautifully written ode to our changing world.

John is co-author, with Midge Raymond, of the eco-mystery Devils Island. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and  Where Oceans Hide Their Dead. Co-founder of Ashland Creek Press and editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program).

Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do about Animals

In Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do about Animals authors Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy take us back to the second half of the 19th century, when the animal rights movement sprung to life and quickly spread across the United States.

This enlightening, engaging and occasionally shocking book is a must read and a testament to the empathetic and fearless Americans who did so much for “Our Dumb Animals.” You will finish this book inspired to pick up where our animal activist ancestors left off.

If we humans wish to stick around on earth we had better become better stewards of the soil and the fungi holding our world together. If you want to expand your mind — without magic mushrooms — I highly recommend reading Entangled Life.