As environmental activists have made clear for decades, the preservation of Earth’s forests is essential to the existence of life. And, yet, continued exploitation of this resource and the simultaneous warming of Earth have placed forests in a precarious situation. The boreal forest is one of the largest biomes on Earth, second only to the …
The subtitle of the must-read book The Insect Crisis by Oliver Milman is The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World. Tiny empires indeed. Consider the following: Three out of four species on this planet are insects. There are more species of assassin fly on this planet (7,500+) than the entire world of …
If you were expecting a book called “Environment” to include an inspiring exploration of how trees communicate, poetic scenes of dolphins swimming gracefully through a blue ocean or an examination of sparkling lakes in gorgeous national parks, you’d be in for a downer surprise. The environmental overview that is Environment by Rolf Halden is instead—as the plastic …
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022 (Published in the UK as The Sea is Not Made of Water) Life Between the Tides is my kind of book. British author, Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West, sets out to write about tide pools and the intertidal zone, but those subjects turn out to be just launching …
Julian Sancton’s Madhouse at the End of the Earth tells the riveting, page-turning story of the Belgica’s multinational expedition to Antarctica, led by Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache. This may be not be among the best-known stories of Antarctic exploration, but it is certainly among the most harrowing, as well as the most haunting, with an abundance of …
Not on My Watch: How a Renegade Whale Biologist Took on Governments and Industry to Save Wild Salmon by Alexandra Morton Guest book review by Gene Helfman. A colleague of mine, a federal agency biologist, finishes his emails with, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Alexandra Morton has been outraged for decades. Not only …
Notes on Wonder By Brian Doyle Little, Brown and Co, 2019 During that small window of time this year when it seemed safe enough to travel abroad, this book was given to me by a friend to take along on a cruise down the Danube River. Get it? One Long River of Song. But the …
In 2016, we began compiling lists of the best books we read that year (new or old, it didn’t matter). And now here we are in 2021, and we’ve got another wonderful list of the best environmental books we’ve read this year. These may not be the books you’ll find in the top lists of …
A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard By Douglas W. Tallamy Timber Press, 2019 As a gardener and garden writer, I thought I knew all about native plants, but Tallamy in his excellent book Nature’s Best Hope was an education. He writes from the grim perspective that we will not survive the …
Living in Southern Oregon, not far north of where Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring is set, I’ve grown used to passing trucks that are overloaded with timber, and mountainsides bare from clear-cuts. Knowing that this novel is about logging redwoods in the late 1970s, I wasn’t sure how biased I might be, as an reader who is decidedly …
Beloved Beasts is a richly informative history of the international conservation movement and the central figures who have played crucial roles in developing conservationism and moving conservation efforts forward. The book is also about the ongoing debates, both philosophical and pragmatic, about “humanity’s proper place on earth” (3). Written by Michelle Nijhuis, an award-winning environmental …
