My Story as told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-watchings, Fish-stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark

Down the River

Edward Abbey · 242 pages

This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.

Walden and Other Writings

Henry David Thoreau · 584 pages

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.

Upstream: Select Essays

Mary Oliver · 185 pages

"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mys

Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson · 78 pages

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface

Olivia Laing · 283 pages

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Kathleen Norris · 228 pages

Norris reveals the contradictions of small town life on the Great Plains, where gracious hospitality blends with provincial wariness, local history is valued by writers, and truth and myth collide.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Annie Dillard · 177 pages

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

John Graves · 313 pages

A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River

Aldo Leopold · 269 pages

First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for Americas relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the

The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

Kevin Fedarko · 432 pages

In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record, a series of "superstorms," battered the West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam. As the water filled the dam, worried federal officials desperately scrambled to avoid a dramatic dam failure. In the midst of this crisis, a trio of river guides secretly launched a small, ha

Ring of Bright Water

Gavin Maxwell · 224 pages

A marvellous book about life in a West Highland seaboard cottage with two otters, Mijbil and Edal.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Terry Tempest Williams · 232 pages

In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams (beloved author of "Refuge") creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals .. and what it means to have a voice beyond a selfless existence informed by children and a husband.

The Secret Knowledge of Water

Craig Childs · 288 pages

Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.

The Founding Fish

John McPhee · 368 pages

"The Founding Fish, John McPhee's twenty-sixth book, is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. McPhee is a shad fisherman. He waits all year for the short spring season when delicious American shad - Alosa sapidissima - leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run up rivers heroic distances to spawn. He approaches them with a catch-an

The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas

Jerry Dennis · 308 pages

"If fresh water is a treasure, the Great Lakes are the mother lode. No bodies of water can compare to them. Superior is the largest lake on earth, and the five lakes together contain a fifth of the world's supply of standing fresh water. Their ten thousand miles of shoreline bound seven states and a Canadian province and are longer than the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States;

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

Michael Pollan · 291 pages

One day, Harper's Magazine editor Michael Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm. He planted a garden and attempted to follow Thoreau's example: do not impose your will upon the wilderness, the woodchucks, or the weeds. That ethic, of course, did not work. But neither did pesticides or firebombing the woodchuck burrow. So Pollan began to think about the troubled borders between nature and con

The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River

Richard White · 130 pages

In The Organic Machine, Richard White, a distinguished historian and leading scholar of the American West, explores the intimate relationship between nature and mankind along the Columbia River. Working on the cutting edge of environmental and social history, White demonstrates how, over the centuries, both native peoples and settlers have continually remade the river, treating it as a machine des

Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps

Ted Kooser · 155 pages

"Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska. Like many other people in this rural area, he has what he calls "wolf vision"--He sees every change in the landscape around him. Nothing is too big or too small for his attention. Memories of his grandmother's cooking are juxtaposed with reflections about the old-fashioned o

River-Horse

William Least Heat-Moon · 516 pages

"In River-Horse, the preeminent chronicler of American back roads - who has given us the classics Blue Highways and PrairyErth - recounts his singular voyage on American waters from sea to sea. Along the route, he offers a lyrical shipboard perspective on the country's rivers, lakes, canals, and landscapes."--BOOK JACKET. "In his most ambitious journey ever, Heat-Moon sets off aboard a small boat

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

Wallace Stegner · 438 pages

Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas

Ruskin Bond · 251 pages

Learning to Walk in the Dark

Barbara Brown Taylor · 208 pages

The Curve of Time: The Classic Memoir of a Woman and Her Children Who Explored the Coastal Waters of the Pacific Northwest

M. Wylie Blanchet · 194 pages

A compendium of a young widow's summer travels among the islands and fjords of British Columbia with her five small children. The family lived and travelled on a small motor launch getting to know that remarkable coast and it's cast of characters starting in 1927. Her enchanting account has become a treasured local classic in B.C.