How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

Alisa Smith, J.B. MacKinnon · 272 pages

Happy Snacking, Don't Die!: Foraging and Vegan Recipes with Black Forager (A Cookbook)

Alexis Nikole Nelson · 272 pages

Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living

Doug Fine · 210 pages

Advance praise for Farewell, My Subaru"Fine is Bryson Funny." --Santa Cruz Sentinel "Fine is an amiable and self-deprecating storyteller in the mold of Douglas Adams. If you're a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-style humor -- and also looking to find out how to raise your own livestock to feed your ice-cream fetish -- Farewell may prove a vital tool." -- The Washington Post "Fine is an

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

Jon Mooallem · 352 pages

Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter's world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls--while the actual world she's inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America's endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world aroun

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren · 408 pages

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Donovan Hohn · 402 pages

When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring

The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature

Starhawk · 250 pages

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

Mark Sundeen · 330 pages

The Unsettlers describes the search for the simple life through stories of diverse Americans living off the grid.

Unbowed

Wangari Maathai · 336 pages

In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people's environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jail

Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

Timothy Egan · 288 pages

The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicine to Life on Earth

Stephen Harrod Buhner · 330 pages

"Enraged, Energized, Exultant. You won't know how to feel after reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's The Lost Language of Plants. This is a devastating expose about how we are polluting our environment with the pharmaceuticals that Western medicine has developed to heal us. We are ingesting Prozac, Premarin, and antibiotics whether we want to or not." "Yet, as we foul air and water with toxic residues

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People

Tim Flannery · 392 pages

What are People for?: Essays

Wendell Berry · 210 pages

Essays on Nate Shaw, Harry Caudill, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, diversity, waste, eating, local culture, consumption, conservation, environmental concerns, and other topics.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver · 384 pages

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat."As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begi

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

The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail

Dan White · 384 pages

The Pacific Crest Trail stretches from Mexico to Canada, a distance of 2,650 grueling, sun-scorched, bear-infested miles. When Dan White and his girlfriend announced their intention to hike it, Dan's parents—among others—thought they were nuts. How could two people who'd never even shared an apartment together survive six months in the desert with little more than a two-person tent and some trail

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

Wallace Stegner · 438 pages

The One-Straw Revolution

Masanobu Fukuoka · 181 pages

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

One Life at a Time, Please

Edward Abbey · 225 pages

Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was born in Home, Pennsylvania. He received graduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of New Mexico, and attended the University of Edinburgh. He worked for a time as a forest ranger and was a committed naturalist and a fierce environmentalist; such was his anger, eloquence, and action on the subject that he has become a heroic, almost mythic figure to a whole

Almost Amish: One Woman's Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life

Nancy Sleeth

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan · 450 pages

What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as

The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I kept the patio, lost the lawn, and fed my family for a year

Spring Warren · 335 pages

Essays of E.B. White

E.B. White · 288 pages

When E.B. White received the Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the following citation, here quoted in part, accompanied the award: "If we are remembered as a civilized era, I think it will be partly because of E.B. White. The historians of the future will decide that a writer of such grace and control could not have been produced by a generation