The best hope-filled books about humans and nature

I can’t count all the ways that Ritchie’s book changed my mind, and all for the better, too, about sustainability, environmental restoration, and a science-based, all-too-possible hope for the future. I had forgotten (like so many of us) how well humans are doing: child and maternal mortality rates are falling, as is hunger and extreme poverty, while education and life expectancy are rising. Ritchie presents (well, she inundates) readers with data-driven arguments and real-world solutions to the core sustainability challenges of air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing.

I had forgotten that not all that long ago, humanity solved two environmental disasters, namely acid rain and the atmosphere’s ozone hole, and I’m grateful for Ritchie’s fact-based, pragmatic, and never utopian hopefulness that we can do the same for the problems we face now. Prepare to be shocked into hopefulness. I certainly was.

Rooted in memoir and science, this book explores forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s decades-long research to discover that a tree in a forest is a forest in a tree. The daughter of a rural, working-class, logging family in British Columbia, Simard knew it was possible to log a forest yet leave it capable of regenerating, something that wasn’t occurring after massive clear-cutting tore away old, big trees only to leave seedlings struggling to survive.

I appreciated how Simard took me along as a reader as she described, step-by-painstaking-step, groundbreaking scientific research into the underground fungal networks that link together a community of trees sharing water and nutrients and communicating warning signals. Even more, I loved how her work as a scientist was intimately grounded in her life as a sister, mother, wife, and breast cancer survivor. 

I don’t think there’s anything as hopeful as patience, and it is patience that supports poet and farmer Scott Chaskey’s reflections on leaving England for a small Long Island land trust and helping it grow into one of the first community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms in the United States.

Seasons, patience, and a love of land and words have created a fertile farm and a thriving human community alongside an abundance of birds and wildlife. I return to this book every decade or so (I’ve had it for that long), when I think I know my life but what I truly need is to be re-enchanted by Chaskey’s poetry and food-growing, his life-long apprenticeship to the beauty alongside us.

Couturier writes of a region I grew up in, namely the cities and suburbs of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States.

I loved how she explored not just the often-ignored natural history of small forests, turkey vultures, crows, coyotes, and snakes (of course) but also the spirit and compassion that flies within tales of citizen science and wildlife restoration. Stories of home and family life nestle alongside a wild nature, often unseen, but always here.

Macdonald, an experienced falconer, trains a goshawk while struggling to fathom her father’s death. Reading this book helped me realize how many forms hope can take, not the least being the courage to stare down grief and use it to form a loving relationship with a bird meant for hunting and freedom.

Macdonald took me into the world of falconry and its day-to-day demands, and she introduced me to the writing of T.H. White, a man broken by life and trying (but failing) to become a falconer to a goshawk. This is a beautiful, tragic, uplifting book, raw in emotion but filled with natural and literary history, and one I’ll return to again and again, I’m sure.