The best books that show humans aren’t the only species that matter

This book was life-changing for me. 

David Haskell is a biologist who visits a one-square-meter patch of forest throughout the year and then writes about what he finds there. His writing is gorgeous and evocative—I felt like I was visiting the place with him and observing the non-human life alongside him. At the end of the book, Haskell encourages the reader to try this experiment of observation themselves with whatever natural place is nearby (yards and city parks count!). I did this for a few months myself and discovered my little urban backyard contains a fascinating natural world well worth my time.

The Forest Unseen taught me that ordinary nature is spectacular, and it’s happening all around us. All we need to do is pay attention (though kneeling or lying on the ground also helps). This is a book to be savored.

What will happen to the world if most of us—everyone except one or two humans, in fact—disappear?

According to Marlen Haushofer, the world will continue on just fine. I find that idea to be a little shocking, sure, but also comforting: maybe humans aren’t essential to the world’s existence after all. Maybe the world doesn’t need humans for drama, love, heartbreak, or healing.

This is what I would call an anti-post-apocalyptic book, one in which no one is a hero because humanity is beyond saving. Instead, the narrator has deep relationships with several animals—a dog, some cats, and a cow—animals that aren’t anthropomorphized in the slightest but treated with dignity, love, compassion, and complexity. I reread this slow and meditative page-turner every few years. I’m going to keep reading it for the rest of my life.

This collection contains, hands down, my favorite exploration of non-human consciousness: the story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” The title is a mouthful but I love how this story acknowledges we may never fully understand other species’ communications, that there will always be some matter of uncertainty or mistranslation.

At the same time, this story captures for me the intelligence and creativity of the non-human while making a persuasive argument that we need to at least try to understand forms of life that see and experience the world so differently from us.  

Is it worth buying an entire collection for this one story? Totally. But there are a lot of other great gems in Real and the Unreal as well.

As a fan of post-apocalyptic novels, I’ve always wondered what the world would actually look like without us. Weisman provides the answer in this book. He visits places that appear to have successfully moved on from humanity, such as the Białowiea forest, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, showing nature thriving without us.

It’s both comforting and sobering, suggesting, yet again, that humans aren’t necessary to the world and, in fact, maybe the world is better off without us. The most jaw-dropping revelation for me was when a paleobiologist calmly stated that humans will go extinct eventually. All species do. But life on Earth will keep going. 

Like all good books, Reservoir 13 is transformative. It’s made me see the world differently, as a place where swallows and bats and the nettle and a river and ewes and wood pigeons and the weather and townspeople are all interconnected through the cycle of years. McGregor manages to do this through a collage-like structure, where a description of a person moves effortlessly into a description of nature, proving that all living things have seasons, stories, and beauty.

By the end of the book, I always feel kind of god-like as a reader, in the sense that I’ve watched and observed and loved, over 13 years, this human and non-human community. Who wants to let something like that go? It’s often easier to just start at the beginning again. This is another book I find myself rereading whenever I get the chance.