84 Books Like English Pastoral

An instant best-seller when it first appeared in 1978, Montaillou uses Inquisition records of the cross-examinations of Cathar heretics and their Catholic neighbours and kin to recover the religious, social, emotional and sexual lives of medieval Pyrenean villagers.

Shepherds, mayors, matriarchs and servants, priests and laity, come vividly to life as they recount their work and pleasures, friendships and enmities, doubts and beliefs. 

Montaillou is the most influential example of what was then a speciality of the French Annales school of history, namely, studies of everyday life (la vie quotidienne) in a particular historical milieu.

Since then micro-histories, detailed accounts of social microcosms and what they tell us about the wider worlds in which they were embedded, and the historical shifts or transformations to which they bear witness, have become the bread and butter not only of local but of global historians.   

On a cold winter night in 1960 the families of Dachuan village were forced out of their homes to make way for the waters of a huge new dam. Some managed to retrieve a few bones from the family graves to take to their new homes. But the ancestral temple that had been at the heart of village life and identity for centuries was lost to the rising waters. 

For decades Maoist policy suppressed all religious expression in China, but the reforms of the 1980s saw many forms of religious revival, including the triumphant reconstruction of Dachuan’s Confucius temple, its rituals, ethics, and ancestral spirit tablets. 

Jing’s book is an outstanding study of social memory, its powers of resistance to crisis and oppression, and its mobilization as a resource to rebuild community and history. A unique window onto the travails of modern China, it also invites us to reflect on… show more.

The Berber village of Tadrar clings to the steep slopes of the High Atlas. Lives are hard.

Women, men and children labor to bring precious water to homes, fields, and byres, to coax barley from narrow terraces, keep houses warm, feed families, tend the sick, and support the mosque and school. Most younger people go to the city for work, at least for a while, sending money home to help their families. 

So how do families and individuals view their options, their place in the village and in the world?

Vivid interviews and observations stud Crawford’s affectionate and perceptive account of how people in Tadrar decide to become involved in the larger world economy, and their views on what it does for them and to them. 

I read this book long before Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was the first of her books that I read, and I was so seized by her style of narration that I proceeded to read with devotion everything she had written.

In one of the early pages of this book, Ernaux declares that in writing about her father, she didn’t want falsity or an overblown style, no artsy attempt to produce something “’ moving’ or ‘gripping.’” The style she followed was true to the life she was describing as a working-class man with minimum education. Here is a book that pays tribute to life but also enacts a credo for what Ernaux calls a “neutral way of writing”: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony.”

I love this thoughtful, personal, and exceptionally well-informed narrative about doing the right thing on a beautiful piece of land quite near my own home.

Through this book, I learned so much about what good farming looks like and the sensitivities around livelihoods and communities. 

When speaking of the role of technology in nature conservation, one might envisage drones to survey habitat destruction, or endangered elephants with radio collars. But technology might go much further. In this book, the authors show how genetics could help us to re-engineer species, even entire food webs to meet the environmental challenges of the future.

Rewilding is a book for older readers (ages 8+) organized in a browseable format.

The authors give a brief two-page overview of several conservation success stories. You’ll find some overlap between Rewilding’s stories and books I’ve written, like freeing the Elwha River (A River’s Gifts) and re-introducing black-footed ferrets into the wild (Zoo Scientists to the Rescue), but you’ll also find new stories about rattlesnakes, snot otters, Arabian oryx, tigers, meat-eating plants, and more. 

Ailton Kranek is a well-known Indigenous Rights activist, environmental campaigner, activist, and journalist in and beyond Brazil. His modest seventy-three-page book looks at, and beyond, life in the Krenak village in Minas Gerais on the Doce River, in southeast Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon. What I so like about this book is it confronts the horror of the prospect of extinction without turning away to the present culture as a force of resistance.

The members of the Krenak nation call the river Watu—our grandfather—a person. His story, the story of his village, and of the river are one. Watu winds its way 853 kilometres through the Amazon to the coast. In 2015, the collapse of a dam released highly contaminated water from mining into the river, causing an ecological disaster. But the plight of the village needs to be seen in a wider context… show more.

Aldo Leopold was a Forest Service ranger stationed in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest when he first began advocating for a new approach to managing national forests. Leopold’s visionary thinking and diligent advocacy resulted in the first-ever Wilderness Area in the U.S.—the Gila Wilderness Area, established in 1922—more than 40 years before the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964. A Sand County Almanac is Leopold’s best-known work and follows his efforts to restore a patch of cut-over farmland in Wisconsin while also articulating his vision of a land ethic where humans and nature are intertwined and care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. His beautiful writing resonated strongly with me when I first read A Sand County Almanac more than two decades ago, and his vision remains as important now as ever.

I first read A Sand County Almanac in college, and it inspired me to think deeply about nature. In fact, it helped inspire my career. Aldo Leopold wrestled with our obligations to wild creatures and places arguably more seriously than any contemporary. This is the sort of book where you can open a random page, read a passage, and spend the rest of the afternoon mulling over the ideas, their implications, and the beauty of their expression. This volume collects not only his most famous book but dozens of articles and letters where you can see his mind evolving and changing. Leopold modeled an integrity and a curious mind at work that I try to emulate. I know I’m not alone.