Books like Rewilding — picked by fans

I love stories of positive change. They give me hope that humans can see themselves as part of nature rather than apart from it.

One Plastic Bag is special because it focuses on how one person addressed the problem of plastic pollution and instituted change with small steps that created a big impact. If we are to coexist with nature, we must realize each of us have something to contribute.

Conservation success isn’t always about saving animals or an ecosystem. Sometimes it’s about learning to live with nature.

Richard Turere’s story is a wonderful tale about how he protected his family’s cows – the first duty of a Maasai warrior – with an invention of his own making. And he was only twelve years old! His lion lights became so popular, they are protecting other Maasai families’ herds, too. I love this story of ingenuity, STEM, and learning to decrease human-wildlife conflicts to coexist.

Human progress is often bad for wildlife. Our roads, housing developments, and stores often disrupt wildlife migration corridors. We are the problem, but Meeg Pincus writes an uplifting book about how we are also the solution.

Make Way for Animals! is a book about coexisting with wildlife. When we put our heads together there is always a way to meet our needs and the needs of the creatures with whom we share this planet.

You might be wondering why I included a book about valuing the birth of girls on a conservation list.

Shyam Sundar Paliwal quit his job at the marble quarry because the owners refused to plant trees to help heal the land after the mining process. When he’s elected the head of his village, he proposes that every family plant 111 trees every time a girl is born.

At that time, girls were considered a burden to their families and welcomed with silence. Slowly, Sundar changed the villagers’ minds. The trees and the girls grew up together and the village continues to prosper.

I love this story of gender equality and healing a devastated land.

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. 

Since Yellowstone is within a day’s drive, I’ve visited it many times in all seasons. While it’s a fave for volcanic activity and abundant wildlife, its unnaturally straight boundaries are at odds with topography and animal needs. With stunning photography, David Quammen dives into the complexities of how everything in the national park expands into a greater interconnected ecosystem. Nothing shows it better for Yellowstone than his stories of the annual elk migrations, the return of wolves, and the intricacies of food webs. In short, no parks, including Yellowstone, are islands unto themselves, and their preservation means looking at the bigger picture. Quammen addresses the issues with skill from his decades as a science writer for National Geographic and his personal witness of living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Indigenous communities and land dispossession are the subjects of Crimes Against Nature, although Jacoby also brings white transgressors of federal policy into his book about the dark history of the American conservation movement. The rural communities he describes engaged in survival practices that quickly became defined and punished as crimes: hunting, fishing, tree-cutting, and foraging. Jacoby includes eastern parks in his assessment, writing about the Adirondacks before turning to Yellowstone and Grand Canyon. At the heart of this beautifully written book is the tension between what constitutes private and public space in American history, and how rural white and Indigenous Americans have often lived in the borderlands between them.

Helm is an Oxford University economist, a wildlife enthusiast, and former chair of the UK’s Natural Capital Committee. He is an outsider inside the system.

Should we put an economic value on nature? If you worry about this then you must read this book.

If you know a bit more than Helm does about wildlife, as I think I do, then he trips now and again (but never falls flat on his face) whereas if you know less about economics than Helm does (as I certainly do) it is difficult to detect whether or not he gallops sure-footedly across the terrain.

This book, though, is a very good read - I agreed with much of it and was interested by all of it.

This reminds me strongly of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac - a classic of the ecological literature, and I can think of no better comparison to give you an idea of this book’s content, quality, and worth. It is set largely in Highland Scotland and comprises 52 short essays on wildlife and land use.

Many of the essays start with an observation of a species or place, then the author fills in the background, muses on the wider picture, and how the world could be better. It’s a simple and effective way to tell a story.

Roy Dennis is an elder statesman of the UK conservation movement, one of its doers, and one of its thinkers. This book is well worth a read.

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.