100 Books Like The Biophilia Effect

Susan Pinker, a developmental psychologist in Montreal, demonstrates that online communicating can never replace the benefits we derive from face-to-face interpersonal contact. Strong bonds of friendship and love heal us and keep us healthy, just as they help children learn, and just as they extend our lives and make us happy. Looser, secondary in-person bonds also have a significant effect on us. In combination with our close relationships, they form a personal “village” around us composed of networks of connectedness. Susan Pinker presents numerous surprising discoveries from social neuroscience, as well as stories from people’s lives. In the final chapter, she suggests six very practical principles to keep in mind while building our “village.” After all, as she concludes, “Genuine social interaction is a force of nature; we all need some.” 

During the past twenty years, hundreds of studies have found that practicing medicine with compassion, caring, and good information-sharing brings significantly better empirical results than usual. In short, relational dynamics affect our measurable physical condition. For instance, biopsy wounds and surgical wounds heal faster if the patients receive compassionate care from their doctors and nurses. Similarly, diabetes patients receiving compassionate care are far less likely to develop metabolic complications. These relational findings should revolutionize medicine, especially considering the hefty savings in healthcare costs. For now, though, “Research shows that physicians routinely miss emotional clues from patients and routinely miss 60-90% of opportunities to respond to patients with compassion.” These two doctors write in an enjoyable conversational style, sharing their own stories as well as the irrefutable data.  

As in other areas of modern life, the role of relationships in education has been considered of minor consequence. However, the Relational Schools Foundation in the UK has found, after years of research, that a focus on improving the quality of relationships in schools improves a broad range of educational and social outcomes and can overcome disadvantages as well. The book the Foundation has published, The Relational Teacher and the accompanying film, begins with some framing by social scientists, but the body of the book consists of six case studies and the insightful reflections of the teacher involved with each study. The relational dynamics in a classroom—particularly the motivational relationship created by the teacher—are closely related to a student’s effort in learning and developing. 

Our mental health has been compromised and the overall health of the planet destroyed because the mechanistic worldview of modernity has long assured us that we live apart from nature, more or less on top of it. This book—actually a boxed set of five short paperbacks: Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice—is a beautiful, deeply engaging antidote to modern alienation. The focus is on memoirs and storytelling because sharing stories is the way we humans make sense of the vast interrelatedness that is our reality. The aim here is a fuller understanding of Kinship Writ Large and the ways in which each of us can become better kin. The wise co-editors who chose these pieces include Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the acclaimed book Braiding Sweetgrass.

Edited by Matilda van den Bosch and William Bird, Nature and Public Health. Each chapter was written by several top experts in the field. There were more than a hundred different experts chosen to write sections of this fine book, selected from all around the world of health, botany, horticulture, urban forestry, urban affairs, and the environment. Nature (or the lack of it) is closely aligned with human health, and this wonderful book explores the subject like no other.

The perennial classic on a healing mindset, legendary integrative medical doctor Andrew Weil, shares stories of natural healing with case studies covering many disparate health challenges, including a chapter dedicated to cancer. Dr. Weil reviews his eight-week program for optimal healing and how to avoid obstacles to wellness, such as medical pessimism and environmental toxins. Spontaneous Healing leaves little doubt that the body’s natural ability to heal can be enhanced when the power of the mind and spirit are properly leveraged.

The last book of a highly-respected psychiatrist and theologian, written as he was dying of cancer. It describes his solo camping trips into the Appalachian Mountains, where he found healing in what he called “the Power of the Slowing”. This spiritual practice taught him to welcome whatever the moment offered. When a growling bear brushes the fabric of his tent in the middle of the night, there’s nothing he can do to protect himself. But he can choose in that instant to enter the “slowing”, going into the quiet acceptance of his own terror. He can be present—“in a place beyond all coping”—to the immediacy of being alive, within the very fear that grips him.

I can find it overwhelming to think how large and bad the environmental crisis really is. Record temperatures, species extinction, fires and storms. In many ways, this book hammers home the scale – but it does so productively. It’s been an excellent companion for me in learning more about the problem. It’s written by two of the world’s top scientists who have led the way in helping us see this as an environmental crisis, not just a problem of climate change or species loss, but an overall destabilization of the natural world. This is often missed from the mainstream discussion and Lewis and Maslin offer a whole range of approaches that can help you make sense of what we can do in response. 

As Roderick Nash is the scholarly historian of the term “wilderness” in the American mind, Gary Snyder is the sagacious philosopher of the term for contemporary America. I admire Snyder’s poetic style as much as his evocation of the meaning of “place”; i.e., how one can develop both a physical and a spiritual awareness of the wild around us and then transfer that awareness to a sense of one’s place in the larger country and then the planet itself.

From chapters such as “The Place, The Region, and the Commons” and “Survival and Sacrament,” I have gleaned what I can only term Snyder’s mystical appreciation of wilderness and its importance for the future of the human race. Snyder is truly the “High Priest” of how to “practice” the wild in one’s own life.

I began reading Sig Olson books when I was in high school, prompted by a biology teacher. Olson uses eloquent prose and emotional description to describe the wilderness lake country of Northern Minnesota and Southern Ontario. Over a career of decades he wrote about his experiences in the wilderness and easily brings the reader into his world, allowing them to see it through his eyes and experiences. Reflections is his last book, and is truly just that, reflections of a life lived on the edge of wilderness and the struggles of balancing desires for preservation of wilderness with encroachment of the modern world.