100 Books Like The Making of the American Landscape

This is a classic work of environmental history, an exploration of not only the growth of Chicago but the inextricable links between the city and its countryside.

Today, there’s an even sharper distinction between the food producers who live in rural areas and the food consumers who live everywhere else, politically as well as economically, and it’s not always clear who’s making the bigger mess. But this is an essential book about the rise of Big Ag and its impact on the landscape.

This was the book that made me pause, look around, and realize the prosaic and banal world around us is full of wonder and meaning. While we often think about bombastic, symbolically rich sites, for example, the Lincoln Memorial, as being “meaningful,” the ordinary spaces that we encounter in our daily lives are equally full of meaning.

The built environment around us tells a story. It tells us about our values, our way of life, the way we organize our societies, and our priorities. This is a collection of essays by some of the leading humanistic geographers of the period, but it’s not a theoretical academic thesis but an incredibly accessible guide to making meaning out of the banal built environment around us. 

J. B. Jackson was an iconoclast, each summer riding his motorcycle between Harvard and Berkeley. Jackson saw America from the road and up close, and in his magazine Landscape, he invited readers to see the every day and the prosaic as well.

His writing illuminates topics like the road, commercial architecture, and mobile homes. Before “Learning from Las Vegas,” Jackson asked us to consider what we could learn from the vernacular architecture around us. His writing is theory-free and offers a meditation on seeing what is around us. 

Yi-Fu Tuan’s brilliance is in illustrating how variable and contextual our understanding of space and place really are, and how our experience of the physical world is based on our mental and bodily perceptions of the places and spaces we encounter.

When we are cheering on our favorite team, we want a crowd of like-minded fans (sitting in empty stands is a depressing thought), but heading to the car, that same crowd becomes intolerable. The small town with 2,000 inhabitants can feel stifling, but the big city, with two million people (which demographers would say would be empirically more “crowded”), provides the freedom to be.

Tuan was a leader in the field of humanistic geography and his writings are a pleasurable meditation of our place in the world. 

Airborne and Allergenic Pollen of North America was the most important book I read (out of hundreds) when I was doing my original research for my own book. The material is extensive, accurate, scientific, and yet it is quite readable. Unlike so many other books, papers, or articles on pollen and allergy, this book takes into consideration all of the plants grown in North America, not just the trees. A classic, and yet, still the very best.

This is similar to Wild Isles – a vast celebration of nature incorporating fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – but this time with its focus on the beautiful wild North of Britain.

It’s exciting to see so many different aspects of the area brought out and the inclusion of lesser-known contemporary writers such as Katie Hale, Loren Cafferty, and Graham Mort alongside greats such as William Wordsworth and Charlotte Brontë. 

So often neglected, so often stereotyped, the North is viewed here by those that know it, through clear eyes but with understandable adoration. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the moors, the dark green and grey wilds inhabited by curlew, kite, and hare.

This is the place where the Brontës created their epic romances and where contemporary writers sought solace during lockdown. The land continues to be a source of inspiration and it is gratifying to see it celebrated in this… show more.

When European colonists settled North America, they began to significantly alter the landscape in ways that were deeply ignorant of ecological health. Now, over 400 years later, that impact has not lessened. However, over that time, there have been significant ebbs and flows in the landscape relative to how it’s used (or not used). This fascinating book follows that trajectory as it explores the environmental history of New England. Even for those not familiar with this particular region, this book offers a unique window into how dynamic and fluid landscapes and ecosystems can be over the course of time.  

There are many general introductions to American environmental history. This one, by a pioneering leader in the field, is excellent. The comprehensive narrative provides a good mix of facts and interpretation, and Merchant provides as well a list of agencies, concepts, laws, and people, in addition to resource guides to print, film, video, archival, and electronic sources, plus bibliographies and essays on a variety of topics

Islands of Abandonment shares extraordinary examples of nature’s ability to reclaim – and restore – land abused by humans.

In startling vignettes, the author visits numerous abandoned sites, uninhabited by humans for different reasons: from Chernobyl to a no man's land on the island of Cyprus, to factories simply rendered obsolete leaving the surrounding neighborhoods blighted, dangerous and often empty.

I found this book to be, if not hopeful, then cautiously optimistic in its affirmation of nature’s resilience, even in the wake of massive destruction. Cal Flyn’s writing is enviably good: keenly observant, capturing intimate details about these landscapes and the non-human beings who inhabit them in vivid detail.

Unforgettable and illuminating. This is nature writing and investigative journalism at its best.

A modern tour around sites of Roman Britain, and a fascinating look at the stories we later Britons have told ourselves about the Roman era over the ensuing centuries – in ways that perhaps say more about us than they do about the Romans.