Arboretum America
The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us
To Speak For The Trees

…and many more.

Max Paschall’s deeply researched article about how absent monoculture has been historically, and the history of promiscuous agriculture in Europe. Also: vines in trees!

by Mark Shepard
This book provides the modern vision, and Shepard has grown the modern example, of an ecological model of agriculture. Bio/Ecomimicry guides us to create a multistory polyculture built around perennials and maintained by the animals that become part of its abundance. It is our future if we want to have one. Inspired by The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, the teachings on permaculture by Bill Mollison et al., and, ya know, Nature.

by David Graeber and David Wengrow
This book is dangerous, and dense. It turns the question of “How did we get here?” on its head. You may begin to question some of your most deeply held assumptions.

By James Rebanks
My favorite book of 2020. The beautifully written true story of a family of farmers and their circular journey from pastoral polyculture, through the chemical and monocultural devastation of the “Green Revolution,” to a modern return to polyculture informed by ecology.

by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us’.” A beautiful must-read that can move you, inspire you, and deepen your understanding. Read this first if you haven’t yet.

by M. Kat Anderson
Welcome to California… a stunning garden of delights, tended for thousands of years by many groups of people with vast ecological knowledge… and for a couple hundred years by a whole lot more people with zero ecological knowledge.

by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Turn on, tune in, and drop out of the standard understanding of what plants are capable of. After reading this you may stop talking to plants… and start listening to hear what they are saying to you. (Also read anything by Buhner, but especially Plant Intellignce and the Imaginal Realm)

by Masanobu Fukuoka
Who knew that a 1960’s treatise on “do nothing” rice farming in Japan would become the seminal text for natural winemaking and ecological farming around the globe?

by Wendell Berry
More relevant now, for the most part, than when it was published in 1977. A true classic by one of the world’s greatest farmer-writers. “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.” Nick Offerman reads the audiobook.

by Edward E. Baptist
“The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.” I don’t think we can understand the culture of agriculture today without this perspective.

by Aldo Leopold
The beauty of a life lived in awe and respect of the natural world, the poetry of ecological observation, the connections between all things. “And in this barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.” This is the line that got me.

by Ursula K. Le Guin
I read this 190 page novel in about a day, and I’m a slow reader. So primal, with such archetypical characters, that it transcends allegory and becomes a myth… a myth in which I find myself living. It’s important to remember, too, that the world for our world is soil, aka earth.

by Suzanne Simard
It turns out that competition and survival of the fittest are not the laws of the jungle. Collaboration, cooperation, network building, sharing, and ensuring mutual survival turn out to be the lessons we can learn from the trees. Simard’s studies have revolutionized scientific thinking and given proof for some ancient ways of seeing the world.

by Julia Butterfly Hill
She spent a year an a half living in the top of a giant sequoia to save it from being cut down. “The question is not “Can you make a difference?” You already do make a difference. It’s just a matter of what kind of a difference you want to make, during your life on this planet.”

by Farley Mowat
A salt water tale that will make the salt water inside you spill out. (Also anything by Mowat)

by Barry Lopez

Questions our belief in cultural progress, and our value in the quest for individual material wealth. “Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.”

by Monica Gagliano

A combination of hard science and mystical exploration that is as necessary as it is uncommon and controversial.

by Fred Provenza

Studying goats’ eating habits starts a journey that leads through human heath and nutrition to a meditation on the illusion of the self in this world of ever-transforming energy.

by Zoë Schlanger

Plant sentience is quietly being studied around the world… and the findings will change you and your relationships with plants forever.

by Stacey O’Brien

Sweet, funny, heartwarming, tear-jerking, inspirational story of a relationship between a human and a non-human. Deep connections are possible all around us, and they can open our eyes to seeing a bigger world. Also… barn owls are awesome!

by Emma Marris

Is any creature or landscape free from human influence? Is "wild" an accurate or even helpful term? Once we question human vs. nature dualism, what does conservation mean? The questions Marris raises about our ecological thinking might be some of the most important and consequential of our time.