Environmental Nonfiction

Try these books if you are looking for:

• Nonfiction
• Books about the environment
• Books about nature
• Natural sciences

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver
641.0973 KIN
This book chronicles the year that the author Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tucson to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
By Bill Bryson
917.404 BRY
This often hilarious account of the foibles of two inept adventurers is sprinkled with fascinating details of the history of the Appalachian Trail, its wildlife, and tales of famous and not-so-famous hikers. In his more serious moments, Bryson argues for the protection of this fragile strip of wilderness.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
By Annie Dillard
508.9755 DIL
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a series of interconnected essays which challenge the listener to contemplate the natural world beyond its commonplace surfaces.

The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
By William Alexander
635.0974 ALE
When the author of this hilarious horticultural memoir plants a large vegetable garden and a small orchard on his Hudson Valley farmstead, he finds himself at odds with almost all creation.

Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
By Terry Tempest Williams
917.925 WIL
As a lifelong desert dweller, Williams is intimately familiar with the multiple shades of red, and she explores many of them, among other things, in this tribute to the desert and canyon country of southern Utah that she holds so dear. In this collection of essays, poems, congressional testimony, and journal entries (some previously published), she ruminates on the meaning of wilderness and the need to preserve it as a way to save ourselves as much as the land itself.