Recommended Nature Writing Books

Writer Gary Nahban calls nature writing “going out into the boonies and interviewing plants” in the excellent anthology Words from the Land. Speaking of Words from the Land (edited by Stephen Trimble), I recommend it highly, though it may be a while before I get around to writing a review. This page is a work in progress. I’ll start off with the best (Edward Abbey) and the worst (Thoreau, according to the students in my nature writing class)

Down the River, by Edward Abbey

If you could combine Henry David Thoreau with George Carlin, you'd get someone like Edward Abbey. Or here’s a better comparison: Edward Abbey is Ralph Nader with a gun. He is (was--he died in 1989) the funniest nature writer out there. I tried some of his fiction, such as his best-known novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and didn't like it. His nonfiction, though, is insightful, descriptive, and hilarious.

Desert Solitaire is his most famous book. But Down the River is my favorite collection of Abbey's essays. In the first long essay, "Down the River with Henry Thoreau," Abbey and friends take a trip down the Green River on the eve of the 1980 Presidential election. Abbey brings along a copy of Thoreau's Walden. For the next 40-odd pages, he contemplates nature, muses about politics, ridicules his vegetarian friends, and simultaneously pays homage to and pokes fun at Henry David Thoreau In one amusing passage, Abbey imagines a marriage of two reclusive literary oddballs, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson:

EMILY (raising her pen): Henry, you haven't taken out the garbage.
HENRY (raising his flute): Take it out yourself.

Abbey is often provocative, but as he himself once said, he’d rather antagonize people than bore them. He certainly isn’t boring.

Walden, or Life in the Woods
by Henry David Thoreau

I hated chapter one of Walden (“Economy”) the first time I read it in high school. That was back in the days when we had to walk to school uphill both ways and the only computers in our classrooms where Apple II’s barely capable of playing Pong. More recently, I moved my chair to the front of the classroom. Teaching a college class about nature writing, I put Walden on the reading list. (Why should I be the only one to suffer?) But I almost decided to have the students skip chapter one and start right in with the “good stuff” in chapter two.

Then I reread “Economy.” Hilarious! Henry David was a riot. It was the funniest damn thing I’d read all week. I loved it, much to my surprise. What had my high school self been thinking? In any event, chapter one went back on my class’s reading list.

The students hated it, of course. They detected no humor in chapter one, and described the experience as “enduring literary thumbscrews.” The rest of the book, in their opinion, wasn’t much better, except for the bit about walking across the frozen pond in winter.

I’m beginning to think that Walden is one of those books you shouldn’t read until you’re over 30.

Top Ten Nature Writing Books

In 2001, Milkweed Editions, publishers of “The World as Home” series of books, asked subscribes to vote for their top ten nature writing books. Here are the results, in brief:

1. Desert Solitaire,
by Edward Abbey

2. Walden,
by Henry David Thoreau

3. A Sand County Almanac,
by Aldo Leopold

4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
by Annie Dillard

5. Silent Spring,
by Rachel Carson

6. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,
by Terry Tempest Williams

7. New and Selected Poems,
by Mary Oliver

8. Arctic Dreams,
by Barry Lopez

9. The Solace of Open Spaces,
by Gretel Ehlich

10. The Outermost House,
by Henry Beston

See the full list with commentary and dozens of runner-up nominees here

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Interviews with Nature Writers