A guide to some of our favourite Nature writing.
We love to share good Nature writing that inspires us. Here are some new and old writings on Nature, ideas of wilderness, cultural creation of Nature, and calls for a new relationship with the Natural world. Through our blog and insta posts, we will digest these works, share ideas and read some passages we love, engage with you and (hopefully) interview some of the authors.
This is not a comprehensive or is any sense a complete list, and is not listed here in any particular order. These books are stacked together in themes or styles that roughly run together. Old classics and new finds, books we have discovered and read recently or in sitting on our bookshelves and revisited recently like old friends. Mostly we want to share them so you can also find at a library or your local independent or specialist bookstore and enjoy for yourself.
The book stack
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement - Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicargo Press, 2016)
David Suzuki, The Scared Balance - Rediscovering our Place in Nature (Greystone Books, 1997, 25th anniversary edition with Foreword by Robin Wall Kimmerer and afterword by Bill McKibben)
Tim Smit, Eden (Penguin Random House, 2001)
Melanie Challenger, How to Be Animal - What it Means to be Human (Canongate Books, 2021)
Sophie Yeo, Nature’s Ghost - The world we lost and how to bring it back (Harper North, 2024)
Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment - Life in the Post-human Landscape (Williams Collins, 2021)
Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (John Hopkins University Press, 1992)
John Rennie Short, Imagined Country - Society, Culture and Environment (Routledge, 1991)
George Seddon, Landprints - Reflection on Place and Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Blackwell, 1995)
Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature - North Amercian Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Blackwell, 1992)
Max Oelschlaeager, The Idea of Wilderness - From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (Yale University Press, 1991)
Rewilding.
Here are a few classics of rewilding literature and re-thinking our relationship with Nature.
Starting with Isabella Tree’s Wilding you could say we have fallen down the rewilding equivalent of Alice’s rabbit hole, and Wonderland looks beautiful and hopeful, with a few Mad Hatters and Red Queens battling out the return of Beavers and other rewilding landscape changes - see the soon to be released ‘Derek vs Derek’ (directed by James Dawson, 2026).
The book stack
Poppy Okotcha, A Wilder Way - How Gardens Grow us (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Guy Shrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain (William Collins, 2022)
Derek Gow, Bringing Back the Beaver - the Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways (Chelsea Green, 2020)
Derk Gow, Birds, Beats and Bedlam - Turning my Farm into an Ark for Lost Species (Chelsea Green, 2022)
Roy Dennis, Restoring the Wild - Rewilding our Skies, Woods and Waterways (Haper Collins, 2021)
Ken Thompson, Where do Camels Belong? The Story and Science of Invasive Species (Profile Books, 2014)
Ben Goldsmith, God is an Octopus - Loss, Love and a Calling to Nature (Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2023)
Kiran Sidhu, I Can Hear the Cuckoo - Life in the wilds of Wales (Gaia, 2023)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss - A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Penguin, 2021)
Isabella Tree, Wilding - The Return of Nature to a British Farm (Picador, 2018)
Richard Mabey, Nature Cuture (Vintage, 2008)
George Monbiot, Feral - Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (Penguin, 2013)
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Canongate, 2017)
Andrew Darby, The Ancients - Discovering the world’s oldest surving trees in wild Tasmania (Allen & Unwin, 2025)
Reimagining our relationship with Nature.
Here are a few more classic writing that fundamentally challenge our relationship with Nature and our experience of wild places.
We really started on this collaboration out of a love of inspiring Nature writing and film. Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? was the start of a discussion which is continuing through this website, our social media and podcasts (soon to come). Macfarlane’s Wild Places with its beautiful and heart felt interaction with Roger Deakin and their experiences of ‘the wild’ in England and Scotland, the pleasures of wild swimming and sleeping under the stars.
Leopold, Muir and Dillard were a starting point, then Rick Bass on The Lost Grizzlies, later finding classics like Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, and early seminal writings on ecological ways of being and thinking from Arne Naess and Freya Matthews discovered in university undergraduate studies in the 1990s and more recently Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. So fitting that Robert Macfarlane is the 2026 Arne Naess Chair at the Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo. Former Chairs included James Lovelock author of the Gaia - a New Look at Life on Earth and Robyn Eckersley, Mark’s former honours supervisor in a BA at Monash in the 1990s, inspiring life long learning about and wonder at Nature, human behaviour and the more than human world.
The book stack
Arne Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle -outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Freya Mathews, The Ecological Self (Routledge, 1991)
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Canongate, 2019, originally published in 1977)
Rick Bass, The Lost Grizzlies - a search for survivors in the wilderness of Colorado (Mariner Books, 1995)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass - Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the teachings of Plants (Penguin, 2020)
Roger Deakin, Wildwood - A Journey Through Trees (Penguin, 2007)
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac - and sketches here and there (Oxford University Press, 1987, orginally published in 1949)
Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (Granta, 2007)
John Muir, The Mountains of California (Penguin, 1985, first published in 1894)
John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (Sierra Club Books, 1991, published writings 1838-1914)
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perrernial, 1974)
Annie Dillard, The Annie Dillard Reader (Harper Collins, 1994)
Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Aliver? (Penguin, 2025)
