The genre has a reputation for being earnest in the wrong way, for sentences that try so hard to be beautiful that they forget to be true. The best nature writing is something else entirely. It's science and grief and gratitude and close attention, all working together in the same paragraph. The books on this list are the ones that changed how I actually look at things.

They are wired for survival, and perhaps expert at that function, but no other creature here possesses intelligence like mine.

I lament my own immersion in an economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts gifts to commodities in a currency that enables us to purchase things we don’t really need while destroying what we do.

No single human can work to save the orcas and protect the Amazon and organize anti-fracking protests and write poetry that inspires others to act and pray in a hermit’s dwelling for transformation and get dinner on the table. How easy is it to feel paralyzed by obligations.

The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth.

We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light.

I always find more answers in a forest than in my own hot attic of a mind.

Oaks support more forms of life and more fascinating interactions than any other tree genus in North America.