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Raise your hand if you’re a book nerd who grew up thinking you were unquestionably an “indoor kid.” Me too. Then in my early twenties, I moved from the midwestern suburbs of my youth to an east coast city with countless parks and riverside hiking trails, located within a short drive of gorgeous beaches and some of the oldest mountains in the world. I fell in love with hiking (who knew walking uphill could be fun?), became a little bit obsessed with getting stamps for my US National Parks passport, and turned into a person who plans travel around seeing natural wonders. Experiencing the magic of nature firsthand made me want to read and learn more about it, which only increased my awe and my appetite for devotion to caring for our planet.
Deepening our relationship to and understanding of nature is good for us both individually and collectively in myriad ways, which is why task #13 of the 2025 Read Harder Challenge is “Read a nonfiction book about nature or the environment.” Whether you’re in it to learn about science, fire up your sense of wonder, or fuel your activism, there’s something for you in the recommendations below.
Reminder: today is the last day to fill out the Read Harder Halfway Check-In Survey! We’d love to hear from you!
The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams
Going outside is good for you. If you somehow still need to be convinced, longtime science journalist Florence Williams has all kinds of data for you here. But what makes this book really compelling are the fascinating facts about how and why our brains react to nature the way they do. Tree branches, snowflakes, and pine cones all contain similar patterns that mimic the geography of our circulatory systems. Specific shades of green activate evolutionary pleasure centers. Birdsong, wind, and the sound of flowing water can help calm our perpetually fried nervous systems. When you understand how and why spending time outside improves your mood, creativity, and overall health, you’ll be more motivated to do it. Plus, you’ll be stocked up on fun tidbits to share the next time you invite a friend out for a silly little mental health walk.
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham
Oh, there’s nothing like a poet writing about their relationship to the natural world! J. Drew Lanham’s family has lived in Edgefield County, South Carolina for generations dating back to slavery. As he explores how his family’s history and connection to the land shaped him—he is also an ornithologist and ecology professor—he complicates common narratives about Black identity in the American south. Lanham invites us to consider what it means to find beauty in a place that was once the site of incredible pain, and as he allows himself to become deeply rooted in his family’s history, he develops an understanding of what it means to be rooted to the earth as well. This is a potent, singular blend of memoir, history, and nature writing.
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams
Honestly, you could read just about any of Terry Tempest Williams’s work for this challenge. If you love nature writing and haven’t yet discovered her, just take a scroll through her extensive catalog and start wherever suits your fancy. I’m recommending this one right now books America’s national parks are under attack thanks to budget cuts, understaffing, and a president who wants to privatize public lands. Published in 2016 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, The Hour of Land is a memoir of Williams’s experience in the parks, a history of the landscapes that have helped shape our national identity, and a call to action to defend them.
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong
Everybody loves a good underdog story, and nothing in the natural world is quite as much of an underdog as bacteria. Sure, microbes can make us sick, but they also kind of make us who we are. Ed Yong’s ode to the microscopic organisms that live in, on, and all around is as warm and funny as it is educational. You’ve never had such a good time reading about potentially gross subject matter, I promise.
Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell
Fun animal facts aren’t just for kids. Katherine Rundell presents a collection of fascinating information about endangered animals that will both make you a ringer at trivia night and activate your sense of wonder. Awe can be a powerful gateway to activism, and understanding how truly special the creatures we share this planet with are is a great way to get inspired to help them survive.
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe
If you’ve been looking for a way to talk about climate change without ruining family gatherings, this one’s for you. Hayhoe is a skilled communicator who argues that while facts and data are an important part of changing minds, it’s connection and shared values that really change hearts and inspire people to participate in activism. She draws on multidisciplinary research and extensive personal experience to offer a vision for how individual change can lead to collective action. There’s plenty of doom to be found elsewhere. Why not practice a little data-driven hope?
What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Another good antidote to the feeling that we’re doomed? Imagining what it would look like to be on the other side of the crisis. Here, climate scientist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson invites dozens of thinkers—writers, poets, farmers, policymakers, philosophers, artists, and activists—to picture “a transformed and replenished world” and what it took to get there. This is a creative and thoughtfully curated collection of inquiries and inspirations that will remind you there is always another angle, another question, another thing to try.
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