• Shopping Cart

Advanced Search

  • Browse Our Shelves
  • Best Sellers
  • Digital Audiobooks
  • Featured Titles
  • New This Week
  • Staff Recommended
  • Suggestions for Kids
  • Fiction Suggestions
  • Nonfiction Suggestions
  • Reading Lists
  • Upcoming Events
  • Ticketed Events
  • Science Book Talks
  • Past Events
  • Video Archive
  • Online Gift Codes
  • University Clothing
  • Goods & Gifts from Harvard Book Store
  • Hours & Directions
  • Newsletter Archive
  • Frequent Buyer Program
  • Signed First Edition Club
  • Signed New Voices in Fiction Club
  • Harvard Square Book Circle
  • Off-Site Book Sales
  • Corporate & Special Sales
  • Print on Demand

Harvard Book Store

  • All Our Shelves
  • Academic New Arrivals
  • New Hardcover - Biography
  • New Hardcover - Fiction
  • New Hardcover - Nonfiction
  • New Titles - Paperback
  • African American Studies
  • Anthologies
  • Anthropology / Archaeology
  • Architecture
  • Asia & The Pacific
  • Astronomy / Geology
  • Boston / Cambridge / New England
  • Business & Management
  • Career Guides
  • Child Care / Childbirth / Adoption
  • Children's Board Books
  • Children's Picture Books
  • Children's Activity Books
  • Children's Beginning Readers
  • Children's Middle Grade
  • Children's Gift Books
  • Children's Nonfiction
  • Children's/Teen Graphic Novels
  • Teen Nonfiction
  • Young Adult
  • Classical Studies
  • Cognitive Science / Linguistics
  • College Guides
  • Cultural & Critical Theory
  • Education - Higher Ed
  • Environment / Sustainablity
  • European History
  • Exam Preps / Outlines
  • Games & Hobbies
  • Gender Studies / Gay & Lesbian
  • Gift / Seasonal Books
  • Globalization
  • Graphic Novels
  • Hardcover Classics
  • Health / Fitness / Med Ref
  • Islamic Studies
  • Large Print
  • Latin America / Caribbean
  • Law & Legal Issues
  • Literary Crit & Biography
  • Local Economy
  • Mathematics
  • Media Studies
  • Middle East
  • Myths / Tales / Legends
  • Native American
  • Paperback Favorites
  • Performing Arts / Acting
  • Personal Finance
  • Personal Growth
  • Photography
  • Physics / Chemistry
  • Poetry Criticism
  • Ref / English Lang Dict & Thes
  • Ref / Foreign Lang Dict / Phrase
  • Reference - General
  • Religion - Christianity
  • Religion - Comparative
  • Religion - Eastern
  • Romance & Erotica
  • Science Fiction
  • Short Introductions
  • Technology, Culture & Media
  • Theology / Religious Studies
  • Travel Atlases & Maps
  • Travel Lit / Adventure
  • Urban Studies
  • Wines And Spirits
  • Women's Studies
  • World History
  • Writing Style And Publishing

Add to Cart

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021

New York Times  best-selling author and renowned science journalist Ed Yong compiles the best science and nature writing published in 2020. 

 “The stories I have chosen reflect where I feel the field of science and nature writing has landed, and where it could go,” Ed Yong writes in his introduction. “They are often full of tragedy, sometimes laced with wonder, but always deeply aware that science does not exist in a social vacuum. They are beautiful, whether in their clarity of ideas, the elegance of their prose, or often both.”

The essays in this year’s  Best American Science and Nature Writing  brought clarity to the complexity and bewilderment of 2020 and delivered us necessary information during a global pandemic. From an in-depth look at the moment of the virus’s outbreak, to a harrowing personal account of lingering Covid symptoms, to a thoughtful analysis on how the pandemic will impact the environment, these essays, as Yong says, “synthesize, evaluate, dig, unveil, and challenge,” imbuing a pivotal moment in history with lucidity and elegance.

THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2021  INCLUDES • SUSAN ORLEAN • EMILY RABOTEAU • ZEYNEP TUFEKCI • HELEN OUYANG • HEATHER HOGAN BROOKE JARVIS • SARAH ZHANG and others

There are no customer reviews for this item yet.

Classic Totes

best nature writing essays

Tote bags and pouches in a variety of styles, sizes, and designs , plus mugs, bookmarks, and more!

Shipping & Pickup

best nature writing essays

We ship anywhere in the U.S. and orders of $75+ ship free via media mail!

Noteworthy Signed Books: Join the Club!

best nature writing essays

Join our Signed First Edition Club (or give a gift subscription) for a signed book of great literary merit, delivered to you monthly.

Harvard Book Store

Harvard Square's Independent Bookstore

© 2024 Harvard Book Store All rights reserved

Contact Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138

Tel (617) 661-1515 Toll Free (800) 542-READ Email [email protected]

View our current hours »

Join our bookselling team »

We plan to remain closed to the public for two weeks, through Saturday, March 28 While our doors are closed, we plan to staff our phones, email, and harvard.com web order services from 10am to 6pm daily.

Store Hours Monday - Saturday: 9am - 11pm Sunday: 10am - 10pm

Holiday Hours 12/24: 9am - 7pm 12/25: closed 12/31: 9am - 9pm 1/1: 12pm - 11pm All other hours as usual.

Map Find Harvard Book Store »

Online Customer Service Shipping » Online Returns » Privacy Policy »

Harvard University harvard.edu »

Facebook

  • Clubs & Services

best nature writing essays

  • International edition
  • Australia edition
  • Europe edition

Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey.

Top 10 nature memoirs

Moving on from writing that holds the natural world at arm’s length, authors have begun using intimate life to show nature as a protagonist in itself

T he lockdowns of 2020/2021 galvanised and expanded a readership drawn to writing about the natural world. For the fortunate, the pause and hush offered space to witness the seasons unfolding, to hear voices other than our own, and to realise “our” story is deeply entangled with other lives. Undisturbed by the hum of road and shipping traffic, birdsong and the buzz of pollinators were amplified in our days’ soundtracks, and whales were recorded for the first time speaking in complex “sentences” . With the grave threat posed by the compound climate, ecological and biodiversity crises, a need and longing to repair our connection to the living world is keenly felt by many, and literature is playing a key role.

While the early nature writing canon leaned towards natural history – often at arm’s length, often written by a man out in a “wild” place – recent forms are bringing the issues of our time closer to home in memoir, making vivid the lives of others – human and not. The diversification of authors and of the places, cultures, and beings represented are lending vitality to the genre. A current fascination with the intelligences of the “‘more-than-human” world is firmly placing nature as protagonist rather than in service to a human plot.

Given the Arctic is such an active protagonist in climate change, it is perhaps surprising that the genre has seldom ventured to the far north. I was lucky enough to spend half a decade in Iceland, leaning into its genius loci. I still do, whenever I get the chance: it is a place that allows me to think differently. My debut The Raven’s Nest is an ecological memoir set in its otherworldly Westfjords. I call it ecological because, in life as on the page, it manifests everything as relational and interdependent. Entangled with the story of my marriage to an Icelander, other stories – of people, ravens, storms, the supernatural, life and death – build a weave in cycles of light and dark, into the titular nest. Amid volcanic eruptions and melting ice sheets, people and place are continuous. We are increasingly aware that the far north is not remote but central – in the regulation of climate, ocean currents, and therefore in all our futures. Treading a fine line between insider and outsider, I felt compelled to record what I witnessed and became a part of.

What happens when we listen to the voices which make a place? How might we feel our entanglements with the world to know it as home and treat it as such, even when we are unsure where we belong to? These books, many with a focus on the far north and spanning nearly a century, have inspired how I explore this interplay between place, people, living, thought and the body.

1. A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter In the winter of 1933/4 Ritter, an Austrian painter and self-proclaimed “housewife”, makes the radical decision to join her hunter-trapper husband and a Norwegian hunter in Arctic Spitsbergen, living together in a tiny hut. Often alone for long spells, her mundane chores and her will to survive the extremes uncover marvels, both in the place and her spirit. The imagistic prose is exhilarating. Written as a journal – with long periods tellingly absent – we witness her transformation as she relinquishes herself to this place.

2. The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd This dazzling gem written in the 1940s is an intimate journey into the Cairngorms Massif. Shepherd swims naked in clear mountain lochs, walks to be with the mountains as companions, naps on them, looks at them upside down between her legs, thrills in the glow of sparks from her hobnail boots while nightwalking. She probes at the possible, but there are no heroics here. The summit is not the point. It is rather to find new thoughts in the material – in the here and now – which is also metaphysical.

3. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez Written in the 1980s, this is a portal into the Arctic before it was synonymous with climate change. Lopez’s masterwork is the result of years of travel, delving into its histories, fauna, ice, water, stars, light and people – both his Indigenous companions and visiting scientists and workers. Scientifically rigorous, poetic and often reverent in its tone, Lopez builds a prismatic portrait. We are in the hands of a truly reliable and loving guide: an ecologist with a profound respect for knowledge of all kinds, so humble and curious that his words and thoughts seem almost prayerful.

4. Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths Partly in response to a debilitating depression, Griffiths makes a seven-year journey across the Earth to which she gives everything, in search of the meaning of “wild” – in the world and in herself. Using the elements as a structural device – Earth, Water, Fire, Wind (and she adds Ice) – she travels to the Peruvian Amazon, the Indonesian Ocean, the Australian bush, the mountains of West Papua, and the Canadian Arctic. Through sharp and heartful observation of these places and a high regard for the indigenous knowledges she encounters, her philosophical inquiry takes us to far corners of our minds, using a deeply embodied prose and wild language that writhes on the tongue.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

5. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Kimmerer’s world is animate and abundant. She is in love with it, and moves through it as if it loves her back. She asks what might “right relationship” look like in a damaged world? What is the language of reciprocity, the “grammar of animacy”? Drawing on her native Potawatomi culture, twined with her training as a bryologist, she shows us how science and culture, myth and reality are not opposed but live within one another.

6. Land of Love and Ruins by Oddný Eir This beautiful, pioneering autofiction mainly set in Iceland is a deceptively small and easy text which covers vast swathes of philosophical terrain in a variety of landscapes and homescapes. Written as a journal marked by feast days, equinoxes and the stages of the moon, Eir’s sensuous and breezy narrative voice explores what shape of existence might allow a woman to tend well to all those relationships which make her: to her living kin, to her ancestors, to a partner and to the Earth itself, without losing herself.

7. Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles A series of loosely connected essays, Small Bodies of Water’s luscious prose flows deftly between moments in the author’s international life, each so vividly and sensuously portrayed as to immerse us in a world, and the age at which that world was lived. We move with Powles across time and geography – from adolescence to adulthood , from Borneo to New Zealand to London – exploring the fluid (and sometimes suspended) nature of identity and home. Deeply embodied, the pleasures of swimming, food, languages, flora and fauna are keenly felt as anchors, and an almost aqueous merging of the bloodline across generations pulses through it.

8. Soundings by Doreen Cunningham A failed relationship and resulting professional and financial ruin compel former climate journalist Cunningham to make a bold move. Taking out a bank loan, she travels with her young son along the migration route of the grey whales, from Mexico to the Canadian Arctic, back to a family of Iñupiaq whale hunters who took her in as one of their own years earlier on a research trip. Cunningham’s honouring of the hunters’ culture is nuanced by this entanglement, and the endless wait of the whale hunt is made fascinating by her quiet observations. The protagonists make a deeply refreshing triad: a single mother travelling with her child, learning from the whales how to parent.

9. On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason A poetic and heartful treatise which argues that we lack the metaphors to carry the enormity of the ecological crisis. We do not – cannot – truly understand words such as “climate change” and “ocean acidification”, so cannot respond appropriately. Approaching them slant through myth and family history (his grandparents honeymooned as participants in one of the first Icelandic glaciological surveys) Magnason’s simple proposition elicits a shift in perspective to connect to the future “in an intimate and urgent way”. By invoking our time as “the handshake of generations” – the period inhabited by those who have loved us, ourselves, and those who we will love in the future – he brings the impacts of this unknown future close to our hearts.

10. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post Human Landscape by Cal Flyn In rigorously researched and poetic prose Flyn manages a rare feat: an angle on nature writing that is entirely new. Travelling to places that humans once inhabited, then destroyed and (mostly) left, she returns to see what has thrived in their wake. From the abandoned buildings of Detroit to Chernobyl to the “bings”(spoil heaps) of Scotland’s West Lothian, she finds a strange kind of abundance. Flyn proposes that rather than purely lamenting a lost vitality in the natural world, we might also reframe and cultivate our aesthetic sensibilities to see, and appreciate, the life in ruins.

The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas is published by Atlantic Books. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

  • Science and nature books

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Orion Magazine

Orion magazine

America's Finest Environmental Magazine

best nature writing essays

The Greatest Nature Essay Ever

. . . WOULD BEGIN WITH an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down , tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, that’s why god gave you hands , and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had indeed seen or smelled or heard exactly that, but never quite articulated it that way, or seen or heard it articulated that way, and you think, man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.

The next two paragraphs would smoothly and gently move you into a story, seemingly a small story, a light tale, easily accessed, something personal but not self-indulgent or self-absorbed on the writer’s part, just sort of a cheerful nutty everyday story maybe starring an elk or a mink or a child, but then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers, and much later, maybe when you are in bed with someone you love and you are trying to evade his or her icy feet, you think, my god, stories do have roaring power, stories are the most crucial and necessary food, how come we never hardly say that out loud?

The next three paragraphs then walk inexorably toward a line of explosive Conclusions on the horizon like inky alps. Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences. But there’s no opinion or commentary, just one line fitting into another, each one making plain inarguable sense, a goat or even a senator could easily understand the sentences and their implications, and there’s no shouting, no persuasion, no eloquent pirouetting, no pronouncements and accusations, no sermons or homilies, just calm clean clear statements one after another, fitting together like people holding hands.

Then an odd paragraph, this is a most unusual and peculiar essay, for right here where you would normally expect those alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions, there’s only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story he or she was telling you in the second and third paragraphs. The story slips back into view gently, a little shy, holding its hat, nothing melodramatic, in fact it offers a few gnomic questions without answers, and then it gently slides away off the page and off the stage, it almost evanesces or dissolves, and it’s only later after you have read the essay three times with mounting amazement that you see quite how the writer managed the stagecraft there, but that’s the stuff of another essay for another time.

And finally the last paragraph. It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it’s a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there’s a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms, no clarion brassy trumpet blast, no website to which you are directed, no hint that you, yes you, should be ashamed of how much water you use or the car you drive or the fact that you just turned the thermostat up to seventy, or that you actually have not voted in the past two elections despite what you told the kids and the goat. Nor is there a rimshot ending, a bang, a last twist of the dagger. Oddly, sweetly, the essay just ends with a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.

Subscribe to Orion Ad

Brian, Thank you for sharing. I moved with your words through each paragraph. And surprisingly at the end, I really felt as though I had been reading a truly great nature essay, almost simultaneously with your essay. I very much enjoyed the imagery.

Thank you for this, brilliantly done. I feel this way when I read Annie Dillard’s essays.

Who made the b/w photographic image at the head of your column? When you wrote “image” I thought you were referring to this epigraphic view, which is lovely but not forceful enough to do what your written image purported to accomplish.

In other words, the greatest nature essay ever moves like a poem? Imagery and metaphor, showing and not telling, all in as tight and concise a space as possible given the form and genre?

Ah yes, changed. What all us nature mystics aspire to do and how skillfully you worked the other side of the mirror, seeing us seeing you writing to us turning on a dime, change changing indeed . . . .

The Greatest Comment Ever on ‘The Greatest Nature Essay Ever’ would begin with a compliment on the author’s deft use of words, words like flowing water, organic sentences sprouting one from the other like vines climbing up and over a wall and into the sunlight. The compliment would be short, just a sentence or two, complimentary of course, ending with a quiet phrase such as, ‘nicely done Brian Doyle.’

Reminds me of Abbott’s Waste-land Wonderings. Though it must belong to conservatives, I see something fresh and new. Thanks.

Brian, congratulations on a finely constructed piece. I liked it to much I’m going to feature it in my December newsletter and will mention it on my blog (www.pagelambert.blogspot.com) With credits to Orion, of course, whose link is already on my blog. I lead outdoor writing adventures and look forward to sharing your piece with clients.

I nominate David Quammen’s “The Same River Twice”

Seth Zuckerman’s The Same River Twice should be in the running too.

I don’t know why I was led down the path that led to Portland Magazine Brian Doyle but I followed it today on the day that I needed to find it. Thank you.

Very, very beautiful and inspirational.

As what I expect is becoming usual, for me, when I read an essay of You: Yeah! When I read your Essays it feels like my grandmother has just offered me a magnificent bowl of fruit. There’s not a duplicate in the basket. I just heard you speak at In Praise of the Essay, and I was the one, with my daughter at my side, who was overcome with both laughter and tears, a shaken, not stirred mixture of the two. When you’d waltz our way with your emphatic delivery of your heart on that delicate platter, I got a real sense of you. And then, as soon as you were through, and not a moment later, I opened up the issue of your Portland review, and there, on the inside cover you delivered again that same heart on the same delicate platter, when you gave me “All Legs and Curiosity.” And I thought, this man has the power to make Women Burst into tears! And I did, right there at that table. And as I tried to compose myself, my daughter at my side, age 17 having visited Fordham in the Bronx not some 15 hours before, I hand the issue over to the woman at my side. She’s told me her daughter will soon be to school, but she has serious peanut allergies, and the delicacy of finding the right roommate for that situation has her beside herself, knowing there are things she can’t control.

I think to myself, I need to talk to this guy. What and how he says it and What he writes are delivered the Very same. But, I shy a way.

I go home and I find a Brevity Gem: the one you wrote about your children, and you being a stone. I’m filled up again, and I post it on My facebook, and one of my more sensitive man friends, who’s really a real friend, leaves a sensitive comment, and I realize then, This Man has the Power to Make Men cry too! And I decide there and then, He needs to be my mentor too. Will You?

What on earth is this all about? Was ist das?

A massive loss in natural disaster is afoot if you don’t stop writing essays so nobody will remember the images anyhow. So something helpful. Dreamers dream, ideas create ideologies.

brian ilove u very much for a beautiful poem . i delivered the ur nature essay & i got 1’st prize thank u a lot brian

Can someone tell me what a nature essay is about? Particularly this one

I’m trying to answer some questions for my school assignment.

(Eng.Comp 101)

Thank you, Cliff G

wonderful essay

What’s with the goat?

I just want to make sure this is the same Brian Doyle who wrote Joyas Volardores. Both beautifully written!

Yes, Vince, the same Brian Doyle. Here’s just a few of the other essays of his that Orion has published:

http://orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/65/

Many more have only appeared in the print edition. He’s a real favorite of ours, and our readers!

Erik, Orion

I agree with @melvin, The Same River twice is my favorite essay of all time.

Very helpful and informative article. If you do not mind then I will share it. Thank you !

When we choose to simply sit in nature together, we are writing it’s great essay.

Brian, I just read this. I haven’t yet read anything that brought me to the near tears situation but yours made me feel things I hadn’t felt in a while. At one point, minor goosebumps too.

Submit Your Comments Cancel reply

Please Note: Before submitting, copy your comment to your clipboard, be sure every required field is filled out, and only then submit.

We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article.

We're Living Through A Golden Age Of Nature Writing

Digital fatigue and environmental disaster have, paradoxically, lead to a resurgence of books on the power and meaning of the great outdoors. Here are some of the best

Headshot of Olivia Ovenden

Nature writing - in which the beauty of the natural world is used as way of exploring inner turmoil - has enjoyed something of a commercial and critical renaissance in recent years. It's not hard to see why. Our obsession with technology has started to feel more like a trap, making the the great outdoors seem like an appealing balm. Meanwhile the encroaching disaster of climate change is forcing us to reevaluate our relationship with nature, and maybe even stop taking it for granted.

These memoirs or stories of intellectual reckoning, set against sweeping skies, meandering rivers and foreboding forests, are the best recent examples from a genre having a moment in the sun. Whether you're looking for guidance at a moment of crisis, or to get lost in evocative explorations of meadows and riverbanks, crack a spine and be transported.

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

Text, Font, Book cover,

At a moment of personal crisis in her own life, British writer Olivia Laing walks the length of the river Ouse, the stretch of water where more than sixty years ago Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Over the course of a week walking from source to the sea she traces the memories of the writer's life that lurk beneath the surface of the water, and in turn grapples with her own ghosts.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Bird, Bird of prey, Peregrine falcon, Falcon, Beak, Hawk, Poster, Falconiformes,

You might recognise the striking cover from seeing it dotted around tube carriages and airport terminals a few years ago. This award-winning book tells of how, in a moment of grief after her father's death, Macdonald spent £800 on a goshawk and tried to train it. Released in the same year as Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with The Feathers, it begun a trend of books which look to animals and nature for answers on life and death.

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

Poster, Font, Text, Book cover, Graphic design, Illustration, Advertising, Novel, Graphics,

The Quietus co-founder Luke Turner's debut novel opens in the wreckage of a relationship as he comes to terms with being bisexual. Against the backdrop of the Epping Forest, which Turner has grown up in the shadow of, Out Of The Woods fuses the history of the forest with the winding paths and dead-ends of Turner's own life. In doing so it achieves that tricky balance of feeling both deeply personal and totally universal.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Water, Text, Sky, Ocean, Font, Book cover, Poster, Electric blue, World,

One of the most popular examples of the new nature trend, Liptrot's book finds her returning to her hometown of Orkney as alcoholism threatens to engulf her life. By swimming and walking the sparsely populated island, its patterns of rebirth are a symbol of perseverance and growth. In coming home she finds a way back to herself.

Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey through Britain by Roger Deakin

Text, Book cover, Font, Graphic design,

Water is both a mysterious and unknowable entity and a soothing tonic in Deakin's book about swimming through the British Isles. From the water he gains what he calls a "'frog's eye view" of the country, after incidents like being stopped and held by water bailiffs in Winchester and mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands. This fresh perspective from water also offers a reflection of his own life.

Feral by George Monbiot

Text, Poster, Book cover,

Distressed at capitalism and meaninglessness of life in modern cities, environmentalist George Monbiot retreats to rural Wales. The result of is a compelling case for the peace to be found from a simpler life and the solace that can be found in nature. A book that will have you longing to escape the rat race in favour of gulping some fresh air.

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey

Natural landscape, Grassland, Text, Sky, Natural environment, Book cover, Prairie, Ecoregion, Plain, Poster,

One the country's foremost nature writers, this book marked a departure for Richard Mabey who moved to a new part of the country following a bout of depression. There he renegotiates his longstanding relationship with the outdoors. The result is a book that sings with the restorative joys of nature.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Text, Sky, Font, Book cover, Turquoise, Poster, Ocean, Sea, Cloud, Novel,

Solnit is mesmerising when writing on anything, be it Trump's election or mansplaning. This collection of essays is no different and finds a common theme in moments of uncertainty and change. In one standout, she ponders the fate of tortoises, threading together a memory of riding one in a zoo with their modern fate in our crumbling environment. Throughout, history, nature and Solnit's memories collide to create something meditative and stirring.

preview for Esquire UK - Featured Videos

@media(max-width: 73.75rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.4375rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1ktbcds:before{margin-right:0.5625rem;color:#FF3A30;content:'_';display:inline-block;}} Books

andrew o'hagan caledonian road

Inside the Hugo Awards Meltdown

bullet swallower

The Western Renaissance Begins With This Novel

filterworld

How to Take Back Your Life From Algorithms

multiverse

The End of the Multiverse

london, england november 13 ottessa moshfegh attends the special preview screening of eileen at picturehouse central on november 13, 2023 in london, england photo by gareth cattermolegetty images

Ottessa Moshfegh Hits the Big Screen

book

The End of the World, According to AI

a white and black clock

Inside the Definitive Guide to Braun Design

wrong way

The False Promise of Driverless Cars

the book of ayn

Finding Bliss In Cancellation

a pair of yellow and white slippers on a grey surface

Why I Love Paperbacks

fran lebowitz

Inside Fran Lebowitz's Digitally Unbothered Life

Five Books

  • NONFICTION BOOKS
  • BEST NONFICTION 2023
  • Architecture
  • Art History
  • Design & Illustration
  • Fashion & Style
  • Modern and Contemporary Art
  • Photography
  • How to Invest
  • Behavioural Economics
  • Development Economics
  • Economic History
  • Financial Crisis
  • Globalization Books
  • World Economies
  • Climate Change Books
  • Environmental Ethics
  • The Best Cookbooks
  • Food & History of Food
  • Wine & Drinks
  • Death & Dying
  • Family & Relationships
  • Sex & Sexuality
  • American History
  • Ancient History (up to 500)
  • Modern History (1800-1945)
  • History of Science
  • Historical Figures
  • Military History
  • English Grammar & Usage
  • Books for Learning Languages
  • Linguistics
  • Best Biographies
  • Artists' Biographies
  • Classical Music & Opera
  • Film & Cinema
  • The Prehistoric World
  • Plants, Trees & Flowers
  • Ancient Philosophy
  • Ethics & Moral Philosophy
  • Great Philosophers
  • Social & Political Philosophy
  • Foreign Policy & International Relations
  • Human Rights
  • Mental Health
  • Neuroscience
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Psychology Research
  • Religious History Books
  • Maths & Statistics
  • Popular Science
  • Physics Books
  • Football (Soccer)
  • Sport & Sporting Culture
  • Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
  • Digital Age
  • History of Technology
  • FICTION BOOKS
  • BEST FICTION 2023
  • NEW Fiction
  • World Literature
  • Literary Criticism
  • Literary Figures
  • Classical Studies
  • Classic English Literature
  • American Literature
  • Comics & Graphic Novels
  • Fairy Tales & Mythology
  • Historical Fiction
  • Crime Novels
  • Science Fiction
  • Short Stories
  • South Africa
  • United States
  • Arctic & Antarctica
  • Afghanistan
  • Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
  • Netherlands
  • Kids Recommend Books for Kids
  • High School Teachers Recommendations
  • Ages Baby-2
  • Books for Teens and Young Adults
  • Best Kids Books of 2023
  • Best Books for Teens of 2023
  • Best Audiobooks for Kids
  • Prizewinning Kids' Books
  • Popular Series Books for Kids
  • Environment
  • Best Kids' Books of 2023
  • Political Novels
  • New Science Books
  • New Climate Books
  • New Psychology Books
  • New Philosophy Books
  • New Math Books
  • New Economics Books
  • New History Books
  • New Physics Books
  • New Memoirs
  • New Biography
  • New Literary Fiction
  • New World Literature
  • New Historical Fiction
  • THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
  • Actors Read Great Books
  • Books Narrated by Their Authors
  • Best Audiobook Thrillers
  • Best History Audiobooks
  • Nobel Literature Prize
  • Booker Prize (fiction)
  • Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
  • Financial Times (nonfiction)
  • Wolfson Prize (history)
  • Royal Society (science)
  • Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
  • Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
  • Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
  • The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
  • Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Make Your Own List

Nature » Nature Writing

Amy liptrot chooses the best of nature writing.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot , whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - Findings by Kathleen Jamie

Findings by Kathleen Jamie

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - The Orkney Book of Birds by Tim Dean and Tracy Hall

The Orkney Book of Birds by Tim Dean and Tracy Hall

best nature writing essays

1 Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

2 the drowned world by j. g. ballard, 3 findings by kathleen jamie, 4 feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life by george monbiot, 5 the orkney book of birds by tim dean and tracy hall.

Your bestselling first book, The Outrun, follows your story of recovery from alcoholism in Orkney, it’s a blend of memoir and nature writing: a very visceral sort of nature writing. The phrase ‘the nature cure’ springs to mind—is that something you believe in?

Rather than it being a philosophy I set out with, it was more something that I came to see the truth of through my own experiences. If the book is quite visceral, it’s because it was written at the same time as I was going through it, often from daily diaries that I keep. It’s set mainly during the time I lived on the small island of Papay and that’s also when I was writing the book.

This time in the wee house on the island was where I had the space to figure out what was going on with myself, how I’d ended up with an alcohol problem and in rehab and all that but also what helped me out of that was getting to know the island, the people and the culture and the coastline and the birds and the changes of the sea. I think often what I found most rewarding was not just, you know, going out for a walk, but time when I was actually in the landscape either immersing myself physically, by swimming in the sea, through the winter, or doing something like building the drystone walls. Going back to the same place as it changes through the seasons and physically linking myself to the land in some sort of way could be more rewarding and I could gain a deeper understanding of the place, and myself.

“I was doing more and better writing than I had done when I was pissed…that was helping me to keep sober”

While all that stuff has helped me—learning about the birds, connecting myself to something bigger than just me—while I am interested in that, what I’m specifically interested in is writing about the birds, and the place, and the fact that I had struck upon a great new source of material and was doing more and better writing than I had done when I was pissed…that was helping me to keep sober. So I was writing about the place and getting sober but that writing itself was keeping me sober and helping me with my recovery as well.

When you read other people writing about nature, or wild swimming, or other focuses of your own work, what do you look for, what do you admire?

I suppose I look for people that have more knowledge than me, who’ve done their research or…it’s a combination of both first-hand experience, often expressed in an unusual or poetic way, but I think that has to be combined with background research.

I also like it when somebody describes something that I have seen myself, but they’re able to do it in a better way than what I could have come up with—that recognition, I’ve seen that too! That’s true! And I’m glad that someone else has noticed it, or that they’ve corroborated my experience. That can be satisfying.

That reminds me of why I like reading film reviews, I often prefer to read them after I’ve seen the film, to get that sense of ‘yes! That’s it, that’s why that worked.’ Once I remember seeing you tweet that you’d learned as much from music criticism as you had from other nature books, do you still feel that?

Yes. I was actually a little nervous about doing this interview because there are lots of experts in the particular field of ecological writing, which I’m certainly not. Growing up I wasn’t a keen young ornithologist, or naturalist, although I was a keen reader but the books that I read as a kid were, you know, about boarding schools and babysitters and stuff far away from Orkney. Then, when I was a teenager and a student, I liked cities and rock’n’roll and angst, and I started writing a little for the music and style press.

“I was a keen reader but the books that I read as a kid were about boarding schools and babysitters”

And I think that was what formed me as a writer. I realised recently that when it’s come to me writing about the natural world, I think I’ve taken some of the things that I learnt through music journalism and magazine and fanzine writing, which often has a certain poise and wit or  a sense of the absurd detail, and enjoys slightly odd, fringe type characters—then applying that to looking at island life, or bird life.

Speaking of fringe characters, maybe that brings us to your first book choice: Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. Maxwell himself was a rather complicated character, but his book was just so captivating and gorgeous.

It’s a cult book that I had been aware of but never read, until my mum recommended it to me recently. I’ve actually read a kind of spin off book about it, Island of Dreams, by Dan Boothby, a chap who lived more recently on the island under the Skye bridge which Maxwell had owned. I did an event with him last year. So I was aware of the captivation Maxwell had held over a generation of young naturalists, often kind of loner type men, I think.

Particularly the first half of the book is just wonderful. He’s this aristocrat that just manages to acquire the lease on this lighthouse keeper’s house, and the sense of place that he evokes…he’s a brilliant writer. I got that recognition I mentioned before, of things that I myself have experienced in Orkney. He talks about the eider ducks and their mating calls: I’ve heard that! Or just the effects of the wind and the sea on the west coast of Scotland. That really struck something deep in me.

You can just imagine it—he’s very good with physical detail and how they descend the hill to the house, which is surrounded on three sides by sea, the ‘ring of bright water’.

It has a wonderful sense of freedom, perhaps because he’s doing something that people dream of. Living alongside an otter—laying aside whether or not someone should try to have an otter as a pet—it’s the dream isn’t it?

Yes, he’s retreated to this isolated place, where—although he gets a lot of help from people—he’s sort of alone, in the natural world, which is very appealing. As I think I discovered myself when I wrote about being on Papay, readers seem to relate to that, and it has a relationship to another book I thought about choosing, Walden, the archetype of this lone person in a small place in the countryside.

“The book is very of its time, it wouldn’t get published or written today”

But like Henry David Thoreau, Maxwell is…Well, the book can be read as a psychological portrait of a somewhat damaged person, actually. He’s from this privileged background and has, perhaps, problems with other human beings. That makes this lifestyle—and as it happens in the second half of the book, the relationship he has with his pet otters—attractive to him. It’s a weird portrait really. He’s brilliant, and funny, on the behaviour of the otters and how they differ from other kinds of pets. They’re not meant to be pets really. The book is very of its time, it wouldn’t get published or written today, I don’t think—someone taking wild animals from the Middle East and attempting to tame them with all the chaos that it causes and taking on local lads to help him out. But there’s something very idealistic about this world that he creates.

There’s a wonderful section when he takes the otter on the sleeper train and puts him in the sink, where he splashes around merrily.

Yes and the guard comes in in the morning and the otter’s actually in bed next to him, lying on its back with its hands over the cover and the guard says, ‘Would that be tea for one or two, sir?’

He’s a special and unusual guy who’d probably have been infuriating to deal with. He gets live eels sent up daily from London for the otters at great expense, huge amounts of money are spent on his outlandish plans—but you’re rooting for him, really, to be able to carry this off.

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Then there’s this fantastic coincidence—after his first otter dies, is killed by a local person, which is heartrending, he’s desperately searching for a new otter and one just happens to turn up. Somebody hoping to find someone to take on their otter happens to walk by when he’s having lunch in a local hotel. You’re delighted, as delighted as he is when you read it.

The rural idyll Maxwell creates is so different to the world of your second book, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World. Here, instead of a paean to the pristine environment, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic catastrophe. What made you pick this?

Well, I think it’s a good example of using the natural world in fiction, and dystopian fiction, and I like the way that it uses the natural world, animals, and they are threatening and dangerous and strange rather than a source of solace or escape. They are the opposite. It was ahead of its time, it could almost be seen as a novel about climate change: ‘de-evolution’ is the word used.

Ballard is a master of the surreal but revealing detail, often using plants and animals. I remember one section in High Rise, a bit that stuck with me, was a seagull picking a diamante from a pair of sunglasses abandoned at the top of a building. And in The Drowned World, he has what was London, now flooded, and all these hotels now silted up where only the top floors are still accessible. And when it’s drained there are all these sea creatures—giant anemones and starfish and kelp—in Leicester Square, and dinghies stranded on traffic islands. This idea of the familiar being made strange and awful is part of what creates his distinctive, and highly influential, atmosphere.

The main character is almost perversely attracted to this new, ruined, world.

Kerans, the main character, the biologist—when the other people are retreating further towards the poles where it’s cooler, he’s going deeper in towards the equator…into the heart of darkness…A lot of Ballard’s books are about dark psychological stuff. But I can relate to being attracted to some of the more brutal elements of nature. I chose to go and live on a small Orkney island during winters rather than summers, when most people would choose the opposite. The big winds and the wild seas that sometimes cause damage are appealing to me, in their power and inhospitability.

Is there something in you that is drawing you back there? Or was it a time of your life when you needed it, when it suited you?

I think there are two parts of me. The island lass and the city dweller. I think I tend towards one extreme or the other, either inner city or outer isle for me—although, currently, I’m living in small-town Yorkshire which is a completely different environment. But I think these kinds of places, that are quite tough, quite sensory, appeal to me.

Absolutely. In Orkney, you were working for the RSPB looking for corncrakes. Kathleen Jamie, in your third book, Findings, has an essay about corncrakes. Was that something you came across before, or after?

Good question! I was writing a series of columns for Caught by the River, a nature writing website, and I think I’d already done the first four and my friend Morag said to me, ‘Have you read any Kathleen Jamie?’ and directed me towards Findings, which I just gulped up. It was interesting to discover that she was operating in some of the same territory that I was trying to—in an extremely skillful and much more developed way. And a little bit of me was like: ‘Damn you Jamie! Back off!’

“I spent two summers being out every night, looking and listening for corncrakes”

But I’ve gone back and looked at this book recently, and realised how influential she has been on me—just by showing what can be done with the nature essay. I think she’s wonderful. She’s a poet, which you can just see in her work, in her tight descriptions. She describes the weather in Orkney as there being ‘frequent scraps of rainbow,’ which is just right. So yes, it wasn’t like I read Jamie’s stuff and thought I’d go and do something similar, but during the writing of The Outrun, I came across her near the beginning.

The first time I came across your writing was an essay for Aeon , “The Corncrake Wife”. Perhaps it’s the quest element, the idea of these corncrakes being so tricky to find, that makes them so compelling to read about.

Yes—I spent two summers being out every night, looking and listening for corncrakes, and I only ever saw one of them. They almost became a sort of phantom, or symbol, or a way of allowing me to see the island as much as find the bird. There’s a lot of mythology and theory associated with them. It was something that I randomly applied for, got the job, and working for the RSPB opened a lot of doors for me. That was the beginning of my deeper interest in the natural world and realising, through writing and also through reading people like Jamie, that it was something that I could write about.

I’ve given this book to a number of people and recommended it to more. She’s a poet, but she’s also a realist—she talks about details of modern-day Scottish life, the people that she meets, and a little bit about her own daily life: she has to be back to pick the kids up from school, things like that. And she’s just really smart, in terms of the research that she does and sometimes, not in a too heavy handed way, but the way she relates it to wider ecological issues.

“They almost became a sort of phantom, or symbol, or a way of allowing me to see the island as much as find the bird”

The title essay, “Findings”, is about beach-combing and the things that she finds. I like how she describes, on the same poetic level, the gannet skull that she finds but also the unusual plastic objects she finds washed up, which is obviously about the pollution of the seas. Her tone is really well judged and her beautiful, clear-eyed descriptions show the reality of what’s going on on the coastlines.

I think she’s fantastic and a worthy winner of the Saltire Book Prize last year.

And a very different style to George Monbiot, next, with Feral. Is it accurate to describe him as a polemicist? He comes from a very different direction.

This is a bold and radical book, which introduced me to several new ideas and changed the way I look at the countryside in quite a challenging way. As you say, it’s different to Jamie in that he’s unafraid of stating his opinions. The book broadly is about this idea of ‘re-wilding,’ which was a new idea to me. A really exciting one, I found it. All the stuff about the return of large predators and the effects that the loss of the top predators has had on the landscape was really eye-opening, and also—particularly as a sheep-farmer’s daughter—it was quite difficult to read some of his opinions. Because he hates sheep. Or rather, he hates the effect that sheep have had on the uplands of this country.

He describes sheep farming as ‘having done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution.’

Yes! Which is a really radical idea. But I think he might be right.

How does that feel, coming from a sheep-farming family?

Well, I guess there might be some differences  between the Scottish islands and the uplands of Wales, in that they weren’t really wooded places in the first place. But I think I’m open to looking at the way that agriculture is very protected, sometimes, and it’s difficult to criticise. Perhaps we should be looking at new ways of using the land, and diversifying what landowners and farmers do.

My dad is an organic farmer, which is slightly less intensive and slightly more varied, and has a lower impact on the land, but after reading Monbiot, I do look out, even in Orkney, and see the ‘green deserts’ he describes, the monocultures of grassland for beef.

“After reading Monbiot, I do look out even in Orkney and see the ‘green deserts’ he describes”

However, I put Monbiot in a category with two American writers I love, Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit, in that he’s an outspoken writer on conservation and the environment, but he does offer some mitigations and some ways forward: in his ideas about re-wilding, and talking about localisation and how landowners can diversify or be more creative about how the land is used and the species that can possibly be introduced. So while it is very challenging and difficult, there are also some exciting ideas and suggested ways forward that could provide some blueprint.

He uses very emotive language, phrases like ‘sheep-wrecked’—do you think that is necessary to shock people, almost, to make people look afresh at landscapes, the way you described?

I think that’s his style, and I commend it and quite admire it, really. It might not make his ideas palatable to a broader audience, including some farmers who might just dismiss it, but I think there’s absolutely a place for what he’s saying. Some people might think he’s too strong, or he’s not allowing a place for looking at how small farmers, who are small business owners, might just be doing what they need to do to survive, and how it’s been in their families for generations. But no, I don’t think he’s too dramatic, the natural world is in crisis.

Let’s move on to your last book, the illustrated Orkney Book of Birds. You say you’ve learnt a great deal from this book. Why would you recommend it?

I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, just to people who are in or visiting Orkney. It’s a little masterpiece of local knowledge and research, presented extremely readably. It’s a guidebook, and over the last few years, as a novice birdwatcher in Orkney, it’s the nature book I return to the most. Unlike the Collins bird guide, it only includes the species found in Orkney, which is different to what you find in other places, and includes lovely details such as the Orcadian dialect names for all the different birds: puffins are ‘tammie norries’, and lapwings are ‘teeicks’.

“In Orkney, puffins are ‘tammie norries’, and lapwings are ‘teeicks”

It also includes their specific local locations, the different islands or habitats they are found on, their numbers and how they have increased or declined over the years, looking at data from local surveys. Then it often has specific, almost poetic, facts, like how there was a starling roost on the Kirkwall lifeboat, or that most farms in Orkney tend to have a pair of pied wagtails. It really helped me to appreciate my local patch. The birds I’m now most knowledgable on are the seabirds and the farmland birds that you get in Orkney.

And as well as the text, which is fabulously researched and written by Tim Dean, there are also the illustrations by Tracy Hall, which are beautiful. What I particularly like is that they are shown in their specific Orkney locations where they are found, you can see identifiable buildings and coastlines. I think the corncrakes are on the island of Egilsay, which has been a place that has encouraged them. I love this book.

Having moved to Yorkshire, do you feel you’ve had to learn a whole new population of birds and wildlife?

Well, I’m just starting off! I was out for a walk yesterday and I saw some grey wagtails, a bird we don’t get in Orkney. There are so many species down here that you don’t get in Orkney. I hear  tawny owls, hooting at night, which feels very exotic to me, as the only owls we have in Orkney are the short-eared owls, which are silent. So I’ve been learning a new landscape. But I can’t help comparing it—I keep saying ‘oh, we don’t get that at home!’ I do feel like Orkney is my heartland, my local patch, and I can see myself returning there at some point. I’m just having an interlude here in Yorkshire. The islands are really…particularly the curlews and oystercatchers and the gannets and the tysties [black guillemots] are the birds that speak most to my heart, that I grew up with and got to know deeply over the years that I lived there.

It’s something that is dyed in you, almost. What you said there reminded me of Nan Shepard, and the way she was always going in and out of the same hills over years and decades, how rich those layers of experience can become. It’s all imbued with this history of yourself.

Yes. Although I said that I wasn’t a birdwatcher when I was a kid, I grew up on a farm so I was aware of the birds, and knew their names and their calls were already in me. I think it was there all along, I just avoided admitting it for a long time. So it’s been very rewarding to study it all and write about it more closely.

April 13, 2017

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .

Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot's first book, The Outrun was a Sunday Times bestselling title and winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing. It was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, for the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and was recently announced as in the running for narrative non-fiction book of the year at the British Book Awards.

best nature writing essays

James Bradley on The Best Climate Change Novels

best nature writing essays

Alan Lee on Books Drawn From Myth and Fairy Tale

best nature writing essays

David George Haskell on Trees Books

best nature writing essays

Jules Evans on Ecstatic Experiences Books

best nature writing essays

M G Leonard on Nature Books for Kids

best nature writing essays

Rae Earl on Teenage Mental Health Books

best nature writing essays

Dr Matthew Green on London’s Addictions Books

best nature writing essays

Robert Macfarlane on Wild Places Books

best nature writing essays

Daniel Headrick on Technology and Nature Books

best nature writing essays

TC Boyle on Man and Nature Books

best nature writing essays

Tim Birkhead on Sperm Books

best nature writing essays

Phil Richardson on Bats Books

best nature writing essays

Richard Fortey on Palaeontology Books

best nature writing essays

Shazia Omar on The Best Novels on Drug Addiction

best nature writing essays

Karen Paolillo on Conservation and Hippos Books

best nature writing essays

Rosamund McDougall on Global Warming Books

best nature writing essays

Denise Russell on The Sea

best nature writing essays

Jonathan Self on Dog Food Books

best nature writing essays

Gaia Vince on The Anthropocene

best nature writing essays

Amy Liptrot on Nature Writing

best nature writing essays

Caspar Henderson on The Best Books for Growing up in the Anthropocene

best nature writing essays

Kenneth Cox on Plants and Plant Hunting Books

best nature writing essays

Bob Johnstone on Solar Power Books

best nature writing essays

Juliet Schor on Consumption and the Environment Books

best nature writing essays

Lawrence Bee on Spiders Books

best nature writing essays

Jonathan Silvertown on Plants Books

best nature writing essays

Isabella Tree on Wilding Books

best nature writing essays

Isabel Hilton on China’s Environmental Crisis Books

best nature writing essays

Beth Shapiro on Extinction and De-Extinction Books

best nature writing essays

Laura Dassow Walls on The Best Henry David Thoreau Books

best nature writing essays

David Pyle on Volcanoes Books

best nature writing essays

Jerry McNerney on Clean Energy Books

best nature writing essays

George Monbiot on An Essential Reading List

best nature writing essays

Tullis Onstott on Life Below the Surface of the Earth Books

best nature writing essays

Mark Boyle on Wilderness Books

best nature writing essays

Helen Scales on Ocean Life Books

best nature writing essays

Juliet Davenport on Renewable Energy Books

best nature writing essays

Philip Marsden on The Sea

best nature writing essays

Paul Kingsnorth on Uncivilisation Books

best nature writing essays

Andrew Scott on Evolution of the Earth Books

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

best nature writing essays

  • Literature & Fiction
  • History & Criticism

Amazon prime logo

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

  • Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
  • Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
  • Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
  • A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
  • Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
  • Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Audible Logo

Buy new: $18.17 $18.17 FREE delivery: Thursday, Feb 22 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

  • Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges
  • Learn more about free returns.
  • Go to your orders and start the return
  • Select the return method

Buy used: $11.99

Other sellers on amazon.

Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Image Unavailable

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

  • To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

Carl Zimmer

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023 Paperback – October 17, 2023

iphone with kindle app

Purchase options and add-ons

  • Book Description
  • Editorial Reviews

Award-winning writer, columnist, and journalists Carl Zimmer selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2022.

 “What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s  Best American Science and Nature Writing  probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us. From a hopeful portrait of a future for people with Alzheimer’s disease, to a fascinating exploration of the rise of nearsightedness in children, to the heroic story of a herd of cows that evaded a hurricane, these selections reveal how science and nature shape our everyday lives. With tremendous intelligence, clarity, and insight, this anthology offers an expansive look at where we are and where we are headed.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023  includes JESSICA CAMILLE AGUIRRE • VANESSA GREGORY • SABRINA IMBLER FERRIS JABR • MARION RENAULT • ELIZABETH SVOBODA NATALIE WOLCHOVER • SARAH ZHANG and others  

“Captivating. . . .  The contributors showcase science journalism’s capacity to educate while entertaining, and the timely bent of the selections gives the collection a sense of urgency. . . . Readers will be enthralled.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

CARL ZIMMER, guest editor, writes the Origins column for the New York Times . He is the author of fourteen books, including Life’s Edge and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh , both of which were finalists for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Zimmer has written for magazines including T he Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American . He has won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award three times, and is a two-time winner of the National Academies Communication Award. Zimmer is professor adjunct at Yale University

JAIME GREEN, series editor, is a science writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Astrobites , and elsewhere. She is a lecturer at Smith College and the author of The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.

  • Print length 272 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Mariner Books
  • Publication date October 17, 2023
  • Dimensions 5.5 x 0.61 x 8.25 inches
  • ISBN-10 0063293218
  • ISBN-13 978-0063293212
  • See all details

The Amazon Book Review

Frequently bought together

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

More items to explore

The Best American Short Stories 2023

From the Publisher

b1

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (October 17, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063293218
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063293212
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.61 x 8.25 inches
  • #40 in Science Essays & Commentary (Books)
  • #51 in Nature Writing & Essays
  • #160 in Essays (Books)

Important information

To report an issue with this product or seller, click here .

About the authors

best nature writing essays

Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer is the author of fourteen books about science. His latest book is Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.

Zimmer’s column Matter appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. His previous book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award. The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018.

Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and is professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom both a species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named.

best nature writing essays

Jaime Green

Jaime Green is a science writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, and she is series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia, and her writing has appeared in Slate, Popular Science, The New York Times Book Review, American Theatre, Catapult, Astrobites, and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and son. Her book, The Possibility of Life, is about how we imagine extraterrestrial life, in science and science fiction.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

Customer Image

  • Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

best nature writing essays

Top reviews from other countries

  • Amazon Newsletter
  • About Amazon
  • Accessibility
  • Sustainability
  • Press Center
  • Investor Relations
  • Amazon Devices
  • Amazon Science
  • Start Selling with Amazon
  • Sell apps on Amazon
  • Supply to Amazon
  • Protect & Build Your Brand
  • Become an Affiliate
  • Become a Delivery Driver
  • Start a Package Delivery Business
  • Advertise Your Products
  • Self-Publish with Us
  • Host an Amazon Hub
  • › See More Ways to Make Money
  • Amazon Visa
  • Amazon Store Card
  • Amazon Secured Card
  • Amazon Business Card
  • Shop with Points
  • Credit Card Marketplace
  • Reload Your Balance
  • Amazon Currency Converter
  • Your Account
  • Your Orders
  • Shipping Rates & Policies
  • Amazon Prime
  • Returns & Replacements
  • Manage Your Content and Devices
  • Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
  • Conditions of Use
  • Privacy Notice
  • Your Ads Privacy Choices

“Nature Is Literally Our Larger Context”

The cedar waxwing is the glutton of songbirds, known for stuffing itself—even to the point of incapacity—with fruit. In “The Cherry Birds,” Kateri Kosek traces the path of a 1908 act “relating to the protection of fruit from the cedar waxwing” through the Vermont state legislature and, more broadly, considers the value humans assign to the species with which we share our space.

Writing about birds is not new to Kosek; her essay “Killing Starlings”—about a seasonal job that required her to kill invasive species—appeared in Creative Nonfiction #40 in 2011. Her poetry and essays have also appeared in Orion , Terrain.org , and Catamaran , and she teaches college English and mentors students in the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. “The Cherry Birds” is the winner of the $1,000 Best Essay prize for Creative Nonfiction #69: “Intoxication.”

CNF: The research for your prize-winning essay “The Cherry Birds” began when you saw a cedar waxwing killed by your housemate’s cat. You write, “But before the waxwing fluttered away and flopped to the ground, before I turned away and went inside so as not to see the cat finish it off, we stood there in the driveway guiltily admiring the finer points of its plumage.” What about that moment inspired you? Did you know right away that you would write about these birds?

Kosek: Well, it’s always exciting to see a bird that up close, and a waxwing isn’t a bird that comes to feeders, that you spend a lot of time looking at. It was beautiful, which becomes a key premise in the essay, but mostly I was struck by the tenuousness of the moment, how fragile yet tenacious the bird was, fighting for its life. I did write about it immediately, though not with any sense of the essay you see before you, or of how waxwings specifically would figure into it. At first, the poor waxwing worked metaphorically for how I was feeling at the time. Two essays I had read also colored the incident. One was “Les Oiseaux,” Angela Pelster’s very short lyric essay that opens her book Limber, in which a huge flock of waxwings descends on her yard in the winter and devours the berries off the trees, both magically and destructively (my epigraph). And Leslie Jamison’s essay “In Defense of Saccharin(e)” grappled with notions of sweetness and indulgence and included a passage about birds that were, I think, drunk on berries and banging into windows. So I was kind of stuck on the idea of gorging on sweetness even though it may do us in. I forget why, exactly, but at some point perhaps a few months later I did a search on waxwings. I kept coming across that story of the Vermont senators in 1908, which set the course for the essay. But I am first indebted to my housemate and her cat.

CNF: This essay takes a historical and personal approach to the story of the cedar waxwing. How did you organize your research? Did you find that there was some research that had to be left out?

Kosek: This is by far the most “researchy” piece I’ve written. I definitely tried to represent everything that I found (there were lots of examples to choose from), but it’s possible I could have kept looking. Most everything I used was available online. Perhaps somewhere out there, obtainable through more old-fashioned research, is an old newspaper article that would illuminate what happened when the bill to exterminate waxwings came before those senators. Not having found that, I just worked that gap into the essay.

So, similar to leaving things out was deciding when to stop combing through the research and just write the essay already. As a poet I tend to prefer a limited amount of material, when I can see everything on a page and just tinker with it. This amount of research was a little overwhelming. The sources were kind of slippery and finding them was haphazard. Luckily the legislative journals from Vermont in 1908 were digitized on a Vermont government website. Where I found those, all sorts of supplemental government-issued writings popped up, such as old agricultural bulletins. Several of those happened to contain extensive guides to different bird species, based on the research into their diets to prove that they were (mostly) helpful to farmers. But there was a lot of overlap with variation, and sometimes it was hard to tell what something was and when it was written. Submitting for this theme —intoxication—was actually very helpful. I had thought about the essay thematically for a long time, but the deadline forced me to stop staring at potentially endless amounts of material and select enough to make a narrative.

CNF: Did anything in your research surprise you?

Kosek: Some attitudes toward ecology and environmental protection were more progressive than I might have expected for the early twentieth century. I was surprised to find the origins of the “keep cats indoors” campaigns; apparently, some states even wanted to license cats. A State Fish and Game Commissioner report, after establishing how helpful birds were for agriculture, crunched some numbers about how many might get killed by cats and ended, “Those who are really bird lovers and want to have birds nesting close to the house should try the experiment of dispensing with the family cat for one summer and note the increase in bird life about the garden.” Another article was about how we shouldn’t dismiss the “lower animals,” for they can do us much good—insects keeping other insects in check, for instance. It contained the delightful sentence, “Even such a humble animal as the common garden toad deserves our sympathy and encouragement.” And I was surprised at how popular bird-watching was, to the point of newspapers running lists of the new bird species seen migrating through the locale. That was one branch of this essay I didn’t initially plan on, but searching for the phrase “cedar waxwing” in old newspapers turned up a lot of lists like that, as well as some funny items, like an Audubon-sponsored ball to which guests wore outfits that mimicked the plumage of a certain bird, and then everyone had to guess the birds … maybe something someone should bring back?

CNF: Both of the essays that you’ve published in Creative Nonfiction are about birds. What attracts you to writing about nature?

Kosek: Well, I’ve been a birder since I was a little girl. I certainly didn’t share such a questionable hobby with my peers growing up, but the more I wrote, the more I decided to claim and tap into that rather unique area of knowledge. Nature in general has always anchored me, so it seems to follow that it also anchors most of my writing. It also embodies mystery, which is important for my writing. I’ve always written more personal things too, but often in the slightly veiled form of poetry, where nature may exist symbolically. In prose, recapturing extended dialogue and scenes intimidates me. I’m more comfortable describing exterior elements—birds and landscapes and my movements in them—and they also provide that bigger picture that’s necessary for creative nonfiction to avoid falling in on itself. Nature is literally our larger context. The backdrop of the natural world can prevent writing from being too purely confessional. Where I live, in a river valley in western Massachusetts, surrounded by mountains, hiking on the Appalachian Trail regularly, it’s hard for me not to notice nature on a daily basis.

CNF: How does your background in science overlap or feed into your writing?

Kosek: Actually, somewhere in cellular biology lab my freshman year of college, I abandoned wanting to be a scientist, and went in the direction of literature and writing. I wouldn’t have made a very good scientist, because I can’t read science without being struck by the poetic implications of it. So, you could say I “use” science to render it lyrically. But I’m also very interested in what it has to say. The poetry I’ve written in the last few years has a strong environmental consciousness to it, though it’s also very personal. I weave in various effects of climate change, the disruption of weather patterns, my longing for snow in the winter. We can’t afford to ignore science these days. But art and imagination are important vehicles for it.

That first essay that appeared in CNF, “Killing Starlings” (Issue #40/Winter 2011), I wrote after a seasonal job teaching environmental education, and the scientific principle that says invasive species = bad was at the heart of that piece, but of course it’s more complicated than that. After that essay, I noticed that I was fascinated with the larger concept of how we ascribe value to other species, particularly birds—which ones we as a culture cherish or ignore, which we deem okay to hunt, or despise, and how those biases change if one is a birdwatcher. So science certainly plays a role in that discussion.

CNF: The passage that describes the cedar waxwings drunk on fermented berries made me laugh out loud. Did you start writing knowing that humor would be an important element, or is that something that developed as you wrote?

Kosek: No, I definitely started in a more poignant mindset, but the more I read, the more I found the writings about birds in the early twentieth century to be inherently humorous, and I suppose I wanted to convey some of that. The very notion of passing moral judgment on birds based on their habits or diets, all of which we now view objectively through the lens of science, is endlessly amusing. (Though I’m not against anthropomorphizing the natural world to a certain degree. If we don’t see ourselves in nature, we risk distancing ourselves from it.)

I’m also pretty aware that writing focused on the natural world carries a stereotype of reverence and awe—and, often, boredom for the reader—so I suppose humor is one element that works against that. Most writers who write about nature these days find something that erodes that stereotype. It’s also worth mentioning that although I had a draft and many notes, I rewrote this essay with the theme of “intoxication” in mind, so perhaps I was drawn to the many facets of the word, one being the humorous connotation. But from the start I was captivated by the fervor with which these birds can gorge themselves, so “intoxication” seemed fitting—also the way their beauty can intoxicate us, or the way we need to let ourselves be intoxicated by the natural world if we hope to protect it.

CNF: Your essay ends with a lovely but tragic description of “Albatross chicks on Pacific islands, crammed to the throat not with insects, but with bright bits of plastic” and “stunned, jeweled bodies of warblers piled below a skyscraper.” What would you like the reader to take away from these final paragraphs? Do you believe that writers also have an obligation to be advocates?

Kosek: Ideally, yes, but being an advocate could take so many different forms, I wouldn’t presume to tell anybody what to do, writers or readers. Of course—using that example—don’t throw your plastic in the street, but I’m not sure a reader in America can greatly impact the problem of plastic in the ocean, which stems mostly from six or so nations on the other side of the world. It is easier, though, to put decals on our big glass doors so birds don’t fly into them. So sure, there are measures we can all take, but mainly I just hope readers are at the very least more aware and attuned to something the essay touches on after reading it—maybe the birds themselves, or maybe the current administration’s regular attempts to roll back laws that protect endangered species and environmental regulations. 

I certainly find it easier to write than to be an advocate. It’s hard and overwhelming to keep track of every issue and make sure I’m doing something about it, but as a writer, I can follow an obsession with one particular place or bird or story and present that to readers. Of course, the hope is that art can make a difference because people need images and stories in addition to science and facts. A student of mine recently quoted a line from Words that Sing: Composing Lyrical Prose by Mary Ylvisaker: “language has the power to transform people … by adding to or altering the images in the subconscious—the place where 90% of our opinions are formed and decisions made.” I liked that scientific explanation to the sense that writing can translate to societal change.

CNF: What are you working on now?

Kosek: I plan to put together a book of essays exploring what I mentioned above regarding our various attitudes towards other species, particularly birds. One I worked on recently focuses on the Bicknell’s Thrush, a bird considered rare and prized because of its very limited mountain range. Lately, I’m drawn to braided lyric essays, because they allow me to be more of a poet while still writing essays. So that one also has some threads about me and my proclivities. I have another lyric essay about swimming that needs finishing. And a few months ago, I traveled for the second time to Poland, where my father is from, so I have a lot of material from that floating around.

  • >", "name": "top-nav-watch", "type": "link"}}' href="https://watch.outsideonline.com">Watch
  • >", "name": "top-nav-learn", "type": "link"}}' href="https://learn.outsideonline.com">Learn
  • >", "name": "top-nav-podcasts", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsideonline.com/podcast-directory/">Podcasts
  • >", "name": "top-nav-maps", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.gaiagps.com">Maps
  • >", "name": "top-nav-events", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.athletereg.com/events">Events
  • >", "name": "top-nav-shop", "type": "link"}}' href="https://shop.outsideonline.com">Shop
  • >", "name": "top-nav-buysell", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.pinkbike.com/buysell">BuySell
  • >", "name": "top-nav-outside", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsideonline.com/outsideplus">Outside+

Become a Member

Get access to more than 30 brands, premium video, exclusive content, events, mapping, and more.

Already have an account? >", "name": "mega-signin", "type": "link"}}' class="u-color--red-dark u-font--xs u-text-transform--upper u-font-weight--bold">Sign In

Outside watch, outside learn.

  • >", "name": "mega-backpacker-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.backpacker.com/">Backpacker
  • >", "name": "mega-climbing-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.climbing.com/">Climbing
  • >", "name": "mega-flyfilmtour-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://flyfilmtour.com/">Fly Fishing Film Tour
  • >", "name": "mega-gaiagps-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.gaiagps.com/">Gaia GPS
  • >", "name": "mega-npt-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.nationalparktrips.com/">National Park Trips
  • >", "name": "mega-outsideonline-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsideonline.com/">Outside
  • >", "name": "mega-outsideio-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outside.io/">Outside.io
  • >", "name": "mega-outsidetv-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://watch.outsideonline.com">Outside Watch
  • >", "name": "mega-ski-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.skimag.com/">Ski
  • >", "name": "mega-warrenmiller-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://warrenmiller.com/">Warren Miller Entertainment

Healthy Living

  • >", "name": "mega-ce-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.cleaneatingmag.com/">Clean Eating
  • >", "name": "mega-oxy-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.oxygenmag.com/">Oxygen
  • >", "name": "mega-vt-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.vegetariantimes.com/">Vegetarian Times
  • >", "name": "mega-yj-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.yogajournal.com/">Yoga Journal
  • >", "name": "mega-beta-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.betamtb.com/">Beta
  • >", "name": "mega-pinkbike-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.pinkbike.com/">Pinkbike
  • >", "name": "mega-roll-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.rollmassif.com/">Roll Massif
  • >", "name": "mega-trailforks-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.trailforks.com/">Trailforks
  • >", "name": "mega-trail-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://trailrunnermag.com/">Trail Runner
  • >", "name": "mega-tri-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.triathlete.com/">Triathlete
  • >", "name": "mega-vn-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://velo.outsideonline.com/">Velo
  • >", "name": "mega-wr-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.womensrunning.com/">Women's Running
  • >", "name": "mega-athletereg-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.athletereg.com/">athleteReg
  • >", "name": "mega-bicycleretailer-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.bicycleretailer.com/">Bicycle Retailer & Industry News
  • >", "name": "mega-cairn-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.getcairn.com/">Cairn
  • >", "name": "mega-finisherpix-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.finisherpix.com/">FinisherPix
  • >", "name": "mega-idea-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.ideafit.com/">Idea
  • >", "name": "mega-nastar-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.nastar.com/">NASTAR
  • >", "name": "mega-shop-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsideinc.com/outside-books/">Outside Books
  • >", "name": "mega-obj-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsidebusinessjournal.com/">Outside Business Journal
  • >", "name": "mega-veloswap-link", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.veloswap.com/">VeloSwap
  • >", "name": "mega-backpacker-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.backpacker.com/">Backpacker
  • >", "name": "mega-climbing-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.climbing.com/">Climbing
  • >", "name": "mega-flyfilmtour-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://flyfilmtour.com/">Fly Fishing Film Tour
  • >", "name": "mega-gaiagps-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.gaiagps.com/">Gaia GPS
  • >", "name": "mega-npt-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.nationalparktrips.com/">National Park Trips
  • >", "name": "mega-outsideonline-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsideonline.com/">Outside
  • >", "name": "mega-outsidetv-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://watch.outsideonline.com">Watch
  • >", "name": "mega-ski-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.skimag.com/">Ski
  • >", "name": "mega-warrenmiller-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://warrenmiller.com/">Warren Miller Entertainment
  • >", "name": "mega-ce-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.cleaneatingmag.com/">Clean Eating
  • >", "name": "mega-oxy-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.oxygenmag.com/">Oxygen
  • >", "name": "mega-vt-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.vegetariantimes.com/">Vegetarian Times
  • >", "name": "mega-yj-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.yogajournal.com/">Yoga Journal
  • >", "name": "mega-beta-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.betamtb.com/">Beta
  • >", "name": "mega-roll-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.rollmassif.com/">Roll Massif
  • >", "name": "mega-trail-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://trailrunnermag.com/">Trail Runner
  • >", "name": "mega-tri-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.triathlete.com/">Triathlete
  • >", "name": "mega-vn-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://velo.outsideonline.com/">Velo
  • >", "name": "mega-wr-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.womensrunning.com/">Women's Running
  • >", "name": "mega-athletereg-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.athletereg.com/">athleteReg
  • >", "name": "mega-bicycleretailer-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.bicycleretailer.com/">Bicycle Retailer & Industry News
  • >", "name": "mega-finisherpix-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.finisherpix.com/">FinisherPix
  • >", "name": "mega-idea-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.ideafit.com/">Idea
  • >", "name": "mega-nastar-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.nastar.com/">NASTAR
  • >", "name": "mega-obj-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.outsideonline.com/business-journal/">Outside Business Journal
  • >", "name": "mega-shop-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://shop.outsideonline.com/">Outside Shop
  • >", "name": "mega-vp-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.velopress.com/">VeloPress
  • >", "name": "mega-veloswap-link-accordion", "type": "link"}}' href="https://www.veloswap.com/">VeloSwap

2-FOR-1 GA TICKETS WITH OUTSIDE+

Don’t miss Thundercat, Fleet Foxes, and more at the Outside Festival.

GET TICKETS NOW

TICKETS NOW ON SALE!

Outside Festival feat. Thundercat, Fleet Foxes, and more.

GET EARLY-BIRD DEALS

From left: Susan Fenimore Cooper, Camille Dungy, Melissa Harrison, and Karen Blixen.

Women Writing About the Wild: 25 Essential Authors

A primer on who to start reading and who you've been overlooking for too long.

If you want a primer on some of the best nature writing you probably haven’t read yet, you’d do well to start with these 25 women.

Heading out the door? Read this article on the Outside app available now on iOS devices for members! >","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}'>Download the app .

Women who write about the wild cannot be easily labeled. They are conservationists, scientists, and explorers; historians, poets, and novelists; ramblers, scholars, and spiritual seekers. They are hard to pin down but for their willingness to be “unladylike,” to question, and to seek.

The following list is in no way definitive, but if you want a primer on some of the best nature writing you probably haven’t read yet, you’d do well to start with these 25 women. We present them in order from historical to contemporary.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

best nature writing essays

Henry David Thoreau is considered to be the father of American environmentalism, but he owes much of his philosophy to nature writers who came before him—and one writer in particular is overdue for credit. For his 1854 book Walden , Thoreau consulted Rural Hours , written in 1850 by Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Rural Hours is a record of a year around Cooperstown, New York, where she lived, and it’s the first American book of place-based nature observations.

Despite its anonymous publication “by a Lady” and Cooper’s status as an amateur naturalist, the book caught the attention of leading scientists of the time. Cooper lamented the changing landscape and anticipated concepts central to ecology when few others did. And she did so personally and lyrically: “The varied foliage clothing in tender wreaths every naked branch, the pale mosses reviving, a thousand young plants rising above the blighted herbage of last year in cheerful succession.” Choose the 1998 University of Georgia Press edition of Rural Hours —the 1968 version cuts 40 percent of the original text and much of Cooper’s environmental commentary.

Gene Stratton-Porter

best nature writing essays

At a time when most women were homemakers, Gene Stratton-Porter was a prolific novelist, naturalist, and conservationist. She also wrote at a time when the Limberlost wetlands and swamps of her native Indiana were vanishing: 13,000 acres of this biodiverse area were drained for agriculture by 1913. Before they disappeared, Stratton-Porter captured the wetlands’ rich habitat by setting her internationally popular fiction there. This includes two novels: Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), the latter of which influenced many young girls, including author Annie Dillard, profiled below, and was adapted to film four times. The self-reliant teenage heroine, Elnora, loved the outdoors, especially hunting moths. Stratton-Porter made a fortune from these romantic novels, with a stunning 10 million copies sold by 1924. She also wrote ten natural history books between 1907 and 1925. Stratton-Porter was the first American woman to form a movie and production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, Inc., and used her position to help conserve parts of the Limberlands you see in Indiana today.

Mary Austin

best nature writing essays

Anyone interested in the natural history of Southern California—what came before sprawl, smog, and Kardashians—should pick up Mary Austin’s 1903 classic The Land of Little Rain . More than a century ago, Austin presciently captured a disappearing cultural and physical landscape: the people, plants, politics, and sense of place in California’s Owens Valley. She did so ten years before the city of Los Angeles diverted the Owens River in 1913, a period in history known as the California Water Wars and immortalized in the film Chinatown . Austin disregarded prescribed gender roles about how women should explore and talk about the natural world, and she did it with wit, verve, and lyricism. You can hear her wry voice here, channeling Jane Austen: “It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigating ditch.” She is known for writing essays, poetry, plays, and novels; for her pioneering work in science fiction; and as an advocate of indigenous cultures.

Karen Blixen-Isak Dinesen

best nature writing essays

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke was also Baroness Badass: She shot lions, had a love affair with English game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and was enamored with the idea of vultures picking her remains clean when she died. She wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen in Danish, French, and English, including the superlative Out of Africa , her 1937 memoir made into a film about running a 4,000-acre coffee plantation in British East Africa, now Kenya, from 1914 to 1931. Though some readers feel that a European arrogance appears at times in her writing, she wrote with great feeling and affection about the people and landscape of the African continent: “The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.”

Nan Shepherd

best nature writing essays

“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live.” —Nan Shepherd

Men have written hundreds of mountaineering books, but who wrote one of the best? A Scottish poet and novelist named Anna “Nan” Shepherd. The Living Mountain is her meditation on high and holy places: a walk into rather than up mountains, a caress rather than a conquer of peaks, a whisper of “let’s see closer” rather than a testosterone-fueled bugle of “ I did it!”

She writes, “Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.” Shepherd was a localist who deeply immersed herself in the Cairngorms, Scotland’s eastern Highlands. She swam in streams, watched wildlife, and slept outdoors—a deep engagement recounted in luminescent prose. The Living Mountain was written during World War II, when Shepherd often went “stravaigin”—a Scottish term for wandering. For reasons unknown, she left the manuscript in a drawer for nearly 40 years. It was published late in her life, in 1977. Today, Shepherd’s writing is justifiably experiencing a renaissance—so much so that the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a new £5 note with her portrait in 2016.

Rachel Carson

best nature writing essays

“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.” —John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

Rachel Carson’s day job was in marine biology, and she wrote the prize-winning book The Sea Around Us (1951), which spent 86 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But Carson is best known for her 1961 book, Silent Spring , which directly led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. With a title inspired by a Keats poem, Silent Spring originated when dead birds began turning up in the garden of one of Carson’s friends after rampant spraying of the pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). A landmark in the environmental movement, Carson’s book demonstrated the harmful environmental effects of pesticides including DDT, leading to its ban. In the book, she asks, “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home of insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintance who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” In 2006, Discover named Silent Spring one of the 25 greatest science books of all time.

Ann Haymond Zwinger

best nature writing essays

Ann Haymond Zwinger was studying for a doctorate at Harvard when she met her husband, an Air Force pilot. As a military wife, she raised three daughters during their transfers around the country, finally settling down in Colorado Springs in 1960. When the couple bought 40 acres, Zwinger started cataloging and illustrating plants she discovered there—the beginning of a career writing natural histories of mountains, rivers, deserts, and canyon lands of the American West. Over 30 years, she wrote more than 20 books about her quiet observations of the wild. Meticulous and graceful, Zwinger’s writing integrated geology, botany, archaeology, and history along with personal reflections. Start by reading her 1975 book, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist’s Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the West . You’ll feel as if you’re in the boat with her: “Raw, open sand dunes spread over the right bank, white prickly poppy and masses of yellow mustard and sand-verbena blooming across them.”

Annie Dillard

best nature writing essays

You feel as though you’re sleepwalking through life. You decide you need to get off the grid. As you head for the solitude of a cabin, bring Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It is, like Thoreau’s Walden , a “meteorological journal of [her] mind” (in her own words), a meditation, and a nonfiction book about seeing the world more intimately. At age 29, Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim , and the book remains one of the finest in nature narratives. What sets Dillard apart is her desire to behold the sacred and divine along a creek in the Virginia woods. She observes her own way of seeing in poetic, scientific, mystical ways: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Edward Abbey called Dillard the “true heir of the Master” (Thoreau), and she has been compared to Gerard Manly Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, John Donne, and William Blake.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

best nature writing essays

“What it takes to dazzle us, masters of dazzle, all of us here together at the top of the world, is a night without neon or mercury lamps.” —“Mt. Lemmon, Steward Observatory, 1990”

Descended from the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Hawthorne Deming is a rare interdisciplinary cross-thinker: a poet who writes about science. From the miniscule to the stellar, she explores science, the physical world, and poetry with exquisite observations and memorable juxtapositions. With seven volumes of poetry and five collections of essays, there is no one best place to begin exploring her work, though the essay “Science and Poetry: A View from the Divide” is a good one. As the title suggests, it coalesces Deming’s thinking about the creative process and shared language of the two disciplines. Also good: Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001), in which she writes passionately about the importance of nature writing in reconnecting people to the natural world and enhancing our spiritual lives, and her most recent work, Stairway to Heaven (2016), a collection of poems reflecting on the loss of her mother and brother.

Gretel Ehrlich

best nature writing essays

Gretel Ehrlich debuted in 1985 with The Solace of Open Spaces . It is a bareback, elegant collection of essays—a mix of memoir, meditation, and poetry—set in Wyoming and capturing the stoic people who call the arid landscape home. After the death of the man she loves, Ehrlich throws herself into hard ranch work—delivering lambs and calves, punching cattle, learning to ride. You can practically smell pungent sagebrush and feel the texture of dirty sheep’s wool as she works to regain personal happiness. To herd sheep, Ehrlich observes, “is to discover a new human gear somewhere between second and reverse—a slow, steady trot of keenness with no speed.” She has a knack for describing the people and places of Wyoming with mystic expression: “The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties into an unquenchable appetite for life.” Ehrlich’s 11 other books shimmer with a keen perspective on travel and place, including her 1991 narrative nonfiction, Islands, the Universe, Home —ten essays on ritual, nature and philosophy—and A Match to the Heart (1994), an unsentimental account of healing after being struck by lightning.

Kathleen Norris

best nature writing essays

“Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the Holy.”

Don’t shut the book if you feel a prairie wind blow through you while reading Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by poet and essayist Kathleen Norris. It may happen. The book is a prairie-based spiritual meditation about learning to see more in less. In 1974, Norris and her husband moved from New York City to her grandparent’s farm in isolated Lemmon, South Dakota, where she discovers a community of Benedictine monks and revives her Protestant faith. “Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are.” Norris’s spiritual quest continued beyond this book when she became a Benedictine oblate in 1986 and wrote The Cloister Walk in 1997 and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith in 1999.

Diane Ackerman

best nature writing essays

A grad school friend once argued, “Diane Ackerman is just too lush.” And I said, “That’s precisely why I’d like her.” If you’re in the mood for a velvety, layered wine by someone who revels in playing with language as much as writing about the physical world, reach for Ackerman’s books. One of the finest narrative nonfiction writers (you may know her bestselling book The Zookeeper’s Wife or Pulitzer finalist One Hundred Names for Love ), Ackerman also ponders diverse subjects in natural history. In The Natural History of the Senses , she encourages readers to see the common with fresh eyes: “Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit.”

Leslie Marmon Silko

best nature writing essays

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is the story of a shell-shocked World War II veteran trying to regain his peace of mind. When first published in 1977, it deeply resonated with returning Vietnam vets and has gained more relevance as mental health and post-traumatic stress syndrome in vets is better understood. The story follows Tayo, a vet of mixed Laguna-white ancestry who has returned home to his reservation, having lost his will to live after enduring the 65-mile Bataan Death March and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Alternating between prose and poetry, the book tells the events of Tayo’s life and shows how ancient Laguna rituals reconnect him to his Pueblo people, plants, and animals. Silko is regarded as the premiere figure in the Native American Renaissance. A Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white storyteller, she infuses all her work—novels, poems, films, short stories, and essays—with concerns for traditional Native American culture and the restorative power of ancient rituals. Raised in the sparse beauty of a New Mexican plateau and a debut recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award in 1981, Silko deftly explores complex relationships between humans and nature.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

best nature writing essays

Robin Wall Kimmerer blends her scientific understanding as a professor of environmental and forest biology with her heritage as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses , won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for nature writing. Her second, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants , won the Sigurd F. Olsen Nature Writing Award. In both books, Kimmerer weaves close observations of nature with indigenous views that invite us to reflect on our relationship with plants, animals, and the land—“an ancient conversation between mosses and rocks … About light and shadow and the drift of continents … an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy.” Kimmerer manages to invoke ecological spirituality while never veering toward unsubstantiated facts (that’s the scientist in her).

Amy Stewart

best nature writing essays

Earthworms, wicked bugs, deadly plants. The flower industry. Botanical ingredients of the world’s great drinks. These are subjects of Amy Stewart’s bestselling books. For Stewart, a Texas transplant in California with a trademark wit, the story of the natural world is the grandest and most important human story. “Our quest to understand the natural world, to preserve it, and even to profit from it and make use of it, is in some ways the only story,” Stewart said in an email exchange. A personal favorite of mine is The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks , filled with liqueur recipes and horticultural history. We learn how to plant citrus and sloes, and how to make a sloe gin fizz or a red lion hybrid. It’s neither easy nor recommended, but I now plant my garden with a cocktail glass in one hand and a spade in the other.

Carolyn Finney

best nature writing essays

What percentage of visitors to America’s national parks are black? Seven percent, according to a survey commissioned by the National Park Service. If black people comprise twice that percentage of the U.S. population, why don’t more people of color venture into America’s public lands, and does that mean they aren’t engaged with the natural environment? These are potent questions of race, identity, and connection that Carolyn Finney, a writer, performer, and cultural geographer, addresses in her 2014 book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors . A mixture of scholarship, memoir, and history, the book is an academic yet probing read, braiding analysis with interviews to trace the environmental legacy of slavery, racial violence, and Jim Crow segregation while also celebrating contributions black Americans have made to the environment.

Terry Tempest Williams

best nature writing essays

“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”

By 1994, nine members of Terry Tempest Williams’s family had undergone mastectomies. Seven died of cancer. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place , her sixth book, Williams weaves memoir and natural history to tell the dual narrative of her mother’s cancer from atomic testing and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Rooted in the sprawling landscape of her native Utah, the book pivots between the natural and unnatural, between a family devastated by exposure to 1950s atomic bomb testing and a bird refuge despoiled by developers. And she writes in such a shimmering manner that decades after reading Refuge for the first time, I can still see the egrets, owls, and herons on the Great Salt Lake. It’s also there that Williams once found a dead swan, placed its body in the shape of a crucifix with two black stones over the eyes, and wrote, “Using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan’s black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather.” Refuge has become a classic of American nature writing in its meditative search for meaning in the rhythms of life and death.

Janisse Ray

best nature writing essays

“My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets,” writes Janisse Ray at the beginning of her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (2000). That home was a junkyard in rural southern Georgia, where Ray writes about growing up in a poor, white, fundamentalist Christian family. It’s also a book about the longleaf pine ecosystem, 99 percent of which is gone. Ray mourns the apocalyptic deforestation of these pines, a valuable tree to merchants and the U.S. Navy. It grew from Virginia to Florida to Texas and has been replaced by faster-growing commercial pines. The author of six books, Ray focuses her work on rural life, agriculture, human rights, and environmental sustainability. What sets her apart as a nature writer? “Southerners in general have a deep relationship with land, history, and place,” Ray said. “Which makes nature very important to the Southern psyche. Because of the terrain, our emphasis is more botanic than geologic, more rural than urban, and more deeply rooted in story rather than statistic, generally speaking.”

Helen MacDonald

best nature writing essays

“Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.”

By page 50 of H Is for Hawk , savoring each sentence like pearls on a string, you realize you’re holding a new classic in nature writing. H is the third book for Helen MacDonald, a British poet, illustrator, falconer, and historian. Her first, Shaler’s Fish (2001), is a collection of poetry, and her second, Falcon (2006), is nonfiction—and it didn’t just put her on the map, but rocketed her to international acclaim. The book masterfully chronicles the collapse of reality when MacDonald’s father, who shared her passion for birding, unexpectedly dies on a London street. To deal with her grief, she throws herself into taming and training a goshawk, a bird she calls “a Victorian melodrama” and “as muscled as a pit bull, and intimidating as hell.” Taking seven years to write, H is, simply, a masterpiece. It also stands apart from much nature writing genre for its dark, sweary, and funny bits—traits practitioners of more traditional nature writing often shy away from, but shouldn’t. What can we expect next from MacDonald? She hasn’t decided yet. “Whatever it will be,” she told me, “I think it will build on one of the deepest themes in H Is for Hawk : investigating how we unconsciously use the natural world as a mirror of our own selves and concerns, and how this relates to the way we give value to particular landscapes and creatures.”

Camille T. Dungy

best nature writing essays

“I am never not thinking about nature,” Camille T. Dungy wrote in an email, “because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.” A professor at Colorado State University, Dungy has written four poetry collections and edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009). This widely influential anthology features nearly 200 poems, from 18th-century slave Phillis Wheatley to recent poet laureate Rita Dove. It challenges the notion that the tradition of nature writing has been solely grounded in the pastoral or wild landscapes of America and Europe. The voices within the collection show nature as a devastating legacy of slavery, with people forced to work the land; at the same time, portraits emerge of writers who saw nature as a source of hope, with seeds of survival. Dungy’s poetry is vivid, personal, and lucid and stays with you long after you close the book. The poem “Trophic Cascade” appears to be about a changing ecosystem after the introduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but the last lines deliver a curveball: “All this life born from one hungry animal, this whole, new landscape, the course of the river changed, I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.” Her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History , was published in June.

Andrea Wulf

best nature writing essays

“All my books are about the relationship between humankind and nature,” said Andrea Wulf, a historian and writer living in Britain. “I dislike the categories that are imposed upon books, such as ‘biography,’ ‘history of science,’ ‘garden history,’ or ‘nature writing.’ I hope that we can transcend these artificial boundaries.” A prize-winning writer, Wulf is the author of five natural history books, including The Brother Gardeners (2008) and The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2012). It is her detailed and arresting 2015 book, The Invention of Nature: How Alexander von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World , that has garnered the most attention. Wulf pulls the explorer von Humboldt from oblivion and writes in great depth about why his ideas were so astonishing in the mid-19th century yet commonplace now: “It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.”

Katharine Norbury

best nature writing essays

Following a miscarriage, a breast cancer diagnosis, and a letter from her birth mother, English writer and film editor Katharine Norbury set out on a journey: to follow rivers from sea to source in the Llyn Peninsula of Northwest Wales in the company of her nine-year-old daughter. This walking journey was meant to be a kind of family memory book that Norbury felt she might bind with leaves and shells, but it grew into an exquisite and profound reflection on the healing power of nature during times of grief and loss. The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream is Norbury’s life-affirming personal narrative about marriage, motherhood, adoption, and self-discovery. Part travelogue and healing meditation, Norbury’s place writing is lush, sensual, and vivid: “Each retreating wave was an apnoeic gasp, gravel lungs filled with water, drowning without panic.” Her next book—untitled as of yet—is about the circus and belonging.

Melissa Harrison

best nature writing essays

The British are obsessed with walking, weather, and the countryside. It’s not surprising that a very good book about moody mists, damp drizzles, and downright deluges would be widely embraced and showered with praise. That book is Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) by English novelist and journalist Melissa Harrison. A patient and poetic guide, she invites readers to explore and reimagine one of the essential elements of our world, reminding us that to “experience the countryside on fair days and never foul is to understand only half its story.” Her third book, Rain , was nominated for the Wainwright Prize, an award given to the best writing on the outdoors, nature, and UK-based travel writing. Harrison has also written two nature novels: Clay (2013) and At Hawthorn Time (2015), the latter shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Hawthorn examines old secrets and a crumbling marriage against the unchanging backdrop of nature: “He remembered the graceful elms,” she writes. “So did the rooks, you could hear the loss of them in their chatter still. Things didn’t always turn out as you feared, though; the countryside was still full of saplings, but fugitive, sheltered in hedgerows and abetted by taller trees.”

Elena Passarello

best nature writing essays

A poet, professor, and actor, Elena Passarello is one of the finest essayists working today. Her second book, Animals Strike Curious Poses , is an exquisite collection of 16 essays weaving human and animal history together in narrative nonfiction that is playful, poignant, and deeply researched. Readers of this book as well as her first, Let Me Clear My Throat (2013), will not be surprised to learn that Passarello is a recipient of the Whiting Award for Nonfiction, a literary prize given to emerging writers with great promise. In Animals Strike Curious Poses , she takes us on a journey to a breathtaking range of places: the imagined mindset of an “endling” (the last of a species), the seemingly lost “crucial glance” between humans and wild animals, and her own childhood memories of “Lancelot the Living Unicorn.” In typical good humor, Passarello told me she brings to the practice of nature writing “a layperson’s sense of uncertainty, wonder, and often wrongheadedness.” What fascinates her is the nature of human thought and obsession, be it a song, a speech, or a salamander. “That’s why I’m as likely to write about the social practices of birdwatchers as I am the birds they seek.” What’s she writing now? Passarello said her next venture will take her outside “to do something a little crazy, something for which I have to undergo training.” Watch for it.

Amy Liptrot

best nature writing essays

After years of hedonism and drowning in booze in London, Amy Liptrot washes ashore on her native Orkney Islands in Scotland to try to save herself. Her debut book, The Outrun —winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for best nature, travel, and outdoor writing—is raw and beautiful, a painful rehab memoir. It follows Liptrot’s recovery and reconnection with the landscape she sought to escape for years. In atmospheric writing, she describes swimming in the cold sea, tracking puffins and arctic terns, and observing the night sky: “I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by 67 moons.” The best descriptive writers have close, repeated observations of particular place; Liptrot watches tides, winds, clouds, wildlife, and more. Learning folklore and rural traditions of the islands also enhances her new, celebratory sense of place.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small commission. We do not accept money for editorial gear reviews. Read more about our policy.

Popular on Outside Online

best nature writing essays

Enjoy coverage of racing, history, food, culture, travel, and tech with access to unlimited digital content from Outside Network's iconic brands.

  • Clean Eating
  • Vegetarian Times
  • Yoga Journal
  • Fly Fishing Film Tour
  • National Park Trips
  • Warren Miller
  • Fastest Known Time
  • Trail Runner
  • Women's Running
  • Bicycle Retailer & Industry News
  • FinisherPix
  • Outside Events Cycling Series
  • Outside Shop

© 2024 Outside Interactive, Inc

Close-button

Meet the 2024 Writing Freedom Fellows

By Jim Plank / February 13 2024

best nature writing essays

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • View all journals
  • Explore content
  • About the journal
  • Publish with us
  • Sign up for alerts
  • 05 February 2024

First passages of rolled-up Herculaneum scroll revealed

  • Jo Marchant 0

Jo Marchant is a science journalist based in London.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Three rows of yellow papyrus with black writing in columns, on a black background.

Text from the Herculaneum scroll, which has been unseen for 2,000 years. Credit: Vesuvius Challenge

A team of student researchers has made a giant contribution to solving one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology by revealing the content of Greek writing inside a charred scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The winners of a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge trained their machine-learning algorithms on scans of the rolled-up papyrus, unveiling a previously unknown philosophical work that discusses the senses and pleasure. The feat paves the way for artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to decipher the rest of the scrolls in their entirety, something that researchers say could have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the ancient world.

best nature writing essays

AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time

The achievement has ignited the usually slow-moving world of ancient studies. It’s “what I always thought was a pipe dream coming true”, says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. The revealed text discusses sources of pleasure including music, the taste of capers and the colour purple. “It’s an historic moment,” says classicist Bob Fowler at the University of Bristol, UK, one of the prize judges. The three students, from Egypt, Switzerland and the United States, who revealed the text share a US$700,000 grand prize.

The scroll is one of hundreds of intact papyri excavated in the eighteenth century from a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, Italy. These lumps of carbonized ash — known as the Herculaneum scrolls — constitute the only library that survives from the ancient world, but are too fragile to open.

The winning entry, announced on 5 February, reveals hundreds of words across 15 columns of text, corresponding to around 5% of a scroll. “The contest has cleared the air on all the people saying will this even work,” says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and co-founder of the prize. “Nobody doubts that anymore.”

Twenty-year mission

In the centuries after the scrolls were discovered, many people have attempted to open them, destroying some and leaving others in pieces. Papyrologists are still working to decipher and stitch together the resulting, horribly fragmented, texts. But the chunks with the worst charring — the most hopeless cases, adding up to perhaps 280 entire scrolls — were left intact. Most are held in the National Library in Naples, Italy, with a few in Paris, London and Oxford, UK.

A carbonized scroll rests on weighing scales.

This Herculaneum scroll was burnt and buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Credit: Vesuvius Challenge

Seales has been trying to read these concealed texts for nearly 20 years. His team developed software to “virtually unwrap” the surfaces of rolled-up papyri using 3D computed tomography (CT) images. In 2019, he took two of the scrolls from the Institut de France in Paris to the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford to make high-resolution scans.

Mapping the surfaces was time consuming, however, and the carbon-based ink used to write the scrolls has the same density as papyrus, so it was impossible to differentiate in CT scans. Seales and his colleagues wondered whether machine-learning models might be trained to ‘unwrap’ the scrolls and distinguish the ink. But making sense of all the data was a gigantic task for his small team.

Seales was approached by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman, who had become intrigued by the Herculaneum scrolls after watching a talk by Seales online. Friedman suggested opening the challenge to contestants. He donated $125,000 to launch the effort and raised hundreds of thousands more on Twitter, and Seales released his software along with the high-resolution scans. The team launched the Vesuvius Challenge in March 2023, setting a grand prize for reading 4 passages, of at least 140 characters each, before the end of the year.

Key to the contest’s success was its “blend of competition and cooperation”, says Friedman. Smaller prizes were awarded along the way to incentivize progress, with the winning machine-learning code released at each stage to “level up” the community so contestants could build on each other’s advances.

The colour purple

A key innovation came in the middle of last year, when US entrepreneur and former physicist Casey Handmer noticed a faint texture in the scans, similar to cracked mud — he called it “crackle” — that seemed to form the shapes of Greek letters. Luke Farritor, an undergraduate studying computer science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, used the crackle to train a machine-learning algorithm, revealing the word porphyras , ‘purple’, which won him the prize for unveiling the first letters in October . An Egyptian computer-science PhD student at the Free University of Berlin, Youssef Nader, followed with even clearer images of the text and came second.

A team of researchers used machine learning to image the shapes of ink on the rolled-up scroll. Credit: Vesuvius Challenge

Their code was released with less than three months for contestants to scale up their reads before the 31 December deadline for the final prize. “We were biting our nails,” says Friedman. But in the final week, the competition received 18 submissions. A technical jury checked entrants’ code, then passed 12 submissions to a committee of papyrologists who transcribed the text and assessed each entry for legibility. Only one fully met the prize criteria: a team formed by Farritor and Nader, along with Julian Schilliger, a robotics student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

The results are “incredible”, says judge Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II. “We were all completely amazed by the images they were showing.” She and her colleagues are now racing to analyse the text that has been revealed.

Music, pleasure and capers

The content of most of the previously opened Herculaneum scrolls relates to the Epicurean school of philosophy, founded by the Athenian philosopher Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 bc . The scrolls seem to have formed the working library of a follower of Epicurus named Philodemus. The new text doesn’t name the author but from a rough first read, say Fowler and Nicolardi, it is probably also by Philodemus. As well as pleasurable tastes and sights, it refers to a figure called Xenophantus, possibly a flute-player of that name mentioned by the ancient authors Seneca and Plutarch, whose evocative playing apparently caused Alexander the Great to reach for his weapons.

Lapatin says the topics discussed by Philodemus and Epicurus are still relevant: “The basic questions Epicurus was asking are the ones that face us all as humans. How do we live a good life? How do we avoid pain?” But “the real gains are still ahead of us”, he says. “What’s so exciting to me is less what this scroll says, but that the decipherment of this scroll bodes well for the decipherment of the hundreds of scrolls that we had previously given up on.”

There is likely to be more Greek philosophy in the scrolls: “I’d love it if he had some works by Aristotle,” says papyrologist and prize judge Richard Janko at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, some of the opened scrolls, written in Latin, cover a broader subject area, raising the possibility of lost poetry and literature by writers from Homer to Sappho. The scrolls “will yield who knows what kinds of new secrets”, says Fowler. “We’re all very excited.”

The achievement is also likely to fuel debate over whether further investigations should be conducted at the Herculaneum villa, entire levels of which have never been excavated. Janko and Fowler are convinced that the villa’s main library was never found, and that thousands more scrolls could still be underground. More broadly, the machine-learning techniques pioneered by Seales and the Vesuvius Challenge contestants could now be used to study other types of hidden text, such as cartonnage, recycled papyri often used to wrap Egyptian mummies.

The next step is to decipher an entire work. Friedman has announced a new set of Vesuvius Challenge prizes for 2024, with the aim of reading 90% of a scroll by the end of the year. But in the meantime, just getting this far “feels like a miracle”, he says. “I can’t believe it worked.”

Nature 626 , 461-462 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00346-8

Reprints and permissions

Related Articles

best nature writing essays

  • Machine learning
  • Archaeology

What the EU’s tough AI law means for research and ChatGPT

What the EU’s tough AI law means for research and ChatGPT

News Explainer 16 FEB 24

How journals are fighting back against a wave of questionable images

How journals are fighting back against a wave of questionable images

News 12 FEB 24

Apple Vision Pro: what does it mean for scientists?

Apple Vision Pro: what does it mean for scientists?

Great ‘Stone Age’ wall discovered in Baltic Sea

Great ‘Stone Age’ wall discovered in Baltic Sea

Research Highlight 14 FEB 24

Stone tools in northern Europe made by Homo sapiens 45,000 years ago

Stone tools in northern Europe made by Homo sapiens 45,000 years ago

News & Views 31 JAN 24

Homo sapiens reached the higher latitudes of Europe by 45,000 years ago

Homo sapiens reached the higher latitudes of Europe by 45,000 years ago

Article 31 JAN 24

Global Faculty Recruitment of School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University

The School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University invites applications for tenure-track or tenured faculty positions at all ranks (Assistant/Ass...

Beijing, China

Tsinghua University (The School of Life Sciences)

best nature writing essays

Professor of Biomedical Data Science (Assistant, Associate, and/or Professor Level)

OHSU Knight Cancer Institute CBDS is searching for multiple tenured or tenure-track faculty positions at all ranks in Biomedical Data Science.

Portland, Oregon

Oregon Health and Science University

best nature writing essays

Data Scientist (Qualitative)

Houston, Texas (US)

Baylor College of Medicine (BCM)

best nature writing essays

Two Faculty Positions in Life Science, iGCORE, Japan

The Institute for Glyco-core Research, iGCORE, in Tokai National Higher Education and Research System in Japan (THERS; consisting of Nagoya University

Institute for Glyco-core Research (iGCORE), Tokai National Higher Education and Research System

best nature writing essays

Attending Physician (m/f/d)

The Institute of Transfusion Medicine – Transfusion Centre headed by Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Daniela S. Krause is hiring:

Mainz, Rheinland-Pfalz (DE)

University of Mainz

best nature writing essays

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

  • Explore articles by subject
  • Guide to authors
  • Editorial policies

IMAGES

  1. 🌱 Save mother earth essay. Save Water Save Life Essay. 2022-10-03

    best nature writing essays

  2. Essay on nature

    best nature writing essays

  3. The Best Nature Writing of 2017

    best nature writing essays

  4. 013 Good Persuasive Essay Topics Example ~ Thatsnotus

    best nature writing essays

  5. The Best of Nature Writing 2019

    best nature writing essays

  6. Essay on Nature

    best nature writing essays

VIDEO

  1. Essay On Nature |Paragraph About Nature

  2. A Darker Wilderness, Black Nature Writing, from Soil to Stars edited by Erin Sharkey 1st book #2024

  3. Writing Introduction and Conclusion (Nature and Style of Writing) English

  4. BEST NATURE QUOTES

  5. Essay examples I The best online essay

  6. Improve your ESSAYS📝🇬🇧

COMMENTS

  1. Written in the wild: the best radical nature writing

    Mixing the deeply personal with policy and propaganda, interweaving the callous coldness of the wild, from sparrowhawks to viruses, with the regenerative and ebullient effects of nature, The...

  2. Nature Writing

    Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing Amy Liptrot, whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism. The best books on Sense of Place, recommended by Patrick Galbraith

  3. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021

    The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing brought clarity to the complexity and bewilderment of 2020 and delivered us necessary information during a global pandemic.

  4. Exploring Nature Writing: Examples and Tips for Writing About the Wild

    by Kaelyn Barron | 1 comment While many of our favorite stories describe epic adventures in the great outdoors, nature writing—writing about nature itself—has evolved as a genre in its own right.

  5. The Best of Nature Writing 2019

    The best nature writing of 2019, as selected and recommended by the academic and bestselling author of Being a Beast, Charles Foster. Support Us . Search. ... It's a collection of essays about apparently very, very different things - from ancient seal meat to Chinese politics - and very different times - from the Neolithic to the ...

  6. Top 10 nature memoirs

    Moving on from writing that holds the natural world at arm's length, authors have begun using intimate life to show nature as a protagonist in itself Sarah Thomas Wed 28 Sep 2022 05.40 EDT Last ...

  7. The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2021

    The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing brought clarity to the complexity and bewilderment of 2020 and delivered us necessary information during a global pandemic. From an in-depth look at the moment of the virus's outbreak, to a harrowing personal account of lingering Covid symptoms, to a thoughtful analysis on ...

  8. The Best Books of 2021: Nature Writing

    The Wild Isles: An Anthology of the Best of British and Irish Nature Writing (Hardback) Patrick Barkham £25.00 Hardback Out of stock Bringing together diverse and luminous passages from the finest British and Irish nature writing, The Wild Isles is a celebration of the endless variety of landscapes, seasons, plants and animals of these islands.

  9. Amazon Best Sellers: Best Nature Writing & Essays

    Walden and Civil Disobedience 4.6 out of 5 stars Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) 4.4 out of 5 stars The Catch of a Lifetime: Moments of Flyfishing Glory A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There 4.7 out of 5 stars 4.6 out of 5 stars Walden: Life in the Woods Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

  10. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

    Award-winning writer, columnist, and journalists Carl Zimmer selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2022. "What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted," writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction.

  11. Orion Magazine

    It turns out that the perfect nature essay is quite short, it's a lean taut thing, an arrow and not a cannon, and here at the end there's a flash of humor, and a hint or tone or subtext of sadness, a touch of rue, you can't quite put your finger on it but it's there, a dark thread in the fabric, and there's also a shot of espresso hope, hope aga...

  12. We're Living Through A Golden Age Of Nature Writing

    1 To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing Amazon Prime SHOP At a moment of personal crisis in her own life, British writer Olivia Laing walks the length of the river Ouse, the...

  13. Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing

    Amy Liptrot, whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism. Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor.

  14. Nature Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and Personal Essays

    My creative nonfiction book, Turning Homeward: Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild, was a Washington State Book Award 2017 Finalist, a Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award 2016 Notable Book, and a Nautilus Book Awards 2016 Silver Winner. My nature writing, personal essays, memoirs, and other creative nonfiction have appeared in The Fourth River, Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, City Creatures ...

  15. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

    The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us. From a hopeful portrait of a future for people with Alzheimer's disease, to a fascinating exploration of the rise of nearsightedness in children, to the heroic story of a herd of ...

  16. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

    The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us. From a hopeful portrait of a future for people with Alzheimer's disease, to a fascinating exploration of the rise of nearsightedness in children, to the heroic story of a herd of ...

  17. 14 Fabulous Contemporary Lady Nature Writers

    Get a FREE Sierra magazine Subscription today. when you become a Sierra Club member. Join Us. Camille Dungy 's Black Nature holds the distinction of being the first collection to anthologize nature writing by African American poets. Dungy's selections—including work by Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Natasha Trethewey, as well as several ...

  18. The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2022

    The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022 is a well curated collection of essays and articles from the world of science from 2021/22 edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Released 1st Nov 2022 by HarperCollins on their Mariner Books imprint, it's 336 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats.

  19. "Nature Is Literally Our Larger Context"

    Nature is literally our larger context. The backdrop of the natural world can prevent writing from being too purely confessional. Where I live, in a river valley in western Massachusetts, surrounded by mountains, hiking on the Appalachian Trail regularly, it's hard for me not to notice nature on a daily basis.

  20. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

    As we close out the year, the SciFri Book Club will read The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023, edited by Carl Zimmer with Jaime Green. The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us. From a hopeful portrait of a future for people with Alzheimer's disease, to a ...

  21. Women Writing About the Wild: 25 Essential Authors

    Her debut book, The Outrun—winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for best nature, travel, and outdoor writing—is raw and beautiful, a painful rehab memoir. It follows Liptrot's recovery and ...

  22. Close Out 2023 With The Best American Science And Nature Writing

    The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023: Livestream and Q&A. When: Monday, December 11 at 5:00pm ET / 2:00pm PT. Where: Science Friday's YouTube livestream. Tickets: Free!

  23. Nature Writing Books

    Showing 1-50 of 5,234 Braiding Sweetgrass (Hardcover) by Robin Wall Kimmerer (shelved 131 times as nature-writing) avg rating 4.54 — 111,487 ratings — published 2013 Want to Read Rate this book 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars H is for Hawk (Hardcover) by Helen Macdonald (shelved 129 times as nature-writing)

  24. Meet the 2024 Writing Freedom Fellows

    Ken Lamberton (he/him) writes about the nature of the Southwest. He is the author of Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison, which won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published hundreds of essays and six books, the latest of which is Chasing Arizona.

  25. First passages of rolled-up Herculaneum scroll revealed

    Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts, unveiling musings on music and capers.

  26. Ukraine's army chief: The design of war has changed

    Former Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, laid out the military challenges holding his country back, before his dismissal on February 8.

  27. What records are exempted from FERPA?

    Records which are kept in the sole possession of the maker of the records, are used only as a personal memory aid, and are not accessible or revealed to any other person except a temporary substitute for the maker of the records.

  28. LA Language Academy Australia on Instagram: "𝐏𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐔𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 As PTE has

    84 likes, 4 comments - languageacademyau on February 16, 2024: "퐏퐓퐄 퐂퐨퐫퐞 퐔퐩퐝퐚퐭퐞 As PTE has introduced a new test (PTE ..."