The books in the list below are recommendations from book club members.   This list is in alphabetical order by author. If you’ve read a natural history related book that you would like to add to this list, please e-mail your ideas to Linda at linda.rhines@gmail.com. We also have a list of more than 100 books we have already discussed in this group on the first page of the Book Club website, so make sure your suggestion is not already there. 

Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (2016)  What a Fish Knows will forever change how we see our aquatic cousins. We rarely consider how individual fishes think, feel, and behave.  Balcombe describes a variety of fish behaviors, such as courtship rituals and cooperative hunting behaviors. What a Fish Knows offers a thoughtful appraisal of our relationships with fishes and inspires us to take a more enlightened view of the planet’s increasingly imperiled marine life.

Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (2013).  Bogard discusses light pollution in the night skies of most people on the planet, and the effects of this loss on Human physical and mental health and on ecosystems.  (Recommended by Kathy)

Cascadia Field Guide: art, ecology, poetry (2023)  brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide!  It offers a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.  (Recommended by Nan)

Peter Harrison, Seabirds: The New Identification Guide (2021)  Harrison, a local Port Hadlock resident and expedition travel guide, has written the essential new field guide to the 437 species of seabirds of the world, replacing his 1983 publication of Seabirds.  The stunning 239 full color plates were done by Harrison and Swedish artist Hans Larsson.  You can find more about the book, including some beautiful illustrations, at peterharrisonseabirds.com. (Recommended by Diane McDade)

Elin Kelsey, Hope Matters: Why changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental crisis (2020).  Timely, evidence-based, and persuasive, Hope Matters is an argument for the place of hope in our lives and a celebration of the turn toward solutions in the face of the environmental crisis.  (Recommended by Holly and Oma)

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Monique Gray Smith, Nicole Neidhardt, Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (2022)  Although we read the original 2013 version of Braiding Sweetgrass in 2017, many of us have joined the book club since then.  This new shorter version by Smith, who is Cree and Lakota and worked closely with Kimmerer, includes lovely illustrations by Dine (Navajo) artist Neidhardt.  The book reinforces how ecological understanding comes from listening to the plants around us.   (Recommended by Linda)

Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021)  The author takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. (Recommended by Wendy)

Barry Lopez, Horizon (2019)  From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world. (Recommended by Kathy)

Tim McNulty, Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain (2023) explores the Olympic Peninsula’s complex–and ongoing–story of development, conservation, restoration, and cultural heritage, while writers from the Lower Elwha Klallam, Jamestown S’Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Makah Tribe, and Quinault Indian Nation share some of their own history, stories, and perspectives.  This is a rich and vivid exploration of both Olympic National Park and its surrounding peninsula.  Recommended by Linda)

David Montgomery and Anne Bikle’, What Your Food Ate: how to restore our land and reclaim our health (2022)  shows that the roots of good health start on farms. What Your Food Ate marshals evidence from recent and forgotten science to illustrate how the health of the soil ripples through to that of crops, livestock, and ultimately us.  (Recommended by Nan)

Kathleen Dean Moore, Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers (2022) features twenty-two life-affirming essays and drawings. Their entwined art offers pluck, stubborn resolve, and even some laughter to those who have for years been working for environmental sanity, social justice, and ecological thriving.  The book offers encouragement to join or keep on with Earth’s work—not distractions, but deep and honest reasons to remember that the struggle matters. Rather than another to-do list or an empty promise of hope, Take Heart is a thank-you gift to the multitudes of Earth’s defenders. (Recommended by Nan)

Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog & Swamp: a short history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis (2023) is a fierce declaration of peat’s importance to climate stability and human survival.  (Recommended by Linda)

Mary Roach, Fuzz: when nature breaks the law (2022)   A humor filled investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet. What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A grizzly bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? As New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. PTLibrary Book Club Kit

Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, create beauty and achieve peace, (2020) focuses on three species: sperm whales, Scarlet Macaws, chimpanzees, and their relatives and ecologically similar species. (Recommended by Nan)

M. E. Schuman, The Understory: A Female Environmentalist in the Land of the Midnight Sun (2022) Passion and peril are intertwined in this true tale of Michelle’s drive to make the natural world a better place; she found her greatest hindrance not in physical challenges but in human adversaries. In the understory, largely concealed from view, are saplings and shrubs, herbs and grasses, rooted in a carpet of moss, beneath the canopy of trees. They provide the sustenance for the magnificent forest, and this is the inspiring story of one woman’s battle from beneath the forest canopy to the beyond—in a scramble to undo what has been done. (Recommended by Michelle Schuman)

Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (1996)  If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget. (recommended by Kathy)

David B. Williams, Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound (2021)  Focusing on the area south of Port Townsend and between the Cascade and Olympic mountains, Williams uncovers human and natural histories in, on, and around the Sound. In conversations with archaeologists, biologists, and tribal authorities, Williams traces how generations of humans have interacted with such species as geoducks, salmon, orcas, rockfish, and herring. He sheds light on how warfare shaped development and how people have moved across this maritime highway, in canoes, the mosquito fleet, and today’s ferry system. The book also takes an unflinching look at how the Sound’s ecosystems have suffered from human behavior, including pollution, habitat destruction, and the effects of climate change.  Witty, graceful, and deeply informed, Homewaters weaves history and science into a fascinating and hopeful narrative, one that will introduce newcomers to the astonishing life that inhabits the Sound and offers longtime residents new insight into and appreciation of the waters they call home.(Recommended by Kathy)

E.O. Wilson, Tales from the Ant World (2020)  “Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony. . . . Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg,” writes Edward O. Wilson in his most finely observed work in decades. In a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dauphin Island and even his parents’ overgrown yard back in Alabama, Wilson thrillingly evokes his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with more than 15,000 ant species. A personal account by one of our greatest scientists, Tales from the Ant World is an indispensable volume for any lover of the natural world. (recommended by Wendy)