Let's make the world wild again

This book is fundamental to understanding the importance of keystone species in restoring an ecosystem to become healthy and functioning. At Tompkins Conservation, our "rewilding" teams use it to explain why we go to the great effort of reintroducing extinct and extirpated apex predators, such as jaguars and giant river otters. It's also wonderful because it shows the outsized impact that hardworking individuals, scientists in this case, can have on our growing understanding of how the natural world works. The Serengeti Rules was adapted into a documentary by Nicolas Brown in 2018.

Leaders of today’s youth movement say that my generation will die of old age while theirs will die of the climate crisis. It’s time for us to share that burden. Though Catton wrote Overshoot almost forty years ago, it remains the most insightful work I know about the cliff we are steering this planet toward. In it he writes, "We must learn to relate personally to what may be called 'the ecological facts of life.' We must see that those facts are affecting our lives far more importantly and permanently than the events that make the headlines."

A beautiful book tracing the journeys and discoveries of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt throughout the Americas and beyond. Von Humboldt started his life at the end of the 18th century and saw myriad changes and leaps of knowledge. If there's one big takeaway, it's that having firsthand experiences in nature — getting your boots muddy — are crucial to understanding it. Exploring all kind of environments and philosophies convinced him about the interconnected nature of all things.

Over forty years ago, David Ehrenfeld already knew that technology wouldn't save us from our environmental and social crises. This book takes a cold, hard look at the damage humans have done to the natural world and the error in putting ourselves ahead of other kinds of life. It's time that we shift perspective. Progress may mean something entirely different than what we have been taught to envision.

Mary Oliver's poems are like love letters to the natural world, not in any sappy way, but as another means of exploring it in all its terror and perfection, observing each beautiful detail. She reminds us how important it is to pay attention. "So come to the pond," she writes, "or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live. Your life." (From "Mornings at Blackwater")