David George Haskell's Reading List

"His writing is taut but lyrical. Few people can evoke a scene with as few words yet so effectively. This matches the sparse, wind-scoured boundary of land and sea that he describes during his year’s sojourn in a cabin in the dunes. The book is also about healing after trauma. Beston was an ambulance driver in the First World War and he sought in the coast an experience “beyond the violences of men”. Despite all the “grim arrangements”, he finds that Nature (his capitalization) is “no cave of pain”, rather our desires and values are humbled next to the beauty, “zest of living”, and “unexpected and unappreciated mercies” of life beyond the human. In our time of collective and individual trauma brought on by growing injustice, climate crisis, and extinction, his words, although in many ways dated, carry a message of renewal. Opening ourselves to the living Earth can heal us, not as an anodyne or escape but as a living, sensual, generative, humbling, and inspiring union with the sources of life. The sea has many voices. Listen to the surf, really lend it your ears, and you will hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea… He truly heard the sea’s many voices. We’re receiving a first-hand account. He deploys verbs wonderfully, evoking the water’s many motions and sounds with vigour and precision. This evokes majesty and terror. Awe, too, sometimes. The book is full of passages that entrain us in the energies of the sea. By the end of the book, reading him becomes a kinaesthetic experience. Our bodily understanding of water is awakened from within. Our muscles, emotions, and intellects understand that the sea has animacy."

"This book taught me that careful attention to the living world could be celebrated and explored with rich, sensual language. After sipping for the first two decades of my life on watered-down wine, here was a glass overflowing with blood-red delight. Each taste revealed new layers. I truly got drunk on her writing. After reading this book, there was no going back for me. The idea of spending my professional life writing more scientific papers and grant proposals seemed impossible. I wanted to make wine of my own. In no way do I try to follow Dillard’s footsteps, still less mimic her. My interests and writing style are very different. But I do aspire to a kind of writing that honours the world and words equally. I fall far short of this aspiration, of course. Yes, she is very explicit in this book and in her later works that she seeks knowledge not just about the living world but about the divine. In particular, she asks what we are to make of pain and death, a burden so ubiquitous and heavy that it seems to mock any notion of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity. But she also senses that “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them”. The tension between crushing darkness and exulting light animates most of her work. Dillard’s great talent is to remain within the tension, evoking it on the page without pushing toward a simplifying resolution. She is “wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them”. This feels very real to me. When I attend closely to a place or a soundscape, I often come away with a sense that the living world is both unfathomably broken and unutterably beautiful. Dillard’s writing explores and honours that paradox. No, it is not possible, and that is unfortunate because Thoreau is a problematic writer. So many others deserve to be put on the curricular and cultural pedestal ahead of him. But here in the United States we instead suffer from a great surfeit of Thoreau. Certainly, he paid close attention to some of the life around him and wrote sometimes beautifully about it. But he was also a misanthrope and his would-be asceticism is self-righteous and hypocritical. His writing hid his dependence on others, especially women in his family, and he espouses a notion of individuality than is fundamentally un-ecological. The lesson of the forest, as understood by both forest-dwelling peoples and forest-studying scientists, is that life is made of interdependent relationship. To believe that we earn our living “by the labor of my hands only” is a lie, one with especially pernicious effects in North America where politicians use such ideas of self-reliance as an excuse to turn away from communal responsibility and mutual aid. Kathryn Schultz’s essay about Thoreau in The New Yorker is a good place to start in understanding this not-so-wonderful side of him. “Almost all early natural history writers in the English tradition were white supremacist in some form or other” Both Beston and Dillard go out alone, as Thoreau claimed he did, and turn their gaze mostly away from the human lives around them. But they do so not to negate the importance of human relationship but to more deeply attend to the world beyond the human and, in part, to understand and love what is good in humans and nonhumans alike."

"Findings , and her later books of essays, are suffused with wit and insight, conveyed in prose so clear, subtly balanced, and powerful that I often put down the book, temporarily stunned. Then I start reading again, with a huge smile of appreciation and admiration. She is renowned for careful observations and reflections that erase the boundaries between the so-called “natural” and human worlds. This erasure—or blurring—is especially important in Scotland , a nation that writers from elsewhere have repeatedly described through a romantic naturalist lens, seeking “wild” refuge and even claiming the landscape as their own. She regards this view as “an affront to those many generations who took their living on that land”. Reading Jamie’s essays is like being a needle in a growing tapestry, our path determined by a skilful and sometimes playful weaver. Through precise and colourful language she dips and lifts us through the many layers of story that comprise human and nonhuman life in place, gradually building a whole whose overall effect is surprising and inspiring. They are all brilliant. But the opening essay of the book, ‘Darkness and Light’, is magnificent. It opens by situating us at the “still point of the turning year”. Then: “Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light over the Black Craig”. We have not yet left her kitchen, and already the rhythms of the cosmos are present, another planet shines, local history and language are manifest, and the echo of T. S. Eliot is dimly heard. And so it continues, but the essay is utterly lacking in pomposity or self-regarding literary fireworks. Instead, with wry humour and a keen awareness of the meanings of darkness she takes us into ancient and modern experiences of winter’s dark, a marvellous integration of personal narrative and keen-eyed reflection."

"Pascoe makes a strong argument that Aboriginal Australians were sophisticated agriculturalists, working with plants, animals, water, and soil to create a productive and biodiverse landscape. His book shows how culture and nature were deeply intertwined across the continent. He also makes clear how warfare, murder, disease, and land theft destroyed most of the foundations of this fruitful ecosystem. We cannot understand modern Australia without understanding that much of the continent has been transformed by colonial violence, fundamentally altering soils, plant communities, and animal populations. His is a powerful call to undo what he calls the “amnesia” about Australia’s history and ecology. There are parallels here with other colonized continents whose “nature” was regarded by many European naturalists as untouched “wilderness” inhabited by “primitives” who had little effect on their environments. The field of natural history writing still sometimes clings to myths of wilderness—ignoring the presence, knowledge, and ecological management activities of indigenous peoples—and Pascoe’s book provides an excellent counter, relevant everywhere. His descriptions of the extraordinary depth of integration between people and the landscape in pre-colonized Australia is also a lesson and inspiration to the rest of the world as we seek more sustainable and resilient economies. Natural history writing has always had a fascination with the relationships among layers of time. Our myopia is not temporal. Instead, the myopia in natural history writing is the gender and race bias that pervaded the genre until recently. Well into the twentieth century, the notion that female animals had agency or were equal to males in their importance in evolution was dismissed. To this day, most accounts of natural history make heteronormative and gender binary assumptions about animals and plants. Yet, in many species homosexual sexual and social bonds are commonplace. Many individual organisms have both male and female sexual organs. In some species, multiple versions of “sex” exist, and so males and females can exist in multiple forms. Almost all early natural history writers in the English tradition were white supremacist in some form or other, even those who opposed slavery. The field therefore needs more diverse voices represented among authors and, for all authors, our studies of the lives of other species (and our own) should strive to acknowledge prejudice and, as much as possible, seek to move beyond into truer representations of life’s diversity. In my latest book , Sounds Wild and Broken , for example, I have foregrounded discussions of sexism in the study of sonic evolution and of environmental injustice in forest conservation. No doubt my writing is blinkered and imperfect, but I hope that readers with an interest in natural history will understand more clearly how the biodiversity crisis is also a crisis of human rights. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Fiction writers are doing astonishingly good work in this area. For example, N. K. Jemisin is usually described as a writer of speculative fiction . True enough, but she is also one of the foremost natural history writers, in my opinion. Her stories are stunning explorations of the intersections of human justice and nature in ways that help us see our own time more clearly. Diversifying natural history writing will include an expanded notion of what the genre comprises. Fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and audio essays all belong."

"Dunn’s book shocked me. We humans are remaking the world so thoroughly that we’ve become an evolutionary force causing rapid natural selection among other species. We’ve known this for decades, but Dunn shows just how speedy and ubiquitous the changes are. Our cities, agricultural fields, and even our bodies are incubators of evolutionary novelty. From viruses adapting to new homes—like Covid-19 , insects finding new ways to live in cities, and crop plants and diseases co-evolving, Dunn reframes what “nature” is and will be, both in the near future and long after the human species is gone. Most nineteenth and twentieth century natural history books looked back in time to better understand the present. But the study of history is also about charting possible futures. Dunn’s work and that of his colleagues in evolutionary biology offer a complement and a contrast. In doing so, we receive a significant dose of humility. Humans may be powerful and often destructive, but life’s generative capacity transcends us. In no way does this excuse short-sighted and unethical despoliation of habitats. Rather, the grandeur and creativity of evolution should inspire us to be more thoughtful members of life’s community. The moral imperative is to be better kin and neighbours, both to other humans and what philosopher David Abram calls the more-than-human world. This is easier if we know something about our extended family and home. Such knowledge is the highest aim of natural history, an expression of love for the world in all its diversity. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The magic of books helps. They draw us into community. They also reveal something about our own natural history. The written word is one of the few communicative inventions truly unique to our species. Many other species have language and culture. But none can break the bonds of time and space as we do when we crack open a book and start to read. We wake from the page the thoughts and feelings of people long dead or far away. And so, the very act of reading is an experience of the unique natural history of our own species. Let’s use our super-power for the good of all!"

"Janisse Ray tells the story of one of the world’s great forests—the longleaf of the southeastern US, an ecosystem mostly obliterated in the 19th century—through her experience of being “raised in a junkyard”, in a region most people now write off as being “as ugly as a place can get”. Her book tells this story from the perspectives of those often missing from writing about forests and trees: a child, a young woman, a daughter of a fundamentalist, a poor family with poorer neighbours, and a culture that has lived within the forest and its ecologically degraded remnants for generations. Ray is a vital, insightful writer and her voice is full of the language and modes of thought of what she calls her “homeland” of “lost forests”. In telling her stories, she unfolds the many cultural, ecological, ethical and personal layers of our relationships to trees and ecological communities. The world has always been biologically hyper-connected: every living body, every forest, every drop of ocean water is a swarm of connections. Our electronic media are the latest manifestation of life’s networks, an outgrowth of the social nature of the human mind. The medium is new, but the problems are old. Every network faces a tension between openness and walls, opportunity and vulnerability. And so the arms race that we’re all suffering through now in electronic media is a variation on an ancient theme. It manifests in the present day as a battle between those who would grab our attention and our ability to control our own time. But the tension is this: how do I belong to this network without completely losing all agency within it? This is the same problem that tree roots face as they negotiate with fungal partners below ground, that microbes face in their chemical connections in the ocean, that our gut cells struggle with as they work with bacteria. There is no way out of this tension. We cannot live in complete openness or behind high walls. So we must engage and discern how to live within the network. What I experience in my own life and in my work with students is that we’re often unconscious of just how vigorous the assaults on our attention have become. So, yes, we have shorter attention spans because we’re being invaded by the pathology of mind-grabbing micro-media. But we’re counter-evolving. I encounter a great hunger in my students to restore more control, more balance, so that we’re the ones choosing how our minutes, days, and lives will pass, not giving up that control to the algorithms of manipulation. Smelling the soil, talking to other people, holding an acorn in your hand, coming to know the sounds of birds and trees: these have great power once we wake to them, partly because they are such multi-sensory activities, engaging mind and emotion. As for the decline in contact with the “natural world”, I’d argue that a computer screen is just as natural as a mountain stream. It has more of the human mind present within its development, but that mind is natural. So I’d prefer to talk about the decline in awakened contact with “the other”, with other species, other people. And for many, yes, our connection to other species is diminished in some ways. But in other ways there is more “environmental” education and awareness now than decades ago. And the direction of this trend differs depending on class and race. For working class people in urban or industrial landscapes, the opportunities for contact with green space are much expanded, at least here in the US. The upper classes and those who grew up in the countryside see their kids and grandkids losing out on the unleashed experience of play and exploration in woods and fields. In many cities, that opportunity is now expanded, not contracted. “Our big human brains and delicate teeth evolved because wood made cooking possible. Other major technological and cultural advances also happened in relationship with trees: shelter, shafted tools, musical instruments, paper” In the case of the rural southeastern US where Ray is writing, contact with the ecological community was, for generations, forced on people by slavery, share-cropping and poverty. That legacy is well remembered in some families. People left the fields and woods for a reason, and have little interest in a return, especially one mediated by the well-meaning wealthy white descendants of the land-owning classes. This is not true in regions away from the southeast US, but race and class deserve more attention as we discuss “nature”. In Ray’s case I believe that the most important arc of her book is her exploration of what it means to grow up in ecological ignorance, to awaken to the extraordinary stories of her home, then to face the devastating knowledge that most of the ecological vitality of the region is gone, partly at the hands of one’s own ancestors and partly by economic forces that don’t give a damn about trees or people. It would be easy to paint a simple arc, but she resists this and shows us, indirectly through familial stories, how complex this process is. She connects history, religion, gender, economics, and ecology. Yes, she grew up with lots of outdoor time, but she also grew up with little understanding of where she was and what the place had been. This is a loss, only partly redeemable by later knowledge. In her awakening – one we all go through as we learn how diminished and wounded our homes and planet have become – she walks us through grief, anger, wonder, puzzlement, regret. Her writing does this without leaving us with an easy conclusion. Instead we get a fiery dream for the future. That future is one where the longleaf pine forest might be restored. This forest once covered 90 million acres — about the same area as the UK and Ireland combined. The pines grew to great sizes, widely spaced in meadows kept open by regular fire. Plant diversity in the meadows was phenomenal. Now, only about 12,000 acres remain. The rest went to timber and turpentine, then was converted to monoculture tree farms and agricultural fields. Most of the loss happened in a few decades of the mid-late nineteenth century, a startlingly rapid loss. Of course, many of the plants and animals of the forest are now gone or critically endangered. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In some areas the forest in being restored. But these hopeful signs should not blind us to the fact that, over much of the rural southeast, the pattern of ecological abuse of the land continues. In an article last year about a coal ash dump near her home, Ray wrote: “We are suffering out here in rural America. We are watching agrarian landscapes turned into industrial ones (giant clear-cuts, giant glyphosated fields, giant genetically engineered eucalyptus plantations), and we are watching the high quality of rural life, with its hummingbirds and purple martins, its trilliums and turnips, its streams and lakes, made toxic.” One reason The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is so important is that the injustices and violence that she describes are still underway. The study of trees is not an escape into a natural wonderland, rather it’s a way to see what is beautiful and what is broken in the world, to try to find a way forward. Yes, this ceibo tree in the Amazon rainforest grows in the most biodiverse place on the face of the planet, a forest that is also home to several indigenous cultures, people who have lived there for thousands of years. All this is threatened by extraction of oil deposits under the forest. From the top of the ceibo tree I saw forest stretching to the horizon, but I could also hear generators and drills working in the forest. Once roads and industry move into the Amazon, the forest’s diversity unravels and local peoples are displaced. Great biotic diminishment and human injustice are underway and will continue if oil extraction intensifies. But political and legal action within Ecuador offer hope that this battle is not lost. The country changed its constitution to give rights to “nature” and there is strong public support for protection of the Amazon. One indigenous activist told me, “Our politics is this: to show that trees and rivers have music, songs, and life…[to live] with the millions of beings in the forest.” That future is threatened, but still possible."

"Gentler in literary tone, but not in lived experience. In the US at the time, infant mortality rates were close to 10% for the first year of life and nearly 1% of births killed the mother. TB was endemic. So people understood that “nature” was, as Tennyson put it, “careless of the single life”, often quite dark. Comstock’s book is important because she changed the course of education in the US, making the case for what we’d now call “environmental education” both through her writing and her advocacy for educational reform. She justified this work to her readers and funders (in agriculture schools) by noting that increased urbanization was drawing people away from relationship with the land. Alongside her instruction about particulars was an imperative to teachers and students: be curious, open your mind and senses to the many lives of other species around you. “Contact with the ecological community was, for generations, forced on people by slavery, share-cropping and poverty… Race and class deserve more attention as we discuss ‘nature’” Comstock writes with great precision of observation and respect for science while using personification of her subjects as a narrative technique. It’s hard to pull this off successfully. To modern ears her work is dated, especially on matters of gender and race, but, like Jean-Henri Fabre, she set the bar high for subsequent writers. To this day, there’s a temptation to either jump so far into anthropomorphism that we lose sight of the actual lives of the creatures we’re studying, or to erect walls of objectivity that deny our bodily and emotional kinship with other species. Twigs appear static, literally “wooden”. But they’re dynamic, wood is a lively substance. Growing twigs have a pulsing 24-hour rhythm, narrowing during the day as water moves through them, then swelling at night. I use the metaphor of our own heart and arteries to draw the reader’s imagination into this odd property of twigs. I hope that familiar words from the world of humans are a bridge to understanding the unexpected, sometimes strange world of plant life. The metaphor works only if it helps us understand the life of the plant, in this case the slow and — for our ears and eyes — unseen, unheard pulsing that surrounds us in the forest."

"I chose this book first and foremost for Sarah Simblet’s spectacular ink drawings. Trees live at scales that are hard to represent. Their form is much larger than we readily apprehend with senses tuned to human scale (torso size, which is why bonsai is such an effective artform). But they’re also made of detail — bud scales, texture of twig bark, leaf edging — that is so small that our senses often skip over it. Simblet’s drawings speak very powerfully of the nature of each of her subjects. Through her work I understand and sense the trees, a very direct and profound experience. This comes across in the book plates and even more so in the originals that I saw at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. I learned afterward from her “note” in the book that she draws with a single steel-dip pen, often while holding the plant in her other hand. I suspect that this method allows deeper sensory understanding, more expansive observation. The use of a single pen is perhaps analogous to meditative technique, going deeper through material focus and simplicity. The very first book published by The Royal Society was John Evelyn’s Sylva . This most august of scientific societies understood at its origin that human lives and tree lives were deeply interconnected. As you mention, The New Sylva is a response and homage — an attempt to underscore this truth for the present day. And just as Sarah Simblet connects detail with broader understanding, Gabriel Hemery’s text gathers many particulars — especially practical wisdom gained through horticulture in British soil — to make a larger argument that our well-being depends on trees. In the seventeenth century this dependence was obvious through everyday use of timber and fuel wood. It was also a matter of national security as the navy needed oak for its warships. Today the connections are just as vital, but indirect and often global in scale. Hemery also outlines threats to trees, especially climate change and invasive pests. These two factors will fell more trees than the navy ever did and combatting them should be high on the agenda of any country. This is partly what I’ve tried to do in The Songs of Trees : bring these unexpected stories of interconnection into the light."

"Trees are not symbols or allegories in this foundational Taoist text. Rather, they’re examples of the true nature of life. Chuang Tzu’s Inner Chapters present a refreshingly ecological philosophy. In Chuang Tzu, the Earth is a “mighty mudball”, time is measured by the life-spans of ancient trees and ephemeral mushrooms, and human perception emerges from the quirks of our physiology and ecology. All human philosophies are natural productions, but many philosophies paradoxically deny this. Our thoughts emerge like tree trunks and branches from roots in our nervous systems, so they’re just as wild and natural as any tree, bird, or bacterium. Yet these very thoughts imagine a separation from the rest of the community of life, a fracture caused by gods or by the sophistication of our culture, mind, and technology. Chuang Tzu punctures this inflated view using wit, paradox, irony, and exposition. He transmutes human exceptionalism into a humbler view, one informed by kinship and belonging on this Earth. Trees appear at pivotal moments in his stories, places where he makes clear that humans are of the earth. Other traditions of course also have trees at the centre of their narratives — the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, The Bodhi tree under which Buddha was enlightened, the Norse Yggdrasil, the creation trees of the Amazon, even the evolutionary tree of Darwinian genealogy – a near-universal recognition of the importance of trees to our lives. Chuang Tzu seems to me to go deeper, actually listening to trees rather than using them only as symbols and narrative devices. Yes, I visited a dozen trees around the world to listen to their stories. By “listening” I mean literally tuning my ears (and some electronic sensors) to trees to hear their many sounds. I also mean listening to people whose lives are connected to each tree and scientists who have studied the lives of trees. “Sound is a great way into tree lives: it passes around and through solid barriers, revealing what our eyes cannot see” I found that trees are full of sound. Wind reveals the architecture of branches and leaves, and every tree has its own wind sound, emerging from the particularities of its physiology. For example, the Ponderosa pine trees in Colorado sound different from the same species in California. Each has needles adapted to the local environment, so each sounds different when the wind blows. Broad-leaves trees are likewise diverse in their voices. City trees have rumbles of buses and trains running through them, changing the form of their wood. Birds sing from branches and insects gnaw on inner wood. Then there are tree sounds that are too high for our ears, but by listening with sensitive microphones I heard water pulsing through branches and ultrasonic clicks of distress in drought-stricken twigs. These sounds combined with the voices of market vendors working in the trees’ shade, birds singing amid traffic noise, and surf sucking at palm roots on an eroding beach. Sound is a great way into tree lives: it passes around and through solid barriers, revealing what our eyes cannot see."

"Pollan gives us a witty insight into a plant-centered view of evolution and ecology, flipping the usual human-focused narrative of the interaction between people and plants. Through the stories of four familiar plant species – apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes – he demolishes the “erroneous impression that we’re in charge”. We did not “domesticate” these species. Rather, the plants’ evolutionary nimbleness allowed them to insinuate themselves into human desire and so thrive. Human minds, emotions, and tastes are part of the environment to which plants adapt. Like bees guided to the work of pollination by petals and nectar, we’ve been willing and industrious servants of some plants’ needs. Pollan’s account of the reciprocal web of relationships among plants and people takes our understanding of coevolution out of the specialized world of evolutionary theorists and into our everyday experience of orchard, forest, garden, and kitchen. In learning how apples spread from Kazakhstan, we understand how the fates of people and plants are conjoined across the world. In the interplay between plant evolution and human desire we see the future of forests: Humans have become world-changing bees. Plant evolution in the future will be largely a matter of adapting to and exploiting – or not, for many species – the proclivities of a hyper-abundant Great Ape."