Books about nature (for adults) | Bloomingdale Public Library

1) Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants

Author

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 1953-

Description

"An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders,...

2) Grandma Gatewood's walk: the inspiring story of the woman who saved the Appalachian Trail

Author

Montgomery, Ben

Description

"Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin....

3) Into the planet: my life as a cave diver

Author

Description

More people have died exploring underwater caves than climbing Mount Everest, and we know more about deep space than we do about the depths of our oceans. From one of the top cave divers working today-and one of the very few women in her field-Into the Planet blends science, adventure, and memoir to bring readers face-to-face with the terror and beauty of earth's remaining unknowns and the extremes of human capability. Jill Heinerth-the first person...

4) The death and life of the Great Lakes

Author

Series

Norton paperback

Description

"The Great Lakes--Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior--hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan's compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right...

5) Nature obscura: a city's hidden natural world

Author

Description

"With wonder and a sense of humor, Kelly Brenner aims to help us rediscover our connection to the natural world that is just outside our front door--we just need to know where to look. Through explorations of a rich, varied urban landscape, Brenner reveals the complex micro-habitats and surprising nature that exists in the middle of a city. In her hometown of Seattle, which has plowed down hills, cut through the land to connect fresh- and saltwater,...

6) Teaching a stone to talk: expeditions and encounters

Author

Description

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

7) Rising tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America

Author

Barry, John M., 1947-

Description

In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands. The Red Cross fed nearly 700,000 refugees for months....

8) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a year of food life

Author

Kingsolver, Barbara

Description

"When Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. 'Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle...

9) National Audubon Society The Sibley guide to birds

Author

Sibley, David, 1961-

10) Summer world: a season of bounty

Author

Heinrich, Bernd, 1940-

Description

Summer World is an intimate, accessible, and eloquent illumination of animal survival in the Summer months from Bernd Heinrich, bestselling author of Winter World and our latter-day Thoreau. Heinrich's fascinating exploration and appreciation of the natural order a lovely book, meticulously etched and based on impassioned but exacting scientific research animals come to life in gripping detail...and so does Heinrich…. The man is irrepressible.

11) Nature's best hope: a new approach to conservation that starts in your yard

Author

Tallamy, Douglas W

Description

"Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. Nature's Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors...

12) A walk in the woods: rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Author

Description

Stretching from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail offers some of America's most breathtaking scenery. It also offers an irresistible, amusingly ill-conceived adventure to Bryson & his out-of-shape walking companion, Stephen Katz. Mile by arduous mile, these unlikely pioneers walk the Appalachian Trail, along the way surviving the threat of bear attacks, cravings for hot showers & cream sodas, the loss of key provisions, & everything else this...

13) Mycophilia: revelations from the weird world of mushrooms

Author

14) Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Author

Strayed, Cheryl, 1968-

Series

Thorndike Press large print biography series
Oprah's book club

Description

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State -- and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little...

15) Lessons from plants

Author

Montgomery, Beronda L

Description

"What would a plant do? It is an unusual question. But, as Beronda L. Montgomery shows, humans can learn a great deal from these organisms. Lessons from Plants unpacks the "senses" and skills of highly adaptive organisms that overcome immense challenges en route to flourishing"-- Provided by publisher.

16) Under a white sky: the nature of the future

Author

Kolbert, Elizabeth

Series

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series

Description

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? That man should have dominion 'over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth' is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch:...

17) Eating wildly: foraging for life, love and the perfect meal

Author

Description

Chin, who writes the "Wild Edibles" column for the New York Times, goes looking for love, blackberries, and wild garlic in this wildly uneven, yet warmly exhilarating memoir. Trekking through Central Park and other urban beaten paths and backyards, Chin leads us on a journey of discovery as she searches for the tender shoots poking through cement cracks and hardy wild plants resisting winter's bite.

18) The food explorer: the true adventures of the globe-trotting botanist who transformed what America eats

Author

Stone, Daniel (Daniel Evan), 1985-

Description

The true adventures of David Fairchild, a late-nineteenth-century food explorer who traveled the globe and introduced diverse crops like avocados, mangoes, seedless grapes--and thousands more--to the American plate. "In the nineteenth century American meals were about subsistence, not enjoyment. Agriculture yielded stable, basic crops like soybeans, corn, and barley, and few growers considered variety or flavor. But as a new century approached, appetites...

19) The re-origin of species: a second chance for extinct animals

Author

Kornfeldt, Torill, 1984-

Description

From the Siberian permafrost to balmy California, scientists across the globe are working to resurrect all kinds of extinct animals, from ones that just left us to those that have been gone for many thousands of years. Their tools in this hunt are both fossils and cutting-edge genetic technologies. Some of these scientists are driven by sheer curiosity; others view the lost species as a powerful weapon in the fight to preserve rapidly changing ecosystems....

20) Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

Author

De Waal, Frans, 1948-2024

Description

What separates your mind from that of an animal? Is it the ability to design tools; a sense of self; or the grasp of past and future? In recent decades these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence, offering a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals...