I read so many books whilst writing Local. Here are some that had a big impact on me.

The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

For almost 40 years, Chet Raymo walked a one-mile path from his house to the college where he taught physics, chronicling the universe by observing every detail of his route with a scientist’s curiosity, a historian’s respect for the past, and a child’s capacity for wonder.

With each step, the landscape he traversed became richer, suggesting ever deeper aspects of astronomy, history, biology, and literature, and making the path universal in scope. His insights inspire us to turn our local paths into portals to greater understanding of our interconnectedness with nature and history.

Reconnection: Fixing our Broken Relationship with Nature

How did our relationship with nature become broken, why does it matter and how can we fix it? From a past in which we were embedded in the natural world, revolutions in farming, science and industry have seen the human bond with nature eroded with the promise of prosperity offering happiness and meaning in life. This mindset may have delivered comfortable living for many, but there is growing recognition that the root cause of wildlife loss and the warming climate is people’s disconnection from nature, which is also an important factor in our mental health. Yet solutions focus on technical fixes to treat the symptoms of that damaged relationship, such as reducing carbon emissions and increasing habitat. What we urgently need is a whole new way of thinking.

Reconnection explores our hidden links with nature through the science of nature connectedness, setting out a way to revivify the relationship across society. Here is a route to a meaningful life that unites both human and nature’s wellbeing for a truly sustainable future. What’s more, everybody has a role to play. From business leaders to conservationists, teachers to medics, from drivers to walkers, we can all reduce the damage we do and find new ways to bring nature into our lives. This timely book considers the problems scientifically, then offers simple, practical, positive steps for how we can all work towards a better world.

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

On Looking( Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes)

Alexandra Horowitz’s brilliant On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” On Looking is structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, with experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. She also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.

The Man Who Planted Trees

While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.
Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again. A young forest is slowly spreading over the valley – Elzéard has continued his work. Year after year the narrator returns to see the miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man’s creative instinct. miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man’s creative instinct.

Nature Near London

Nature Near London is a collection of observational pieces from locations near London at the end of the 19th Century. The depth of knowledge and of familiarity with particular places and particular species gives the impression that each small piece is the product of many years of observation.
His style of observation is a work in miniature cataloguing the most minute details; the dancing of a flower in the wind or the darting of a cautious trout. The chapters centre on a special place, a certain species, geographical feature or habitat everything from orchards and copses to rivers and streams.

The Almanac

Reconnect with the seasons in Britain and Ireland with this month-by-month guide to the world around us – including tide tables, sunrises and moon phases; garden feasts, wildlife and folklore; seasonal recipes, snacks and more.
The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2024 gives you the tools and inspiration you need to celebrate, mark and appreciate each month of the year in your own particular way.
Divided into the 12 months, a set of tables each month gives it the feel and weight of a traditional almanac, providing practical information that gives access to the outdoors and the seasons, perfect for expeditions, meteor-spotting nights and beach holidays.

Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life

How many of us sometimes feel that we are scratching at the walls of this life, seeking to find our way into a wider space beyond? That our mild, polite existence sometimes seems to crush the breath out of us? Feral is the lyrical and gripping story of George Monbiot’s efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living. He shows how, by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea, we can bring wonder back into our lives. Making use of some remarkable scientific discoveries, Feral lays out a new, positive environmentalism, in which nature is allowed to find its own way.

 

How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything

How Bad Are Bananas? was a groundbreaking book when first published in 2009, when most of us were hearing the phrase ‘carbon footprint’ for the first time. Mike Berners-Lee set out to inform us what was important (aviation, heating, swimming pools) and what made very little difference (bananas, naturally packaged, are good!).
This new edition updates all the figures (from data centres to hosting a World Cup) and introduces many areas that have become a regular part of modern life – Twitter, the Cloud, Bitcoin, electric bikes and cars, even space tourism. Berners-Lee runs a considered eye over each area and gives us the figures to manage and reduce our own carbon footprint, as well as to lobby our companies, businesses and government. His findings, presented in clear and even entertaining prose, are often surprising. And they are essential if we are to address climate change.

 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has continued to change people’s lives for over thirty years. A passionate and poetic reflection on the mystery of creation with its beauty on the one hand and cruelty on the other, it has become a modern American literary classic in the tradition of Thoreau. Living in solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, and observing the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the author reflects on the nature of creation and of the God who set it in motion. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is memorably beautiful and poetic, and insistently celebratory. Just pay attention, Dillard urges throughout, and you will find yourself ‘sailing headlong and breathless under the gale force of the spirit’.

Walden: or, Life in the Woods

Walden (also known as Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s life for two years and two months in second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau called it an experiment in simple living.
Walden is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, and manual for self reliance.

A Thousand Mornings

Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Mary Oliver is beautifully open to the teachings contained within the smallest of moments. In A Thousand Mornings she explores, with startling clarity, humour and kindness, the mysteries of our daily experience.

The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs

The ultimate guide to what the land, sun, moon, stars, trees, plants, animals, sky and clouds can reveal – when you know what to look for.

Eating Animals

Eating Animals is the most original and urgent book on the subject of food written this century. It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat. For good.
Whether you’re flirting with veganuary, trying to cut back on animal consumption, or a lifelong meat-eater, you need to read this book.

Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction – and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

 

Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape

A manifesto for revolutionising our food system.
You may not be aware of this – not consciously, at least – but you do not control what you eat. Every mouthful you take is informed by the subtle tweaking and nudging of a vast, complex, global system: one so intimately woven into everyday life that you hardly even know it’s there.
The food system is no longer simply a means of sustenance. It is one of the most successful, most innovative and most destructive industries on earth. It sustains us, but it is also killing us. Diet-related disease is now the biggest cause of preventable illness and death in the developed world – far worse than smoking. The environmental damage done by the food system is also changing climate patterns and degrading the earth, risking our food security.

 

The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Over the past decades, the term “Anthropocene” has climbed into the popular imagination – a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.

 

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.

 

The Forest Unseen

In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature’s path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life.
Each of this book’s short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands- sometimes millions-of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home.

 

The Unofficial Countryside

During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he discovered runs deeper than a natural history of our suburbs and cities. The Unofficial Countryside prescribes another way of seeing, another way of experiencing nature in our daily lives. Wild flowers glimpsed from a commuter train. A kestrel hawking above a public park. Enchanter’s nightshade growing through pavement cracks. Fox cubs playing on a motorway’s scrubby fringe. There is a scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. It is an inspiration to find this abundance, to discover how plants, birds, mammals and insects flourish against the odds in the most obscure and surprising places.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world – a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit our imaginations.

 

Local is available now, worldwide, in paperback, Kindle, and Audible formats.