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Isabella Tree's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Isabella Tree recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Isabella Tree's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that in order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. In this "visionary blueprint for saving the planet" (Stephen Greenblatt), Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature. Identifying actual regions of the planet that... more
Recommended by Isabella Tree, and 1 others.

Isabella TreeIt’s bold, it’s prescient and it hammers the message home: the biosphere does not belong to us, and if we ignore it, we will eventually, inevitably, become the perpetrators of our own extinction. (Source)

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2

Three Against the Wilderness

Timeless tales about wilderness living.

Eric Collier's riveting recollections about the 26 years that he, his wife Lillian and son Veasy spent homesteading in the isolated Chilcotin wilderness made for an international bestseller and one of the most famous books ever written about British Columbia.

In the early 1930s, Collier and his family moved to Meldrum Creek, where the couple built their own log house and learned to live off the land. Fulfilling a promise to Lillian's grandmother to bring the beavers back to the area she knew as a child before the White man came,...
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Recommended by Isabella Tree, and 1 others.

Isabella TreeIt’s an adventure story, first and foremost, and beautifully written, but also a paean to the creative impacts of a keystone species. (Source)

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3
First published in 1949, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the...
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Isabella TreeLeopold wrote that one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. To me, that rings painfully true. (Source)

Mark BoyleI love many books, but I am in love with A Sand County Almanac. (Source)

Mike PhillipsIt speaks to the need for us to recognize we’re just as much a part of this planet as the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us. (Source)

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4
To be an environmentalist early in the twenty-first century is always to be defending, arguing, acknowledging the hurdles we face in our efforts to protect wild places and fight climate change. But let’s be honest: hedging has never inspired anyone.
 
So what if we stopped hedging? What if we grounded our efforts to solve environmental problems in hope instead, and let nature make our case for us? That’s what George Monbiot does in Feral, a lyrical, unabashedly romantic vision of how, by inviting nature back into our lives, we can simultaneously cure our “ecological...
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Recommended by Isabella Tree, Amy Liptrot, and 2 others.

Isabella TreeMonbiot pushed the boundaries of what rewilding should mean. (Source)

Amy LiptrotThis is a bold and radical book, which changed the way I look at the countryside. (Source)

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5
David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message -- a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment and wonders.
In The Song of the Dodo, we follow Quammen's keen intellect through the ideas, theories, and experiments of prominent naturalists of the last two centuries. We trail after him as he travels the world, tracking the subject of island biogeography, which...
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Isabella TreeQuammen’s wondrous peregrination of islands takes us on a journey of evolutions and extinctions in order to illustrate how like islands our continents have become. (Source)

Sean B CarrollThe book covers the role that islands have played in our thinking about how nature works. (Source)

TC BoyleA brilliant journalist who can tell scientific stories with the kind of panache you’d expect from a novelist. (Source)

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