10 Books to Gift a Nature Lover
Are you struggling to come up with the perfect gift ideas for the nature lover in your life? Well, look no further! We’ve collected some of our most popular and accessible nature books for you to choose from. From trees to beavers to reindeer; no matter what kind of books your nature lover likes, we’ve got the perfect gift for them!
Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow’s inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s – in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites and even some conservation professionals – Gow has imported, quarantined and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland.
In addition to detailing the ups and downs of rewilding beavers, Bringing Back the Beaver makes a passionate case as to why the return of one of nature’s great problem solvers will be critical as part of a sustainable fix for flooding and future drought, whilst ensuring the creation of essential lifescapes that enable the broadest possible spectrum of Britain’s wildlife to thrive.
Featured Excerpts
A Man, A Mission, and A Grumpy Beaver
“Mushrooms are having a moment. [A] natural sequel for the many readers who enjoyed Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.”—Library Journal
From ecology to fermentation, in pop culture and in medicine—mushrooms are everywhere. With an explorer’s eye, author Doug Bierend guides readers through the weird, wonderful world of fungi and the amazing mycological movement.
In Search of Mycotopia introduces us to an incredible, essential, and oft-overlooked kingdom of life—fungi—and all the potential it holds for our future, through the work and research being done by an unforgettable community of mushroom-mad citizen scientists and microbe devotees. This entertaining and mind-expanding book will captivate readers who are curious about the hidden worlds and networks that make up our planet.
Featured Excerpt
Below the Mushroom Cap: The Mycelium and Its Secrets
So You Want to Be a Mycologist
In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat.
Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate change. Ultimately, it’s about how we can learn to coexist, harmoniously and even beneficially, with our fellow travelers on this planet.
Featured Excerpts
The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers ad Why They Matter
Brigit Strawbridge Howard was shocked the day she realised she knew more about the French Revolution than she did about her native trees. And birds. And wildflowers. And bees. The thought stopped her—quite literally—in her tracks.
Dancing with Bees is Strawbridge Howard’s charming and eloquent account of a return to noticing, to rediscovering a perspective on the world that had somehow been lost to her for decades and to reconnecting with the natural world. With special care and attention to the plight of pollinators, including honeybees, bumblebees, and solitary bees, and what we can do to help them, Strawbridge Howard shares fascinating details of the lives of flora and fauna that have filled her days with ever-increasing wonder and delight.
Featured Excerpts
Learn how to call for owls, walk like a fox and expand your sensory perceptions. Wild Nights Out is a wonderful new hands-on guide for those who wish to take kids (of all ages) outdoors for fun, thrilling nighttime nature adventures.
Parents, grandparents, teachers and nature educators alike will discover a wealth of unique activities to explore the natural world from dusk till dawn. Alongside games, walks and exercises to expand our senses, storyteller and outdoor educator Chris Salisbury will bring this unexplored nocturnal dimension to life with lore about badgers, bats and minibeasts as well as tales of the constellations and planets to share around the campfire.
Featured Excerpts
How to Walk Like a Fox and See in the Dark
Moths: Nighttime’s Kaleidoscope
In a time of uncertainty about our environmental future—an eye-opening global tour of some of the most wounded places on earth, and stories of how a passionate group of eco-restorers is leading the way to their revitalization.
Schwartz explores regenerative solutions across a range of landscapes: deserts, grasslands, tropics, tundra, Mediterranean. She also highlights various human landscapes, the legacy of colonialism and industrial agriculture, and the endurance of indigenous knowledge.
The Reindeer Chronicles demonstrates how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how the restoration of local water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles can play a dramatic role in stabilizing the global climate. Ultimately, it reveals how much is in our hands if we can find a way to work together and follow nature’s lead.
Featured Excerpts
Rewilding: Restoration by Letting Go
Meet the intelligent insects, marvelous minibeasts, and inspirational invertebrates that help shape our planet—and discover how you can help them help us by rebugging your attitude today!
Remember when there were bugs on your windshield? Ever wonder where they went? We need to act now if we are to help the insects survive. Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Attenborough, and Elizabeth Kolbert are but a few voices championing the rewilding of our world. Rebugging the Planet explains how we are headed toward “insectageddon” with a rate of insect extinction eight times faster than that of mammals or birds, and gives us crucial information to help all those essential creepy-crawlies flourish once more.
Featured Excerpts
How to Rebug Your Neighborhoood
Just Add Bugs: Rewilding in Your Garden
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, the most commonly used weedkiller in the world. Nearly 300 million pounds of glyphosate-based herbicide are sprayed on farms—and food—every year.
Agrochemical companies claim that glyphosate is safe for humans, animals, and the environment. But emerging scientific research on glyphosate’s deadly disruption of the gut microbiome, its crippling effect on protein synthesis, and its impact on the body’s ability to use and transport sulfur—not to mention several landmark legal cases— tells a very different story.
In Toxic Legacy, senior research scientist Stephanie Seneff, PhD, delivers compelling evidence based on countless published, peer-reviewed studies—all in frank, illuminating, and always accessible language.
Featured Excerpts
The #1 Health Rule: Eat Real Food
Trees of Power fills an urgent need for up-to-date information on some of our most important tree species, those that have multiple benefits for humans, animals, and nature. It also provides inspiration for new generations of tree stewards and caretakers who will not only benefit themselves, but leave a lasting legacy for future generations.
Trees of Power is for everyone who wants to connect with trees. It is for the survivalist, the gardener, the homesteader, the forager, the permaculturist, the environmentalist, the parent, the schoolteacher, the farmer, and anyone who feels a deep kinship with these magnificent beings.
Featured Excerpts
Learning from Our Arboreal Allies
As a Franciscan brother and ethnobotanist who has often mixed mirth with earth, laughter with landscape, food with frolic, Nabhan now takes on a large, many-branched question: What does it means to be a tree, or, accordingly, to be in a deep and intimate relationship with one?
Drawing on his half-century of immersion in desert ethnobotany, ecology, linguistics, agroforestry, and eco-gastronomy, Nabhan opens up for us a hidden world that we had never glimpsed before. Along the way, he explores the sensuous reality surrounding this most useful and generous tree.
Mesquite is a book that will delight mystics and foresters, naturalists and foodies. It combines cutting-edge science with a generous sprinkling of humor and folk wisdom, even including traditional recipes for cooking with mesquite.
Featured Excerpts
The Power of the Mesquite Tree
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