Wood Lit

Deborah Lee Luskin has been a writer and teacher, a mother, a hiker and skier, and a gardener. At 60, she decided to become a hunter. Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress is the story of…

Every year, on the first warm, rainy nights of spring, salamanders and frogs migrate en masse to vernal pools and other wetlands in a phenomenon known as Big Night. On any given migration…

In a world where children are spending more time on screens, Forest Magic offers inspiration for young people to venture outdoors. Susie Spikol is a parent, educator, and author who feels…

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World offers an appeal to readers to acknowledge the gifts they receive freely through nature and their…

Climate change and loss of biodiversity are not far-off crises. They are happening in our own backyards – quite literally – and there’s a lot we can do there to address these…

A few summers ago, we removed two ash trees – infected by emerald ash borer – from our yard. Grass has grown where the trees used to be, but every time I look into my backyard, I…

W. John Kress takes on a worthy objective in Smithsonian Trees of North America: rebuilding humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Curator emeritus of the Smithsonian’s…

Anyone with an interest in Maine’s storied conservation history will want to add Loving the North Woods: 25 Years of Historic Conservation in Maine to their book collection. Karin R.…

In the introduction of Tree Trek: A Daughter’s Walk Through Grief, Stephanie Mirocha writes, “This book is the story of losing my father, that pillar of my life, and of trees, the…

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s Forest Euphoria is simultaneously a memoir, a natural history guide, a climate change manifesto, and an enthusiastic celebration of biodiversity and queerness…

Unsurprisingly, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s is about trees – the 100-foot white pines destined to be felled for construction materials, the bent limbs of trees that…

“Every walk had been substantially different,” writes Ted Levin in The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World, “each an endless manuscript multi-authored by…

After more than a half dozen years in academia and even longer suffering from chronic depression, Jarod K. Anderson quit his job. He was tired of often joyless work in the office and…

How does a poet write an ode to a viceroy if their reader doesn’t know what a viceroy is? How do they write an elegy for ash trees without explaining why they require an elegy in the…

At age 4, living with his family in Oklahoma, Eric Orff would spend as much time as he could catching horned toads and tarantulas. “I knew that someday I would work with animals and…

Laura Waterman’s latest book reflects on an extraordinary life as a wilderness steward, homesteader, mountaineer, and writer. It also offers heart-wrenching insight into the death of her…

Spending time in the woods can prompt reflection, especially when one has decisions to make. For forester and writer Ethan Tapper, who also pens the Forest Insights column for this magazine,…

In An Immense World, Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong reveals entirely new ways to think about the world around us. Reading this mind-blowing account of animal evolution…

Walden is Thoreau’s most famous book, but for some readers, the journal he kept for his entire adult life is the favorite. Editor Geoff Wisner has selected text from the journal for a…