Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
10 best books like Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Barbara Hurd): Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn, The Future of Nature: Writing on Human Ecology from Orion Magazine, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, Summer World: A Season of Bounty, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009, Connemara: Listening to the Wind, Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest
| Author | William W. Warner |
| ISBN | 0316923354 |
I had long taken the Chesapeake Bay for granted until my grandparents began talking in earnest about selling their boat. On a trip down there this summer, they recommended this book as a way of coming closer to the bay. As the title indicates, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay...
| Author | Hannah Holmes |
| ISBN | 1596910917 |
William Cronon's essay "The Trouble with Wilderness" lays out a critique of the wilderness myth deeply ingrained in the American mind. The gist of the essay is that since humans are part and parcel of nature, it is not historically or ecologically sound to imagine "proper" ecosystems as without human...
The Future of Nature: Writing on Human Ecology from Orion Magazine
| Author | Barry Lopez |
| ISBN | 1571313060 |
The western mindset is arguably one of the greatest threats to the world’s ecological balance. Corporatism and globalization are two of the obvious villains here, but what part does human nature play in the problem? Since its inception in 1982, Orion magazine has been a forum for looking beyond the...
| Author | Kim Todd |
| ISBN | 0151011087 |
Before Darwin, before Audubon, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist known for her botanical illustrations, she was born just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition...
| Author | Bernd Heinrich |
| ISBN | 0060742178 |
“Bernd Heinrich is one of our greatest living naturalists in the tradition of Gerald Durrell….A national treasure.”
—Los Angeles Times
Summer World is an intimate, accessible, and eloquent illumination of animal survival in the Summer months from Bernd Heinrich,...
| Author | Steven Pinker |
| ISBN | 0618246983 |
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection...
| Author | Rick Bass |
| ISBN | 0547055161 |
The Wild Marsh is Rick Bass’s most mature, full account of life in the Yaak and a crowning achievement in his celebrated career. It begins with his family settling in for the long Montana winter, and captures all the subtle harbingers of change that mark each passing month — the initial cruel teasing...
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009
| Author | Elizabeth Kolbert |
| ISBN | 0547002599 |
I know 'green' is the new hot thing, but this collection seriously suffered from a huge overemphasis on articles about the environment. I'm happy to read them, but I also want to read about physics and neurology and mathematics and biochemistry and other fields I don't even know about! The articles in...
| Author | Tim Robinson |
| ISBN | 1844880656 |
In 1999, Tim Robinson established himself as one of Ireland's most brilliant nonfiction writers with the two-volume Stones of Aran, a tribute to the unspoiled wild of Ireland's Aran Islands. With Connemara, he creates an indelible portrait of a small corner of the world. From the unmarked graves of...
In this collection of natural-history essays, biologist Joan Maloof embarks on a series of lively, fact-filled expeditions into forests of the eastern United States. Through Maloof’s engaging, conversational style, each essay offers a lesson in stewardship as it explores the interwoven connections...
| Author | Carol Kaesuk Yoon |
| ISBN | 0393061973 |
Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus set out to order and name the entire living world and ended up founding a science: the field of scientific classification, or taxonomy. Yet, in spite of Linnaeus’s pioneering...
| Author | Gary Snyder |
| ISBN | 1887178279 |
Gary Snyder is a delight to read. His (clearly) gentle nature is introduced to the reader in his note in the front of this book , where he asks us to be "lean, compassionate and virtuously ferocious, living in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind."
I love his poetry, but have always been drawn...
| Author | Wendell Berry |
| ISBN | 1887178287 |
This short book of essays helped give me some focus on how to see the world and approach my living in it. I relay needed the “pick me up” it gave me after getting so worn down every day by the evidence of the inconvenient truth of the mess we’re in and worn down by the ineffective polarization sowed by...
| Author | Kathleen Dean Moore |
| ISBN | 1571312765 |
In this warm, stimulating brew of personal stories, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore uses the metaphor of an island to challenge the cynicism inherent in the Western worldview. A gifted storyteller with a sly sense of humor, Moore explores three separations brought to us by Enlightenment philosophers:...
| Author | Diane Ackerman |
| ISBN | 0393338754 |
"It's easy to live in the moment when you're immersed in Ackerman's glorious prose."—Washington Post
In an eye-opening sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, one of our most celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalists awakens us to the world at dawn. Diane Ackerman...
| Author | Amy Leach |
| ISBN | 1571313346 |
Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of...
