How the world works

Nature & the planet

The living world, our place in it, and what we stand to lose.

Read your way in

  1. A tree keeps much of its life out of sight — Suzanne Simard · Finding the Mother TreeA glance
  2. A bird can sleep without landing — Jennifer Ackerman · The Bird WayA glance
  3. An octopus can taste what it touches — Peter Godfrey-Smith · Other MindsA glance
  4. How a beaver dam slows a watershed — Ben Goldfarb · EagerA glance
  5. Why wet peat keeps carbon put — Annie Proulx · Fen, Bog and SwampA glance
  6. What a coral loses when it bleaches — Steve Jones · Coral: A Pessimist in ParadiseA glance
  7. Fire is not one thing in a forest — Stephen J. Pyne · Fire: A Brief HistoryA glance
  8. Wolves did not simply change a river — Nate Blakeslee · American WolfA glance
  9. The looping lines that made climate visible — Andrea Wulf · The Invention of NatureA glance
  10. Maria Merian drew the insect with its food — Kim Todd · ChrysalisA glance
  11. Watch one tree change its calendar — Colin Rees · Nature’s CalendarA glance
  12. A tidepool rewards stillness — Rowan Jacobsen · The Living ShoreA glance

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The books behind it

  • Suzanne Simard, 2021. Why this book: Read the field story behind forest-network research, alongside the live scientific debate it prompted.
  • Jennifer Ackerman, 2020. Why this book: A vivid tour of bird cognition and behaviour that keeps returning to the experiments beneath the wonder.
  • Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2016. Why this book: Pairs close observation of cephalopods with a careful inquiry into minds that evolved far from ours.
  • Ben Goldfarb, 2018. Why this book: Connects beaver ecology to the practical, political work of repairing damaged watersheds.
  • Annie Proulx, 2022. Why this book: A concise ecological and cultural case for wetlands, written with anger, history and close attention.
  • Steve Jones, 2007. Why this book: Uses coral biology to open a wider, witty history of reefs without hiding their vulnerability.
  • Stephen J. Pyne, 2001. Why this book: Places human fire inside a long ecological history and resists the easy split between natural and unnatural.
  • Nate Blakeslee, 2017. Why this book: Follows individual Yellowstone wolves while making the human conflict around their return impossible to ignore.
  • Andrea Wulf, 2015. Why this book: Restores Humboldt’s journeys and the connective idea of nature that made his work so influential.
  • Kim Todd, 2007. Why this book: A measured biography of Merian’s observational work, ambition and difficult journey to Suriname.
  • Colin Rees, 2019. Why this book: Shows how recurring seasonal events became observations, records and evidence across centuries.
  • Rowan Jacobsen, 2018. Why this book: An inviting field companion to shore ecology, organised around the lives found between the tides.