10 Vital Books about Wilderness & Wildness

Reading is the plutonium of human activity. Weighs the most but yields the most. Newspapers and PBS are not a substitute for reading, but who has the time to read? I don't mean this in the conext of a job or a family, but of a lifetime. How can you throw away eight hours on a book when you only have a single life to live? But that book gives so much! 

When cancer struck, I lost my sense of time beyond six months. Radiation, chemo, survival, memory, all of these things I could measure only in terms of six months, so fiction went out the window. I haven't read a novel in ten years. Luckily, I'd already put my time into fiction, so I don't bemoan the loss. But still I read every day. Sometimes I read subjects I cannot understand, or at least I do not think I understand, and then find osmosis has left me with some autistic-like comprehension of the topic; I yearn to remember a salient concept, but find myself howling in frustration.

But the weight pf a good book leaves its mark. Reading serves as a signpost, too. The more you ingest, the more you know which way to lean your arguments or thoughts; the shabby shacks of illiteracy blow away in the faintest wind of study.

For a sense of wild places on Earth and their importance to the future, I recommend the books below. They are an initiation into the defense and appreciation of wilderness.


  • Tree Where Man Was Born - Peter Matthiessen can be listed a dozen times for his beautiful and concise observations of the natural world, from Africa (Sand Rivers), to the polar regions (Antarctica with Eliot Porter), North America (Men's Lives about fishing off of Long Island), the Himalayas (Snow Leopard, probably his best book), but for the vicarious pointer of how to get out in the world and experience nature I'll take this book every time. Once I owned it, I made my appointment with Africa.
  • Arctic Dreams - His book "Of Wolves & Men" is also terrific, but Lopez found the best use of his voice for this portrait of the Earth's northernmost regions, showing its delicate and profound landscape in a passionate and poetic language.
  • The Prize by Daniel Yergin - This book was a bible of sorts for me, opening my eyes to the evils of the Rockefeller family and the behemoth called Exxon. Along with Anthony Sampson's "Seven Sisters," the book is still regarded 25 years after its publication as the best explanation of how oil profits have frozen alternative energy reserach and allowed a few fools from Texas to enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. Eisenhower, no great shakes intellectually himself, once write of the Texas oil men: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." How did this tiny minority of "stupids" hijack the American economy and terrorize U.S. citizens?
  • Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard - A hair-raising account about turn-of-the-century exploration in the Antarctic in general, and about a mid-winter nightmare to the emperor penguin rookery to collect eggs in an attempt to show the penguins and dinosaurs were relations. Short-sighted, short-limbed and thoroughly inappropriate for polar travel, Cherry managed to make himself indispensable to his bosses and comrades, and later told the best story of the blizzards and beauties of the forzen ends of the Earth. He was a neighbor later in life of George Bernard Shaw, and this book shows its neighborly influences: "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore...."
  • End of Nature by BILL McKIBBEN - Other than Dawkins' SELFISH GENE, this book was the wake-up call of my life. Don't bother with anythig other than the first chapter, which is all you need to set your blood on fire. What will global warming actually do? Make the Earth freezing cold and blindingly dark. Faster than you think.