2024 Book Recommendations
We asked the NNRG staff and board — notorious for thinking about forests as much off-the-clock as on — for the best forestry, nature, PNW, and environment-related books they read this year. The resulting list has some real gems! Scroll down to read the whole list.
A Forest of Your Own
Author: Kirk Hanson and Seth Zuckerman
Pick from: Nomination for Book of the Year by all board and staff 😉
“In this comprehensive how-to, authors Kirk Hanson and Seth Zuckerman explore all aspects of forest management–everything from how to evaluate a piece of land before you buy it through implementing long-term plans that may include establishing new stands of trees, harvesting mushrooms as well as wood, and protecting your forests far into the future through wildfire risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and conservation easements. Loaded with helpful tables and illustrations that address the pros and cons of various species and how to best care for wildlife and the land, A Forest of Your Own is a clear guide to the many rewards of ecological forestry.”
The Living
Author: Annie Dillard
Pick from: NNRG Board Chair Christine Johnson
“This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of pioneer life navigated by European settlers and Lummi natives in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.”
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World
Author: Katharine Hayhoe
Pick from: NNRG Board Member Grace Wang
“In Saving Us, Hayhoe argues that when it comes to changing hearts and minds, facts are only one part of the equation. We need to find shared values in order to connect our unique identities to collective action. This is not another doomsday narrative about a planet on fire. It is a multilayered look at science, faith, and human psychology, from an icon in her field–recently named chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy.”
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Author: Stephen Ambrose
Pick from: NNRG Director of Forestry Kirk Hanson
“From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a vivid backdrop for the expedition.”
The Overstory
Author: Richard Powers
Pick from: Board Member Grace Wang (and seconded by Board Chair Christine Johnson!)
“The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of–and paean to–the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours–vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.”
The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession
Author: Amy Stewart
Pick from: NNRG Director of Programs Rowan Braybrook
“Stewart populates this lively compendium with her own hand-drawn watercolor portraits of these extraordinary people and their trees, interspersed with side trips to investigate famous tree collections, arboreal glossaries, and even tips for “unauthorized” forestry. This book is a stunning tribute to a devoted group of nature lovers making their lives–and the world–more beautiful, one tree at a time.”
Exhalation
Author: Ted Chiang
Pick from: NNRG Executive Director Seth Zuckerman
“Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory. Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.”
Seth says: “Although this falls technically in the category of science fiction, like the best science fiction writers, Chiang uses imagined technologies to reveal deeper musings and even truths about humans and the societies we live in.”
Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman
Author: Patrick Hutchison
Pick from: NNRG Director of Programs Rowan Braybrook
“A memoir of the author’s journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, based on his wildly popular Outside Magazine piece. CABIN is the story of those renovations, but it’s also a love story; of a place, of possibilities, and of the process of construction, of seeing what could be instead of what is. It is a book for those who know what it’s like to bite off more than you can chew, or who desperately wish to.”
Damnation Spring
Author: Ash Davidson
Pick from: NNRG Board Chair Christine Johnson
“Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.”
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