People can get bent out of shape trying to figure out what to get other folks for Christmas. That’s a shame. Time was, no matter what, a book catering to that special person’s area of interest or curiosity, or a novel by a favoured author, would always do.
These days not so much. A recent Gallup poll found North American adults are reading fewer books each year—an average of 12.6, a number lower than Gallup has measured in any survey dating back to 1990. On the other hand, as of 2023, global book-sales revenue was estimated at $78.07 billion, a 2.53-per-cent increase over 2022.
So, if more books are flooding the market than ever, and book sales are up, clearly someone is reading them. At least most of us know at least one or two bookworms we can buy for, so I’ll continue my twice-annual recommended science/nature non-fiction reading lists, 12.6 be damned. And you can either find or order all of these at local word-maven Armchair Books.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, by Simon Winchester, 2021, Harper Perennial
Land—whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city—is central to our existence, quite literally underlying and underpinning everything.
Writing with the usual verve, intellect and curiosity behind his previous multitudinous bestsellers, Winchester examines what we humans are up to with the billions of acres that make up the planet’s solid surface. Land examines in depth how we acquire terra firma, steward it, fight over it, and how we can—and occasionally do—come to share it. By exploring the notion of property—bought, earned, or received—throughout human history,
Winchester makes a fun read of a potentially dull subject by confronting essential questions: Who actually owns the world’s land? Why does it matter? How has it shaped us? and what it will mean for our future?
Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, by Ben Goldfarb, 2023, Norton
Some 65 million kilometres of roadways encircle the earth. The U.S., home to the world’s longest network, has 10 per cent of the total. Though pavement covers only one per cent of that country’s landmass, its ecological influence—the “road-effect zone”—covers 20 per cent.
Thus armed, conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb (Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter) explores the emergent and increasingly important science of road ecology, the study of how these ribbons so important to our lives and their attendant traffic patterns disturb (in some odd cases, enhance) the lives of plants and animals—and sadly end many of the latter. An easy, non-technical read constellated with critters, characters, ham-fisted human history and Goldfarb’s fun and funny pop-cultural allusions, we learn, unsurprisingly but informatively, that underpasses, overpasses, fencing and lowered speed limits can help save billions of sentient lives every year—and billions of dollars.
Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, Johan Rockström and Owen Gaffney, 2021, DK
You may have watched the Netflix documentary of the same name, narrated by David Attenborough, and wanted to throw yourself off a cliff. But digging into the written history and details about how we’ve exceeded several of Earth’s key planetary boundaries is a much more immersive—and grounding—experience. If you’re looking for one book that can explain precisely how the Earth works and what it’s currently up against, this is it.
In 2009, scientists identified nine planetary boundaries that keep Earth stable, ranging from biodiversity to ozone. Beyond these boundaries lurk tipping points. In order to stop short of these tipping points, the 2020s must see the fastest economic transition in history. Breaking Boundaries shows how societies are reaching positive tipping points that will make this transition possible: groups like the schoolchildren led by Greta Thunberg demand political action; countries are committing to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions; and one tipping point has even already passed—the price of clean energy has dropped below that of fossil fuels.
The text is accompanied by unique images of Earth produced by Globaïa, the world’s leading visualizers of human impact.
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, by John Vaillant, 2023, Knopf Canada
I interviewed John about this book in April, before Canada erupted into the kind of summer-long, coast-to-coast conflagration that, previous to the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of climate creep, would have seemed unimaginable.
I interviewed him again at the Whistler Writers Festival in October—a surreal experience given how many of the book’s winged messengers had come home to roost. But uncanny timeliness isn’t the reason Fire Weather—which uses the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire as a springboard to larger themes of humanity’s relationship with fire—is literally the non-fiction book of the year (No. 1 National Bestseller, winner of Britain’s prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize, shortlisted for Canada’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust prize for non-fiction, finalist for the U.S. National Book Award in non-fiction, one of the New York Times’ top-10 books of the year, etc.).
The “must read” entreat has far more to do with Vaillant’s ability to turn out definitive masterpieces, his previous works The Golden Spruce and The Tiger remaining acclaimed benchmarks of the genre. Rich in detail, far-reaching in scope, with expertly rendered histories of oil, the automobile and climate science layered in, Fire Weather is an equal masterpiece, but additionally bears a disturbing message—that the theoretical hothouse-Earth long predicted for our future is actually pounding on our door.
Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like.
