A list of four books and poetry focusing on human connectedness to nature.
The Overview: Meditation on Nature for a World in Transitions by Willow Defebaugh
Publisher: Atmos, Year: 2024
Information of note: This book offers four different covers. The book is printed on 100% recycled paper, and is a linen-bound hardcover.
Atmos summary: Metamorphosis begins within. In order to mend our relationship with this planet, we need more than sustainability: we need a change of spirit. From the reciprocity of trees to the long view of volcanoes to the patience of spiders, The Overview illuminates the wisdom of the Earth and its many teachers. An anthology of meditative essays from Atmos Editor-in-Chief Willow Defebaugh alongside immersive photography of ecosystems around the world, it’s a pathway for reconnecting with nature through reverence, balance, evolution, and healing.
With photography by Chloé Milos Azzopardi, Jacques Brun, Christian Cassiel, Laurence Ellis, Théo de Gueltzl, Collin Hughes, Annie Lai, Gleeson Paulino, Ben Toms, Vivek Vadoliya, Alba Yruela, and more.
Garden Physics by Sylvia Legris
Publisher: Granta (Poetry), Year: 2022
Garden Physic is a radical poetic movement through plant life. With her singular line, she journeys readers through an investigation of how we articulate our ecological surrounds in language through botanical histories.
With a structure that emulates the style of classic manuscripts, Legris’s book deploys humour, deep intellect, and a fanatical obsession with the potential of language, punching through the cliches of contemporary nature writing.
The whole book is a glorious meditation on the garden and the power of plants: how they can heal us, emotionally and physically, and how we communicate with them.
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram
Publisher: Random House, Year: 2010
David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous—hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring and truly original” by Science—has become a classic of environmental literature. Now Abram returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.
As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.
The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.
With the audacity of its vision and the luminosity of its prose, Becoming Animal sets a new benchmark for the human appraisal of our place in the whole.
Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking by Tyson Yunkaporta
Publisher: Text Publishing , Year: 2023
Right Story, Wrong Story extends Yunkaporta’s explorations of how we can learn from Indigenous thinking. Along the way, he talks to a range of people including liberal economists, memorisation experts, Frisian ecologists, and Elders who are wood carvers, mathematicians and storytellers.
Right Story, Wrong Story describes how our relationship with land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’
And, as he argues, story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or wrong story? This exhilarating book is an attempt to answer that question. Right Story, Wrong Story is a formidably original essay about how we teach and learn, and how we can talk to each other to shape forms of collective thinking that are aligned with land and creation.
Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy my last year's post about Animism & landconnectedness.
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