The Best Books of 2022: Nature

Best Books of 2022: Nature!

As with science, so too with nature: in the modern moment, the news seems either hopeless or threatening or both. The news was full of species in danger, horizons on fire, and experts predicting various kinds of apocalypse. And correspondingly, a great many nature books of 2022 had subtly (or not-so-subtly) eulogistic undertones, as though more and more books of the genre were knowingly saying farewell. But not all! Some of them – perhaps tellingly, usually the ones with very small-scale, very local concentrations – brim with defiant hope. And whether hopeful or not, many of these books were first-rate. These were the best of them:

10 A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf Press) – Dorthe Nors’s travel memoir chronicles the year she spent on the North Sea coast, from the tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands, and in the course of the book’s sections, she reflects on many of those bleak, beautiful hours – and on both her own family history and the history of the region. Nors employs a prose line that’s often as crystalline as the subject, and the book as a result is intensely memorable.

9 Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores (WW Norton) – Dan Flores, author of Coyote America, broadens his canvas for this terrific new book about the almost impossibly profuse and diverse natural world of North America in the Pleistocene, a world full of wolves, bears, bison, mammoths, and thousands of other species … and about the incredible changes wrought on that world by the addition of one extra species: Homo sapiens. 

8 Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying Birds in Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann (TarcherPerigee) – Shaped almost as a gift to every armchair birdwatcher who looks dubiously on their more active colleagues out tramping in all weathers, notebook in one hand, binoculars in the other, this wonderful book by Joan Strassmann invitingly fleshes out the world of “slow birding,” which encourages those armchair birders to pay attention to their own immediate surroundings. And Strassmann’s lively descriptions of birds and their behaviors is likely to make converts.

7 How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill (Grand Central) – At the heart of Tom Mustill’s book is something that seems to have stepped out of a science fiction story: maverick entrepreneurs developing AI that will allow them to crack the code of cetacean communication. And Mustill chases this science fiction angle until even the most skeptical reader will be a believer. And the author’s descriptions of the “fieldwork” of testing these new technologies are surprisingly poetic. 

6 Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps by Seiran Sumner (Harper) – If using AI to communicate with whales sounds like science fiction, a book asking its readers to see the bright side of wasps sounds like blatant fantasy. And yet, that’s exactly the impossible task Seiran Sumner sets for herself in this wacky, wonderful book, which takes readers deep inside the world of these hateful little murder-beasts that are hated by gods and men alike. Sumner is a warm, enthusiastic writer, and she brings to light in these pages all the ways in which wasps are important to their ecosystems and misunderstood by all the innocent bystanders they savagely attack on beautiful summer days. And although this book certainly won’t make converts – some tasks are beyond even the formidable talents of a writer like Sumner – it’ll entertain even the victims of these infernal little monsters.

5 What Bees Want: Beekeeping as Nature Intended by Susan Knilans & Jacqueline Freeman (Countryman Press) – Any book with the sheer nerve to attempt defending wasps will necessarily take resentful swipes at bees, which have far better public relations teams. And this delightful, informative book by Susan Knilans and Jacqueline Freeman will add to that divide; it’s not only a vivid evocation of the world of bees but also a passionate call to preserve that world, which is under siege from human depredation on all sides. 

4 Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicolson (FSG) – Anyone who’s ever spent hours poking around in rock pools left behind by a receding tide knows the particular allure these impromptu little biomes have. Adam Nicholson’s eloquent new book takes a deep look at those rock pools and the life-forms that have evolved specifically for the liminal world that exists between the tides. Nicolson is wonderful at describing that world, and he also does a surprisingly effective job broadening its scope to include much more of the natural world.

3 The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty by Sy Montgomery (Atria Books) – The combination of a nature-writer with Sy Montgomery’s skills and a subject as arresting as the ancient sport of hawking is irresistible in this slim book, which is full of both vivid personalities (only a few of which are humans) and absolutely gorgeous descriptions of what it’s like to step into a working partnership with hawks in all their unknowable dignity. This is one of those little ‘bird-books’ that slips into a pocket and stays with you for a long time.

2 Pig Years by Ellyn Gaydos (Knopf) – This memoir of farming life is stark and surprisingly harsh; unlike many back-to-the-farm books of the 21st century, this one has no sheen of romanticism. And yet, through dint of her narrative skills, Ellyn Gaydos manages to make this bare-knuckled look at the sheer work of farming oddly eloquent and moving. The lives of the farmers, the workers, and the animals are portrayed in unsparing detail – this book will be a much-needed discouragement to many an aspiring DIY-farmer – but with an arresting simple beauty.

1 Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx (Scribner) – This slim new book by Annie Proulx, the best work of nature-writing in 2022, has both the beautiful writing and the sobering tone that characterized so many works in the genre this year. It’s a paradoxically lovely call for the preservation and restoration of the wetlands that perform so many vital ecological functions, as well as a short and quietly furious history of the wide-scale destruction that humans have visited upon these ‘waste’ areas over the centuries. The result is a work of urgent eloquence.