Read the natural history classics

Natural history classics

In the face of this challenge, Living With Nature presents a recommended reading list of classic nature writing available online, arranged in chronological order.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature (1836). A great essay by one of history's outstanding poets and philosophers. A Web study text.

2. Charles Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). Perhaps no one else has influenced scientific thought so profoundly in the past 200 years as this English biologist. His most controversial work, On the Origin of Species, was published 20 years later, but Darwin formulated his theory of evolutionary change at the same time as he wrote this earlier work, an account of his journeys in South America, the South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia.

3. Susannah Moodie: Roughing It In The Bush (1852). This Canadian literary classic recounts a British settler's experiences homesteading in Ontario.

4. Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854). In one of the masterpieces of American nature writing, Thoreau recounts his year living by the sweat of his own brow at Walden Pond, and his reflections on the human condition.

5. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1855). A monumental expression of American mysticism in free verse. This is a 1900 version. You may prefer an annotated version with hypertext meaning and commentary.

6. Isabella Lucy Bird: A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Many will consider this the least important work on this list, and many would have considered Bird an unremarkable English woman until she broke with social convention and became a world traveler.

7. Catherine Parr Trail: Pearls and Pebbles excerpts (1894). Together with her younger sister, Susannah Moodie, Traill was an important influence in early natural history writing in Canada.

8. John Muir: My First Summer in the Sierra (1911). An personal essay of boundless enthusiasm for the outdoors.

9. Aldo Leopold: Excerpts from his works between 1925 and 1948.

10. Wendell Berry: "Another turn of the crank" (1995). Chapter 1 from his book, Farming and the Global Economy.

11. Barry Lopez: A Literature of Place (1997).

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