Reading list

Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts
Jessica J. Lee (2020)

Lee’s memoir documents her changing relationship with Taiwan as well as the island’s complicated colonial legacies, a reflection on the intimate ties between family history and the natural environment. – Angie Chau, Assistant Professor, Pacific and Asian Studies

"Names are rarely uncomplicated markers. So often they are born from the snares of conquest, from the declarations and misunderstandings of those who sailed from foreign shores."

As We Have Always Done
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

I think differently about the landscape of this city and this island after reading Nishnaabeg scholar Simpson. Indigenous lands as everything of meaning. – Elizabeth Vibert, Professor, History

“I stand up anytime our nation’s land base is threatened because everything we have of meaning comes from the land – our political systems, our intellectual systems, our health care, food security, language, and our spiritual sustenance and our moral fortitude.”

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn

The sciences don’t simply record the facts about nature. Instead, observation is shaped by assumptions scientists already bring to it. – Thomas Land, Associate Professor, Philosophy

The Natural Contract
Michel Serres

This work argues that we have reached a point in human history at which we cannot consider the world or nature any longer as mere background and ready resource to exploit, since that world is now pushing back against the combined weight of humanity’s actions. This book helped me understand that care for the natural environment is not just a matter of sentiment—or even ethics—but, rather, a matter of creating a space for nature in a renewed social contract. – Thom Heyd, Lecturer, Philosophy

“Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: here's something unheard of in philosophy.”

The Ruined Cottage
William Wordsworth

The Ruined Cottage profoundly complicates the relationship between natural beauty and the meaning of human suffering—suffering due to war, health, and poverty. – G. Kim Blank, Professor, English

I stood, and leaning o’er the garden-gate
Reviewed that Woman’s suff’rings, and it seemed
To comfort me while with a brother’s love
I blessed her in the impotence of grief.
At length upon the hut I fix’d my eyes
Fondly, and traced with milder interest
That secret spirit of humanity
Which, ’mid the calm oblivious tendencies
Of nature, ’mid her plants, her weeds, and flowers,
And silent overgrowings, still survived.
The old man, seeing this, resumed and said,
“My Friend, enough to sorrow have you given,
The purposes of wisdom ask no more;
Be wise and chearful, and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.

The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson

A climate fiction novel set in the near future that takes our multiple global crises seriously and yet finds reasons for hope: these are problems we can solve. – Christopher Douglas, Professor, English

“The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.”

Big Yellow Taxi
Joni Mitchell

I was three when Ladies of the Canyon was released, so I won’t claim that I can remember hearing the song for the first time, but I believe that listening to “Big Yellow Taxi” as a child inspired a lifelong interest in, and concern for, the natural world and its fragility. – Andrew Murray, Assistant Teaching Professor, English and Academic and Technical Writing Program

“They took all the trees put 'em in a tree museum And they charged the people a dollar an' a half just to see 'em.”

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Gumbs’ Black feminist eco-poetics offers everyone old and new ways to understand our relationship with our ancestors, kin, and the damaged world. – Simi Kang, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies

“Lissodelphis dolphins…How diligent your breath for staying deep. And all the noise that bounces off our lives. How powerful we are when we’re together. We could confuse the warships, scatter sound. We could change the entire story with what we know.”

The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature
William Cronon

Cronon points out that wilderness in the contemporary world is artificially created; that the world is so full of people, that every bit of the natural world is measured, fenced, bounded, and the only “untouched wilderness” left has been legislated into existence. – Misao Dean, Professor, English

“Learning to honor the wild—learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions. It means the deep reflection and respect must accompany each act of use, and means too that we must always consider the possibility of non-use. It means looking at the part of nature we intend to turn toward our own ends and asking whether we can use it again and again and again—sustainably—without its being diminished in the process. It means never imagining that we can flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions that history inescapably entails.”

Time's Anvil: England, Archaeology and the Imagination
Richard Morris

Combining archaeological and literary sensitivity, Morris's book has opened my eyes to the complex, culture-bound ways in which, from one generation to the next, we read and misread vestiges of people's lives on ancient landscapes. – Joseph Grossi, Professor, English

"If it is moot whether archaeology can give voice to the oppressed, it can at least help to restore their powers of decision. Whether the white stone was placed in our peasant's hand by his priest or his lover, whether it denotes Revelation's last things, whether it was something invested with immemorial meaning or emptied of it, the stone reflects intent, a thing done or imagined which puts us in the presence of what was mortal. Something rather than nothing, it is part of the flow from then to now, a place to start."

Unsustainable Inequalities
Lucas Chancel

This book powerfully analyses the connections between economic inequality and climate change, notably that the rich cause disproportionately more emissions. – Peter Dietsch, Professor, Philosophy

Fight for the Forest (O Testamento do Homen da Floresta)
Chico Mendes

This autobiography of assassinated Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes (1944-85) is an inspiring tale of social and environmental heroism. – Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Associate Professor, History

“We realized that in order to guarantee the future of the Amazon we had to find a way to preserve the forest while at the same time developing the region’s economy . . . We accepted that the Amazon could not be turned into some kind of sanctuary that nobody could touch. On the other hand, we knew it was important to stop the deforestation that is threatening the Amazon and all human life on the planet. We felt our alternative should involve preserving the forest, but it should also include a plan to develop the economy. So, we came up with the idea of extractive reserves.”

Marx in the Anthropocene Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Kohei Saito

Kohei's book masterfully demonstrates the co-constitution of economic and ecological crisis in the Marxist project of human emancipation from multiple oppressions within the capitalist system. – Thiti Jamkajornkeiat, Assistant Professor, Pacific and Asian Studies

Birds of the Northern Forest
James Fenwick Lansdowne and John Livingston

Long-time Oak Bay resident Lansdowne's stunning illustrations inspired me to look for beauty in my rather humdrum southern Ontario hometown. – Matthew Koch, Continuing Sessional Lecturer, History

"Our current sovereignty over much of the living world carries with it a profound responsibility"

Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
David Abram

Intimate, sometimes astonishing, this book explores the magic of paying attention to the world with embodied care rather than cleverness. – Chris Goto-Jones, Professor, Philosophy

“The contemporary person sits enveloped in a cloud of winged words fluttering out of his mouth, delighting in their colored patterns and the way they flock and follow one another, becoming convinced that he alone is in blossom – that his skull alone bears the pollen that will fertilize the barren field, that the things stand mute and inert until he chooses to speak to them.”

Arbol adentro
Octavio Paz

Mexican Poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998) made of a tree a kind of totemic presence in his work. His last collections of poems, entitled Arbol adentro (Tree Within, available in English) includes an eponymous poem where the motif of the tree blends dual realities: inside and outside, body and mind, waking life and the realm of dreams, world and consciousness. Perhaps it is through compositions like this one that we can better appreciate, poetically speaking, the secret bonds that reveal our connections with nature. – Dan Russek, Professor, Hispanic and Italian Studies

Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton

Catton overlays the inevitabilities of tragedy as a genre over an approaching environmental catastrophe, making a compelling case for our efforts, quiet and radical, nevertheless. – Amogha Halepuram Sridhar, Program Administrator, Academic and Technical Writing Program

The Overstory
Richard Powers

This novel brings to life the amazing interconnections of the forest and impressed on me, as never before, the urgency of the fight to protect old growth ecosystems. – Rachel Cleves, Professor, History

“There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”

1491: New Relevations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann

This work fundamentally shifted my way of thinking about human-environmental interaction in the past. The emphasis on diverse environmental management practices and our inability to "see" them archaeologically without decentering and decolonizing knowledge production within the field rings true not only for the pre-Columbian Americas but pre-modern societies around the globe. – Trevor Van Damme, Limited Term Assistant Professor, Greek and Roman Studies

"Understanding that nature is not normative does not mean that anything goes. The fears come from the mistaken identification of wildness with the forest itself. Instead the landscape is an arena for the interaction of natural and social forces, a kind of display, and one that like all displays in not fully under the control of its authors."

The Inverted Pyramid
Bertrand Sinclair

The Inverted Pyramid was nearly pulp fiction, aimed at a truly mass readership, and as a result its depiction of 1920s BC environmental politics can make contemporary readers wonder whether they really understand this province. Although this 1924 novel celebrates logging and loggers, it also celebrates BC’s environment and mourns logging’s impacts, as well as denouncing capitalist consumerism, industrialism, union-busting, and war. – Richard Pickard, Assistant Teaching Professor, Academic and Technical Writing Program

"Rod loved the cool green forest. It made him a little sad sometimes to see it so ravished. Wherever the logger went with his axes and saws and donkey engines he left behind a desolation of stumps and broken saplings and torn earth. But Rod was no sentimentalist. He knew that humanity does not survive by beauty alone. Timber is a utility. It must serve its turn. Nevertheless the artist in him suffered now and then at the havoc,—as a sensitive man turned butcher may perhaps occasionally revolt at his killing trade, despite the fact that man is a meat-eating animal."