The following list represents what the faculty in the Program for Environmental Studies considers to be the seminal books in the field. It was originally compiled during the spring of 2002, although it has been occasionally supplemented with additional titles as they have been proposed. We arbitrarily set the year 1990 as the cut-off for publication date for eligibility for this list. Any book that has been published since 1990 is still too new for its impact to be clearly known.
Nature(Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1839)Walden (Henry David Thoreau, 1854)Man and Nature (George Perkins Marsh, 1864)Land of Little Rain (Mary Austin, 1903)My First Summer in the Sierras (John Muir, 1911)Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (John Muir, 1916)An Almanac for Moderns (Donald Peattie, 1935)A Sand County Almanac (Aldo Leopold, 1949)Log from the Sea of Cortez (John Steinbeck, 1951)The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson, 1951)Wildlife in America (Peter Matthiessen, 1959)Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 1962)In Wildness is the Preservation of the World (Henry David Thoreau, with photos by Eliot Porter, 1967)Wilderness and the American Mind (Roderick Nash, 1967)Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (Edward Abbey, 1968)The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich, 1968)The Way to Rainy Mountain (Scott Momaday, 1969)Encounters with the Archdruid (John McPhee, 1971)Limits to Growth (Donella Meadows et al., 1972)Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered (E.F. Schumacher, 1973)Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard, 1974)Topophilia (Yi-fu Tuan, 1974)Ceremony(Leslie Silko, 1977)Nature's Economy: The Roots of Ecology (Donald Worster, 1977)The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Wendell Berry, 1977)The Arrogance of Humanism (David Ehrenfeld, 1978)The Death of Nature (Carolyn Merchant, 1980)The Ultimate Resource (Julian Simon, 1981)Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (William Cronon, 1983)Biophilia (E.O. Wilson, 1984)Deep Ecology (Bill Devall and George Sessions, 1985)Arctic Dreams (Barry Lopez, 1986)Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (Marc Reisner, 1986)The Control of Nature (John McPhee, 1989)The End of Nature (Bill McKibben, 1989)The Island Within (Richard Nelson, 1989)Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Roderick Nash, 1989)Governing the Commons (Elinor Ostrom, 1990)The Population Explosion (Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, 1990)The Practice of the Wild (Gary Snyder, 1990)