Literature Outdoors Sustainability

The Wild Truth: A Reading Journey for the New Year

By Paula Musto

It’s that time! Tradition calls for setting goals for the coming year. Here’s a suggestion: Let’s resolve to better educate ourselves on the myriads of challenges facing our planet and the creatures that call it home. To welcome 2025, I asked local wildlife enthusiasts for their favorite reads. Here are the picks.

Ardent environmentalist Helen Heckel, who teaches sustainability classes at UNC-Asheville and founded the local nonprofit Engage Globally, recommends starting with the much lauded The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book explains how humans have altered life on earth, posing a question that keeps some conservationists up at night: Could we be on the verge of a mass extinction? A cataclysmic disruption like the one that extinguished dinosaurs but this one man-made? Sixth Extinction is a decade old, but its message still applies.

For a less jolting read, Heckel suggests the highly regarded anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. This collection of essays offers a unique perspective from women at the forefront of various environmental movements worldwide who offer ideas on how we might find solutions (some that would radically reshape society).

The lethal flooding that devasted our region last year provided a lesson in the importance of clean water and sustainable waterways. To learn more about our rivers, Amy Finkler, development and engagement manager for Asheville-based MountainTrue, suggests a classic: Wilma Dykeman’s The French Broad. Published in 1955, the book examined contamination in WNC’s iconic river long before environmentalists sounded the alarm that led to creation of the federal 1972 Clean Water Act. For more on the river and its tributaries, MountainTrue staff also recommends Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time by John E. Ross, a Knoxville author who provides an updated look at historic abuses of the French Broad Watershed and how environmentalists fought—and continue to fight—to mitigate pollution.

Have you ever wondered how bats use sonar that exceeds the capabilities of human vision? Or why turtles can track the Earth’s magnetic fields? Rachel Muir, a former Sierra Club science advisor and descendant of famed 19th century naturalist John Muir, recommends An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. The book is a window into the lives of other creatures and their senses (often very different from ours) and how these attributes shape the animal world. “I found reading An Immense World not only an entertaining source for knowledge about other creatures,” Muir says, “but also a wellspring for wonder.”

Muir led the Greater Asheville Science-for-All Book Club for many years and maintains a long list of highly acclaimed titles, including Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller; Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson; and The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams.

The top pick of avid reader Winslow Umberger is The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World, a biography by Andrea Wulf of the German naturalist who is credited with creating modern environmentalism. “Between the 1820s and 1850s, he was one of the most widely admired public figures of his time,” says Umberger, who serves on the board of Appalachian Wildlife Refuge. “Humboldt was the first person to recognize human activity was impacting the climate … and a pioneer in understanding that everything is interconnected and ecosystems must be preserved. This is the foundation of modern ecology.”

For the future caretakers of our world, there are selections for all age levels. Umberger particularly likes Lynne Cherry’s The Great Kapok Tree, a modern fable with an important message for budding environmentalists: we need to preserve our rainforests. For a read that the whole family can enjoy, Umberger suggests the award-winning Some Babies Are Wild, the text by Marion Dane Bauer and adorable pictures by renowned wildlife photographer Stan Tekiela.

If you are an armchair adventurer, you will enjoy A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko. While the book is an often humorous account of the author’s ill-advised 750-mile hike through some of the toughest terrain in the world, the Grand Canyon, it’s a page-turner that also offers a stunning portrait of one of the nation’s greatest natural treasures and a plea for its preservation. I picked up the book as a casual read, but found it profoundly moving and learned much about the canyon’s history, geology and threats to its future.

Exploring the natural world through the eyes of environmental advocates will not only enhance your understanding of the challenges ahead but may well change your perspective and prompt new resolutions along the way.

Paula Musto is a writer and volunteer for Appalachian Wildlife Refuge which cares for injured and orphaned wildlife. If you find an animal that may need help, call the hotline at 828.633.6364. To learn more, visit AppalachianWild.org.

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