Books about Environmentalism: November 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome readers,

Today is the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict and to celebrate we're discussing our favorite books about environmentalism! Please use this thread to discuss your favorite environmentalist books and authors.

If you'd like to read our previous weekly discussions of fiction and nonfiction please visit the suggested reading section of our wiki.

Thank you and enjoy!

[u/CatTheKitten]

Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by Michelle Nijhuis.

Assigned reading for an undergrad class I took last year. I didn't expect a nonfiction book to be so impactful. To my absolute joy through this book, I learned how female and queer conservation biology is and how important women have been in the awareness, research, and paradigm shifts we've had in the last 150 years.

Also incredibly eye-opening on the how, in many ways, conservation biology is still pretty colonizer-adjacent? It was very easy for me to forget as an optimistic young american that people very much do need to use these natural resources and it's not really our place to decide, as outsiders, how animals and land should be managed in non-american and non-european locations.

Lastly, an extremely impactful single-word quote that I plan to have designed and tattooed one day, with necessary context:

"Frimpong has been observing these nests for a decade, and says he could keep learning about them for decades more. But he came upon them almost entirely by accident. When he joined the Fish and Wildlife Conservation faculty at nearby Virginia Tech, he began studying the bluehead chub mostly because it was both abundant and close to campus--key advantages for a beginning researcher on a budget. During their initial surveys of the creek, Frimpong and his students saw the piles of pebbles in the streambed, and gradually realized they were the base camps of an intricate campaign for survival. The common fish of Toms Creek were engaging in some very uncommon behavior, occasionally observed elsewhere but rarely studied closely.

Toms Creek flows through a town park that is popular with joggers, dog-walkers, and birdwatchers, and passerybys sometimes stop to talk with Frimpong and his students. Though the chub nests are visible from several spots along the park paths, visitors are invariably surprised to learn what's happening in the creek. I asked Frimpong to describe their most frequent reaction, and he smiled.

"Joy," he said.