Bookshelf & Recommendations
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Marcy West
How the Kickapoo Valley Reserve came to be — a compelling account of the grassroots effort to protect one of Wisconsin's most beloved landscapes. West tells the story of community, persistence, and the long fight to preserve wild places for future generations.
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Tamara Dean
A beautifully written memoir of place, weather, and belonging in the Driftless Region. Dean's prose is precise and evocative — a love letter to a landscape that asks everything of those who choose to live within it.
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Rand Atkinson
A practical and urgent call to action grounded in ecological science. Atkinson makes the case that saving the planet is not a matter of grand gestures but of everyday choices, community action, and a clear-eyed understanding of how natural systems actually work.
Find on Bookshop.orgRobin Wall Kimmerer
A luminous meditation on the reciprocal relationship between humans and the plant world. Kimmerer weaves indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge to offer a new way of seeing — and being responsible to — the living world.
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Jane Jacobs
Still the essential text for anyone thinking seriously about cities, neighborhoods, and what makes public life work. Jacobs' observations about sidewalks, mixed use, and the "eyes on the street" remain as urgent as ever.
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Marc Reisner
The definitive account of water in the American West — its politics, its engineering, and its consequences. Essential reading for anyone concerned with water policy, drought, and the future of the Great Plains and beyond.
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Christopher Alexander
One of the most influential books ever written about design. Alexander's 253 patterns — from the scale of regions down to the placement of a window seat — offer a timeless vocabulary for human-centered environments.
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Octavia E. Butler
Butler's prophetic novel about community-building in collapse is not dystopian escapism — it is a serious inquiry into what resilience requires of us. Read it as civic literature.
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Dan Egan
A gripping account of how the Great Lakes — the largest freshwater system on Earth — have been altered, invaded, and imperiled by human decisions. Egan writes with the urgency of a journalist and the depth of an ecologist. Essential reading for anyone who lives in or cares about the Great Lakes basin.
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Peter Annin
Who owns the water? Annin traces the political and legal battles over Great Lakes water diversions — a story that is equal parts history, policy, and warning. As freshwater scarcity intensifies across the continent, this book becomes more relevant with every passing year.
Find on Bookshop.orgRichard Rohr
Rohr offers a profound framework for understanding how loss, failure, and descent are not detours from a meaningful life — they are the path. A quiet, essential book for anyone navigating the second half of life or the aftermath of difficulty. It reframes resilience as something that grows through, not around, hardship.
Find on Bookshop.orgDaniel Pink
Pink argues that the capacities that define great designers — empathy, story, synthesis, play — are becoming the most valuable human skills in an age of automation. A compelling case for why the arts, design thinking, and human connection are not soft extras but core competencies for the world ahead.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer is both a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and this book is a profound weaving of those two ways of knowing. She writes about plants — sweetgrass, asters, goldenrod, pecans — as teachers, as kin, as beings with something to offer us if we learn to listen. A book about reciprocity, gratitude, and what it means to live in right relationship with the living world.
Find on Bookshop.orgRobin Wall Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith
Monique Gray Smith's adaptation brings Kimmerer's luminous ideas to younger readers without diminishing their depth. The core teachings — reciprocity, gratitude, the intelligence of plants, the responsibilities of those who receive gifts from the earth — are all here, made newly accessible. A wonderful way to share this vision of the world with the next generation.
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Richard Louv
Louv coined the term "nature-deficit disorder" and made the research-backed case that children's disconnection from the natural world has real consequences — for attention, creativity, emotional health, and resilience. A book that changed how a generation of parents and educators think about childhood, place, and the outdoors.
Find on Bookshop.orgGabe Brown
Brown's account of transforming a conventional North Dakota farm into a model of regenerative agriculture is both practical and quietly radical. He demonstrates that healthy soil — built through diversity, minimal disturbance, and living roots — is the foundation of everything: food security, water quality, climate resilience, and farm profitability.
Find on Bookshop.orgAyana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson (Eds.)
An anthology of essays, poetry, and art by women at the forefront of the climate movement — scientists, farmers, lawyers, activists, and designers. What distinguishes this collection is its insistence on solutions, community, and the full range of human capacity. It is a book about what we can still do, and who we can still become.
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Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson reframes American history through the lens of caste — an invisible ranking system that has shaped every dimension of life in this country. Drawing on years of research and vivid storytelling, she argues that understanding caste is essential to understanding inequality, community fracture, and the possibility of repair. A book that changes how you see the built social world around you.
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Ibram X. Kendi
Kendi traces the intellectual lineage of authoritarian thinking — how ideas about hierarchy, control, and the suppression of difference have moved through history and taken root in our present moment. A rigorous and urgent work of intellectual history that asks how we got here, and what it will take to build something different.
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