Environment & Nature audiobooks

1491

By: Charles C. Mann

Narrated by: Darrell Dennis

Length: 16 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in... Read more

Erosion

By: Terry Tempest Williams

Narrated by: Terry Tempest Williams

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

Timely and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist

In Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams's fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America's public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of... Read more

The Orchid Thief

By: Susan Orlean

Narrated by: Jennifer Jay Myers

Length: 8 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

In Susan Orlean's mesmerizing true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested... Read more

What an Owl Knows

By: Jennifer Ackerman

Narrated by: Jennifer Ackerman

Length: 9 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

An instant New York Times bestseller!

A New York Times Notable Book of 2023

Named a Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly

From the author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination

With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls... Read more

How to Be a Good Creature

By: Sy Montgomery

Narrated by: Sy Montgomery

Length: 3 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet's rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy's life continually intersects with and... Read more

This Is Your Mind on Plants

By: Michael Pollan

Narrated by: Michael Pollan

Length: 7 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year

“Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review

From #1 New York Times bestselling author... Read more

The Intersectional Environmentalist

By: Leah Thomas

Narrated by: Leah Thomas, Hayden Bishop & Erin Walker

Length: 4 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

From the activist who coined the term comes a primer on intersectional environmentalism for the next generation of activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive, and sustainable change. The Intersectional Environmentalist examines the inextricable link between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and promotes awareness of the fundamental... Read more

The Sixth Extinction

By: Elizabeth Kolbert

Narrated by: Anne Twomey

Length: 9 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important work about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.

Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass... Read more

The Green Planet

By: Leisa Stewart-Sharpe

Narrated by: Roy McMillan

Length: 1 hour 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Puffin.

This is our Green Planet: a hidden world where plants care for other plants and can smell, taste, touch, hear and even . . . 'talk'.

Earth is dominated by plants, which outweigh all other life - from tiny duckweed floating in our ponds to giant sequoia trees towering above us. It's easy to take plants for granted, but we... Read more

At Blackwater Pond

By: Mary Oliver

Narrated by: Mary Oliver

Length: 1 hour

Abridged: No

Mary Oliver has published twenty-one volumes of poetry and six books of prose in the span of five decades, but she rarely performs her poetry in live readings. With At Blackwater Pond, Mary Oliver gives her audience what they've longed to hear: the poet's voice reading her own work. In this audio, she has recorded forty of her favorite poems,... Read more

The Great River

By: Boyce Upholt

Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan

Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

A sweeping history of the Mississippi River—and the centuries of human meddling that have transformed both it and America.Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. But European settlers... Read more

As Long as Grass Grows

By: Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Narrated by: Kyla Garcia

Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty... Read more

Sing Like Fish

By: Amorina Kingdon

Narrated by: Angelina Rocca

Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes—from an award-winning science writer

“Sing Like Fish is that rare book that makes you see the world differently.”—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salt and Cod

For... Read more

The Birds That Audubon Missed

By: Kenn Kaufman

Narrated by: Mack Sanderson

Length: 12 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Renowned naturalist Kenn Kaufman examines the scientific discoveries of John James Audubon and his artistic and ornithologist peers to show how what they saw (and what they missed) reflects how we perceive and understand the natural world.

Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with... Read more

Other Minds

By: Peter Godfrey-Smith

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in Other Minds

Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the... Read more

Less is More

By: Jason Hickel

Narrated by: Ben Crystal & Clifford Samuel

Length: 9 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to you by Penguin.

The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: DEGROWTH.

If we want to have a... Read more

Pastoral Song

By: James Rebanks

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Length: 8 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The acclaimed chronicle of the regeneration of one family's traditional English farmNATIONAL BESTSELLER * Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing * Named ""Nature Book of the Year"" by the Sunday Times * New York Times Editors' Choice * Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize * A BEST BOOK... Read more

The Weight of Nature

By: Clayton Page Aldern

Narrated by: Clayton Page Aldern

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

A New York Times Editors' Choice

A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book

A Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List Pick

A Sierra Magazine Must-Read Book

A deeply reported, eye-opening book about climate change, our brains, and the weight of nature on us all.

The march of climate change is stunning and vicious, with rising seas, extreme weather, and... Read more

The High Sierra

By: Kim Stanley Robinson

Narrated by: Kim Stanley Robinson

Length: 16 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

A “sublime” and “radically original” exploration of the Sierra Nevadas, the best mountains on Earth for hiking and camping, from New York Times bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (—Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder).
 
Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a... Read more

Lessons for Survival

By: Emily Raboteau

Narrated by: Emily Raboteau

Length: 9 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

This program is read by the author.

Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau uses the lens of motherhood to craft a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice—and what it takes to find shelter.

Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children... Read more

The Sea Around Us

By: Rachel Carson

Narrated by: Kaiulani Lee

Length: 9 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Published in 1951, The Sea Around Us is one of the most remarkably successful books ever written about the natural world. Rachel Carson's rare ability to combine scientific insight with moving, poetic prose catapulted her book to first place on The New York Times best-seller list, where it enjoyed wide attention for thirty-one consecutive weeks.... Read more

Storm’s Edge

By: Peter Marshall

Narrated by: Kenny Blyth

Length: 22 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

'A surprising page-turner, full of humour and startling details' THE TIMES 'If I read a better history this year, I will be lucky' TOM HOLLAND 'An astonishing tour de force’ SPECTATOR From Peter Marshall, winner of the... Read more

Pollution is Colonialism

By: Max Liboiron

Narrated by: Donna Postel

Length: 5 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land.... Read more

Of Time and Turtles

By: Sy Montgomery

Narrated by: Sy Montgomery

Length: 10 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

National Book Award finalist for The Soul of an Octopus and New York Times bestseller Sy Montgomery turns her journalistic curiosity to the wonder and wisdom of our long-lived cohabitants—turtles—and through their stories of hope and rescue, reveals to us astonishing new perspectives on time and healing.When acclaimed naturalist Sy Montgomery... Read more