Science journalist Wendy Williams, perhaps best known for her New York Times bestseller The Horse, turns her attention to humanity’s long-standing love of butterflies, those “flying flowers” that inhabit the natural world and have long inspired poets, artists and avid, obsessive collectors. The idea for this informative, thought-provoking account was sparked after Williams viewed thousands of astonishing butterfly specimens collected over a century and now housed at Yale University. Curious, she embarked on a two-year quest to investigate not only the insects but also our fascination with all things Lepidoptera. 

Williams is a consummate storyteller, and her narrative seamlessly integrates scientific facts with vivid portraits of characters as colorful as the butterflies that intrigue and inspire them. While some, like Charles Darwin, are household names, readers will also meet lesser known historical figures including Maria Sibylla Merian, whose artwork and observations provided scientific evidence of how a caterpillar emerges from its chrysalis to become a specific butterfly, and 19th-century Colorado homesteader Charlotte Coplen Hill, a mother of seven who discovered an incredibly detailed butterfly fossil.

Williams also teams up with researchers and citizen scientists to explore threats to butterfly populations, including monarchs, whose life cycles are dependent upon milkweed. She retraces the work that led to the discovery of monarch overwintering sites in Mexico and delves further into the decline caused by habitat loss, climate change and other factors.

While the news for butterfly populations is sobering, Williams urges us to never give up the work of conservation. She advocates for “the joining together of countless people of many different nations, across generations, in a united effort to protect at least one small joyful piece of the natural world to which we belong.” The Language of Butterflies is more than a small contribution to this crucial effort.

We are inundated daily with reports about the devastating effects climate change is wreaking on the planet. Just when we thought we had heard it all, former New York Times science writer Tatiana Schlossberg brings new issues to the forefront in her debut book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, outlining how our individual habits and the products we use play a significant role in the changing climate. 

Schlossberg’s investigative reporting skills are a huge asset in explaining how we got to this point, why it matters and what we can do about it. Full disclosure: She does not paint a pretty picture. The detailed scientific evidence and statistics she uncovers are mind-boggling and very scary, particularly the complexity of the consumer impact on the environment and how swiftly it’s altering our world. But she does her best to lighten the mood by mixing these cold, hard facts with witty prose.

She breaks the book down into four main sections of human consumption: technology and the internet, food, fashion and fuel. Most folks have heard about how food and fuel contribute to climate change, but technology and fashion are lesser-known culprits. The reasons behind the environmental footprint of these two industries are eye-opening, such as the enormous quantities of water required to grow cotton to make our jeans and the huge amount of power wasted by devices in off, standby and sleep mode (equivalent to a quarter of all residential energy, as per one study).

As pointed out by Schlossberg, what it boils down to is that many of our daily activities are “much more connected to each other, to global climate change, and to each one of us than we think.” Although she offers suggestions for many of the pressing issues, she admits that our ripple effect on climate change is confusing and that “it’s really hard to know the right thing to do.” As we continue to push the Earth to its limits, Inconspicuous Consumption is a call to action for our future success and survival.

Natural objects have fascinated, nourished, clothed and even healed people since the dawn of humanity. But as nature writer Edward Posnett points out in his debut, Strange Harvests, some of these extraordinary items are more enthralling than others.

In this unique curio cabinet of a book, Posnett discusses seven little-known natural wonders: eiderdown, edible bird’s nests, civet coffee, sea silk, vicuña fiber, tagua and guano. Many of these objects have been used and loved by humans for centuries, although some are “newer” than others—such as civet coffee, made from coffee beans digested and expelled by a catlike creature in Southeast Asia. 

Posnett’s fascination is evident as he unearths the backstories of these natural objects, comparing and contrasting their similarities and differences. Crisscrossing the globe, he visits the geographical residence of each object, meeting with people who have expert knowledge about cultivating, harvesting and utilizing it. 

One theme that runs throughout this book is exploitation—the exploitation that takes place whether you’re making luxury items such as fluffy eiderdown quilts or jackets from fine sea silk or vicuña fiber, or you’re harvesting the nests of certain birds to satisfy the huge market for this delicacy. Humans want these things and will jump through hoops to gather, curate and manufacture them into the desired end products for their consumption. But since they all come from nature, this comes at a price. Supplies are limited, and harvesting them can be detrimental to the animals or plants that provide them and to their environments. 

However, some items, such as tagua (a nut from a South American palm used to make buttons) and guano (bird droppings used as fertilizer), were eclipsed by postwar technology but are making a comeback because of their sustainability potential. This is the takeaway from Strange Harvests: How can we best use the natural resources we covet without exploiting them and damaging the earth? 

We reach for the stars and keep our eyes to the skies, but how often do we look below our feet and wonder what lies below the grass or sidewalks we tread on every day? What intricate networks lie just below our toes? Could we ever glimpse them? What could we learn by journeying through them?

In the mesmerizing Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane enthusiastically conducts us on such a journey, descending into solid rock to a repository designed to store nuclear waste in Finland, swimming down through sea caves in the Arctic and crawling into the “invisible cities” below Paris.

In Paris, for example, he and fellow claustro-philes follow a map that offers advice about passageways (“Low, quite low, very low, tight, flooded, impracticable, impassable . . .”), also naming places along the underground paths in the depths below (Crossroads of the Dead, the Chamber of Phantoms, the Chamber of Oysters). In England, Macfarlane traverses caves, learning “undersight” as he crawls through narrow spaces, “face forced into wet gravel.” Macfarlane also reveals the fascinating existence of what he calls “the wood wide web,” an intricate and mysterious network that joins below the ground to make forest communities. He introduces readers to Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who has discovered that an underground network of “mycorrhizal fungal species” links trees to other trees.

Blending classic stories of descent into the underworld—the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Aeneid, for example—with his own lucid stories of his experiences in geologic time, Macfarlane poetically concludes that “darkness might be a medium of vision, and descent may be a movement toward revelation rather than deprivation.” He discovers that every culture places into the underland “that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” As Macfarlane descends through some of these narrow passages in search of enlightenment, we often hold our breath and feel our hearts racing, but when he emerges we see with him the beauty of the world beneath our feet.

When a paleontologist writing about whales begins by quoting naturalist Henry Beston—“They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time”—you know you are in for a wondrous read. And Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson is indeed that.

Pyenson is the curator of marine mammal fossils for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and here he recounts discovering the fossils of whales’ ancestors and following today’s whales with tracking technology. He reveals evidence-based predictions about the future of whales, and his obvious passion for these magnificent creatures makes the scientific research enthralling. Readers learn that whales once walked on land (yes, with feet), blue whales were not always giants, and killer whales sometimes travel in packs, like wolves. Pyenson’s enthusiasm is contagious.

Pyenson confesses that “whales aren’t my destination: they are the gateway to a journey of discovery, across oceans and through time,” and he excels in taking his reader along on this journey.

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft carry whale-song recordings as greetings to alien life-forms, although their meanings are yet to be understood. Despite all that humans have learned about whales, these sounds remain as mysterious as their makers.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As descriptive phrases go, “busy as a beaver” is right on target. Most of us probably don’t give much thought to the second largest member of the rodent family, except perhaps when they become a nuisance by felling trees and plugging waterways in residential areas. But did you know just how integral beavers are to the environment?

In his intriguing debut, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb details the multitude of ways beavers impact the landscape. Their dams help create wetlands and water storage, reviving aquifers for farms and ranches and providing homes for a diverse assortment of flora and fauna. Without beavers, wetlands and meadows dry up, streams are altered, and countless forms of wildlife become homeless.

Through interviews with experts in the field, scientific studies, statistical analysis and his own experiences crisscrossing the U.S. and the U.K. to witness beavers up close and personal, Goldfarb explains how restoring these “ecosystem engineers” to their natural habitat can save tens of millions of dollars each year and help combat drought, climate change and other environmental issues.

Goldfarb delves millions of years into the past, explaining how much North America’s terrain has changed since its colonization. Trappers seeking lush beaver pelts brought these “hairy banknotes” to the brink of extinction. But conservationists saved and even reintroduced beavers to some areas in an effort to restore the land to its former status, and today a fervent group of “Beaver Believers” help spread the news that we need to live in harmony with this keystone species.

As Goldfarb reinforces, beavers are “nothing less than continent-scale forces of nature, in large part responsible for sculpting the land upon which we Americans built our towns and raised our food.” It’s a wake-up call that needs to be answered.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.