From the seeds planted by the first Earth Day celebrated over 50 years ago, an astonishing variety of environmental shoots have sprouted and spread. As a result, an eclectic mix of titles is required to celebrate Earth Month in 2025.

This month’s bookshelf offers four different but related takes on the environmental holiday.

The first take updates readers on the top priorities of the first Earth Day: clean air, clean water, and clean, as in litter-free, land. With cleaner air, New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer observes, it’s easier to detect and survey our “living atmosphere.” The legacy and future endurance of the Clean Water Act of 1972 is the focus of “Waters of the United States.” And “Waste Wars” tracks the now “globalized business of garbage.”

The next three titles examine our proximate relationships with nature: the everyday nature “Close to Home,” the protected nature of our national parks and wilderness areas, including “A Place Called Yellowstone,” and the extreme nature we find at the “Ends of the Earth.”

In protecting places, we try to protect biodiversity, the focus of the third tranche of titles. This year’s selections focus on insects, penguins, and the invertebrate life forms of the deep ocean.

That first Earth Day was prompted, at least in part, by changes in the way we envision and experience nature. “Earthrise” revisits, for young readers, the cultural impact of the color photograph astronaut Bill Anders took of “our planet rising over the lunar horizon.”  The silence of Earth in space then leads to the “Natural History of Silence” by eco-acoustic historian Jerome Seur. And our Earth Day bookshelf ends in “The Moral Circle.” Does it make sense, philosopher Jeff Sebo asks, to exclude nature’s creatures from our moral deliberations?

The answer, of course, is “No.” But to deliver on it, we have to value Earth every day of the year.

As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.

Airborne: The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe by Carl Zimmer (Dutton Books 2025, 496 pages, $32.00)

In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind. Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on COVID and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us on every page as it reveals the hidden world of the air.

Waters of the United States: POTUS, SCOTUS, WOTUS, and the Politics of a National Resource by Royal C. Gardner (Island Press 2025, 312 pages, $45.00 paperback)

In 2023, the Supreme Court made one of its most devastating rulings in environmental history. By narrowing the legal definition of ‘waters of the United States’ (WOTUS), the court opened the floodgates to unregulated pollution. But the decision was also simply the latest in a long series of battles over WOTUS, and what was protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. Waters of the United States offers the detailed analysis necessary for lawyers or environmental advocates to understand the nuances of water policy, while spinning a compelling narrative for readers who have never cracked a law book. This unique mix of insights into environmental law, history, and politics is required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the nation’s water. 

Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown & Co. 2025, 400 pages, $32.00)

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that off-loads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report on this world. What, he asks, does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? About us?

Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door by Thor Hanson (Basic Books 2025, 304 pages, $30.00)

 
In Close to Home, biologist Thor Hanson shows how retraining our eyes reveals hidden wonders just waiting to be discovered. In Kansas City, migrating monarch butterflies flock to the local zoo. In the Pacific Northwest, fierce yellowjackets placidly sip honeydew, unseen in the treetops. In New England, a lawn gone slightly wild hosts a naturalist’s life’s work. And in the soil beneath our feet, remedies for everything from breast cancer to the stench of skunks lie waiting for someone’s searching shovel. A hands-on natural history for any local patch of Earth, Close to Home shows that we can all contribute to science and improve the health of our planet. Even more, it proves that the wonders of nature don’t lie in some far-off land: they await us, close to home. 

A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park by Randall K. Wilson (Counterpoint Press 2024, 432 pages, $34.00)

As the birthplace of the national park system, Yellowstone witnessed the first-ever attempt to protect wildlife, to restore endangered species, and to develop a new industry centered on nature tourism. Yellowstone remains a national icon, one of the few entities capable of bridging ideological divides in the United States. Yet the park’s history is also filled with episodes of conflict and exclusion, setting precedents for Native American land dispossession, land rights disputes, and prolonged tensions between commercialism and environmental conservation. Yellowstone’s legacies are both celebratory and problematic. A Place Called Yellowstone tells the comprehensive story of Yellowstone National Park as the story of the nation itself.

Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future by Neil Shubin (Dutton Books 2025, 288 pages, $32.00)

Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries. Renowned scientist Neil Shubin retraces his steps on a “dinosaur dance floor,” showing us where these beasts had populated the once tropical lands at the poles. He takes readers meteor hunting, as meteorites preserved in the ice can be older than our planet and can tell us about our galaxy’s formation. Shubin recounts unforgettable moments from centuries of expeditions to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand the polar regions. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—but its profound stories can change our view of life and the entire planet.

The Insect Epiphany: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture by Barret Klein (Timber Press 2024, 368 pages, $35.00)

Insects surround us. They fuel life on Earth through their roles as pollinators, predators, and prey, but rarely do we consider the outsize influence they have had on our culture and civilization. Their anatomy and habits inform how we live, work, create art, and innovate. Featuring nearly 250 color images—from ancient etchings to avant-garde art, from bug-based meals to haute couture—The Insect Epiphany proves that our world would look very different without insects, not just because they are crucial to our ecosystems, but because they have shaped and inspired so many aspects of what makes us human.

Mission Penguin: A Photographic Quest from the Galapagos to Antarctica by Ursula Clare Franklin (Bloomsbury Wildlife 2025, $35.00)

Following the loss of her husband, Ursula Clare Franklin embarked on a personal mission to see and photograph every species of penguin in its natural habitat. The result is a remarkable showcase of penguins – striking photographs accompanied by engaging text that details the penguins’ features and characteristics. Each chapter explores a new penguin species and details Ursula’s efforts to see and photograph these much-loved birds. Astonishing and informative, this book explores the difficulties all penguins face and explains how humanity’s actions have threatened their very existence. The devastating effects of climate change, Ursula warns, necessitate major conservation efforts to ensure that future generations can experience the joy of penguins.

The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life by Drew Harvell (Viking Books 2025, 288 pages, $32.00)

In The Ocean’s Menagerie, marine ecologist Dr. Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from St. Croix to Indonesia, to uncover the incredible underwater “superpowers” of spineless creatures. We meet corals many times stronger than steel or concrete, sponges that create potent chemical compounds to fight off disease, and sea stars that garden the coastlines, keeping the other species in balance. As our planet changes, the biomedical, engineering, and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures inspire ever more important solutions to our own survival. The Ocean’s Menagerie is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s adventurous career in science, and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

Earthrise: The Story of the Photograph that Changed the Way We See Our Planet by Leonard S. Marcus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2025, 160 pages, $21.99)

Gazing out the window of the Apollo 8 spacecraft on Christmas Eve, 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders grabbed his camera and snapped the iconic color photo of our planet rising over the lunar horizon. Not long after the crew’s safe return, NASA developed Anders’s film and released “Earthrise” to the world. It soon became one of the most viewed and consequential photographs in all of human history, inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970 and boosting the global environmental movement. For its young adult readers, Earthrise explores a key moment in U.S. history through the lens of an iconic photograph. Rocket-paced, compact, and highly accessible, Earthrise includes a trove of black-and-white images and related materials throughout.

Natural History of Silence by Jerome Sueur (Polity Books 2025, 240 pages, $22.95 paperback)

When we listen closely, silence reveals a neglected reality. Neither empty nor singular, silence is instead plentiful and multiple. In this book, eco-acoustic historian Jérôme Sueur allows us to discover a vast landscape of silences that trigger the full gamut of our emotions. He takes us from vistas resplendent with full and rich natural silences to the everyday silence of predators as they stalk their prey. To explore silences in animal behavior and ecology is to discover a counterpoint to the acoustic diversity of nature, throwing into sharp relief the grating reverberations of the human activity that threatens it. It is to attune ourselves to a world our human insensitivities have closed off to us, to take a moment simply to breathe and listen to the place of silence in nature.

The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why by Jeff Sebo (W.W. Norton 2025, 192 pages, $24.00)

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which nonhumans matter, how much do they matter, and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology? In The Moral Circle, philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies. Taking an expansive view of human responsibility, Sebo argues that building a positive future requires shedding human exceptionalism and radically rethinking our place in the world.