Ecosystems & Habitats

A must-have book for walkers, sailors and everyone interested in the natural world, How to Read Water unlocks the secrets of water in all its forms....

How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? Research is now suggesting trees are capable of much more than we have ever known....

Follow global best-selling author Raynor Winn's journey across Great Britain exploring our relationship to the land and to each other....

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife....

One of the inspirations for the major motion picture Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley....

The nation’s greatest voice, David Attenborough, reads a brand-new edition of Life on Earth, now available as an audiobook for the first time....

The Brilliant Abyss tells the story of our relationship with the deep sea – how we imagine, explore and exploit it....

The story of a personal housing crisis that led to a discovery of the true value of home....

A new fully updated narrative edition of David Attenborough’s seminal biography of our world, Living Planet....

In 2015, England's last and loneliest golden eagle died in an unmarked spot among the remote eastern fells of the Lake District. It was a tragic day for the nation's wildlife, but the fight to restore the landscape had already begun....

Man’s struggle against the sea is a theme that has created some of the world’s most exciting stories....

In April 2018, seasoned adventurer Ben Fogle and Olympic cycling gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, along with mountaineer Kenton Cool, took on their most exhausting challenge yet – climbing Everest for the British Red Cross to highlight the environmental challenges mountains face....

Last summer, Katherine May was approaching 40, feeling overwhelmed by motherhood and lacking connection with others, lost in a world of inundation and expectation....

Mudlark (/'mAdla;k/) noun a person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbour....

Environmental writer Laurie King and international best-selling author Miriam Lancewood present a collection of narrative non-fiction stories and poems on the human connection with nature....

A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before....

The Garden Jungle is about the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement and in the soil beneath our feet....

This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands—and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place....

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose is much more utilitarian than that.... 

The Amur River is almost unknown. Yet it is the 10th longest river in the world, rising in the Mongolian mountains and flowing through Siberia to the Pacific. Colin Thubron takes a dramatic journey from the Amur's secret source to its giant mouth, covering almost 3,000 miles....

Collected together for the very first time, this is the complete series one and two of Life Stories, written and presented by Sir David Attenborough....

Threading together places and voices from across Britain, The Flow is a profound, immersive exploration of our personal and ecological place in nature....

Ben Law has lived as a woodsman in Prickly Nut Wood for over 20 years....

From James Rebanks, the Herdwick Shepherd, comes The Shepherd's Life, a story of the Lake District and its people which could redefine the literature of rural life....

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End....

Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated The River You Touch with a question as timely as it is profound: “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the anthropocene?” He answers this fundamental question of our time initially by listening lovingly to rivers and the land they pulse through in his adopted home of Montana.

The scenario we are facing is scary: within a few decades, sea levels around the world may well rise by a meter or more as glaciers and ice caps melt due to climate change. Large parts of our coastal cities will be flooded, the basic outline of our world will be changed, and torrential rains will present their own challenges. But this is not the first time that people have had to cope with threatening waters, because sea levels have been rising for thousands of years, ever since the end of the last Ice Age.

The seafood industry on the coast of Mississippi has attracted waves of immigrants and other workers, oftentimes folks who were either already acquainted with maritime livelihoods or those who quickly adapted to the resources of the region. For generations, the industry has provided employment and sustenance to Coast peoples. 

As a kid, Nina O'Brien spent all her summers at her grandparents' cabin by the beach at Stepping Stone Bay. Long, sunny days full of fun and laughter with her best friends, Leo, the boy from the boatyard next door, his older brother, Adrian, and local girl Maeve - and, as Nina grew older, the magic of falling in love with Leo. But one summer night changed everything, and those glorious days came to an abrupt end for them all.

Environmental writer Laurie King and international best-selling author Miriam Lancewood present a collection of narrative non-fiction stories and poems on the human connection with nature.

The Turning Tide is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance. Combining social and cultural history, nature-writing, travelogue and politics, Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints, invasion forces and furtive gun-runners, writers, musicians and fishermen. The divided but interconnected waters of the Irish Sea—from the narrow North Channel through St George’s Channel to where the Celtic sea opens out into wide Atlantic—have a turbulent history to match the violence of its storms. 

Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.” This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day trees still fulfill these roles for a good portion of the world’s population.

What would you do in a worldwide food shortage? Do you want to learn how to source organic-free food whilst enjoying time with friends and family? If you want to learn the number one most underrated survival skill, then keep listening….

At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood and all that was to come. But when the telephone rang, the news she received changed everything. Her eldest sister had died in a canoeing accident. Five years later, struggling with grief, the demands of being a parent-carer for her young son, and the impact of deeper austerity, life feels very different to the future she had imagined. A move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria offers Victoria and her family a chance to rebuild their lives.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer’s beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.