Rare Reads | Rare

In Climate Wayfinding, Katharine K. Wilkinson offers a compassionate guide for moving from climate grief, uncertainty, and overwhelm into purposeful action. Through essays, reflections, prompts, and the wisdom of climate leaders, the book helps readers look inward, outward, and forward as they find their own role in collective healing.

Ethan Tapper’s How to Love a Forest asks what it really means to care for a living, changing ecosystem, especially when good stewardship can require difficult, counterintuitive choices. The book reimagines forests as fragile and resilient communities and challenges readers to move beyond both exploitation and passive preservation toward active, thoughtful care.

At Every Depth takes readers from tidepools to coral reefs, kelp forests, clam gardens, polar waters, and the deep sea, showing how the oceans are changing and how people are responding. Tessa Hill and Eric Simons foreground scientists, coastal communities, Indigenous knowledge holders, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers. Like Rare’s fisheries efforts, the book emphasizes that ocean protection depends not only on science, but also on the people whose lives and livelihoods are tied to the sea.

Thomas K. Rudel’s Reforesting the Earth looks at why some forest conservation and restoration efforts succeed while others fall short, arguing that successful reforestation depends on coalitions, local stakes, and shared decision-making. By centering small farmers, Indigenous peoples, ranchers, government officials, NGOs, donors, and climate advocates, the book shows that reforestation is as much a social challenge as an ecological one.

In The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit reflects on the sweeping social, political, scientific, and cultural changes of recent decades and makes the case that change is not only possible but already underway. Her focus on interconnectedness, memory, hope, and participation offers a powerful reminder that transformation is shaped by who chooses to take part. This book speaks to the long arc of conservation and climate progress: the work of shifting behaviors, norms, and systems is difficult, but history shows that cultural change can, and does, happen.

Joycelyn Longdon’s Natural Connection reframes environmentalism as both a way of acting and a way of being, rooted in relationships with the living world and with one another. Organized around six roots—rage, imagination, innovation, theory, healing, and care—the book draws on the knowledge, resistance, and creativity of marginalized communities to show climate action as a shared responsibility rather than an individual burden. Its justice-centered, community-rooted vision strongly reflects Rare’s belief that people and communities are central to building durable solutions for nature and climate.