Nature writers choose wonder and resilience, even in the face of climate change

To mark the fall member drive, Kerri Miller dips back into three conversations she’s had this year with authors who write about nature — and thus, wrestle with what they see climate change doing to our planet. How do we live richly in the midst of a great unraveling?

We start by revisiting the Big Books and Bold Ideas with Terry Tempest Williams, a writer and teacher at the Harvard School of Divinity. Her latest book is "The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary," which itself is a meditation on attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds.

Naturalist Robert Macfarlane's new book "The Book of Birds” — done in collaboration with artist Jackie Morris — is an ode to our avian friends. Macfarlane insists he's not a birder; he's just an appreciator. But he's thoughtful and poetic about what he observes. He says he wrote "The Book of Birds" to reignite a sense of wonder about about birds because "we will not save what we do not love."

Author Cal Flynn lives on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, so maybe it's no surprise that she's obsessed with wilderness. Research for her new book, "The Savage Landscape," led her to climb mountains, plunge into forests and helicopter to volcanoes. But more than adventure, Flynn was in search of what these wild places mean for humanity.

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