2025: Not a great year for environmental protections and climate communication, but a very good year in books. Here are a few of the eco-centric titles that we read and loved this year.

Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet is both an introduction to the field of road ecology and a gripping narrative about how streets, routes, and highways have strangled our world. It also offers a vision for mitigation, coexistence, and new ways to travel and share the earth.

Abrahm Lustgarten’s On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America has a harrowing title, but offers a detailed look at how Americans are already adapting to climate change, and how our population may shift over the next decades. It describes how climate change is, and will continue, to disproportionately affect our most vulnerable communities, but also how cities and economies can create opportunity for better futures amid the challenges.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger explores how plants communicate, make decisions, and adapt. It’s accessible and readable, even when it gets into plant physiology on a microscopic level. The author expects you to keep up with explanations of how plants use electricity and what their molecular relationships with bacteria look like, and the writing shines with love and appreciation for the weirdness and wildness of plants as their own form of life.

And, of course: Wild Philly: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Philadelphia by Mike Weilbacher is a wonderful guide that almost works as a fun, engaging textbook for Philly would-be naturalists. In this book you’ll get an overview of Philadelphia area geology and ecology, learn a little of the region’s indigenous history and language, and get some ideas for field trips and seasonal expeditions to explore local flora and fauna.

Bonus: For podcast listeners, Vanessa Lowe’s Nocturne invites us into beautiful and unusual nighttime worlds. For a starting point, we recommend the episode “Impressions,” about an artist who paints oceanscapes in the dark, and “Newt Brigade,” about one woman’s effort to save migrating amphibians, one at a time.

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Happy reading, and feel free to share your favorite environmental books and media of 2025 below!