Arguably the most important book of the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), won eight awards from conservation and women's groups and became a national bestseller.

Bill McKibben, in The End of Nature (1989), wrote about air and weather as Rachel Carson had about soil, plants, and insects in Silent Spring, both warning of irreversible damage if humanity keeps up the increasing pace of production and consumption.

Nature is one of the more complex words in the English language. To tackle the history of the transformation of ideas of nature from early Greeks to modern Americans, Clarence Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1967) is an indispensable resource.

What Clarence Glacken did for the concept of nature in 1967, Max Oelschlaeger did for the concept of...