Books like Thought to Exist in the Wild by Derrick Jensen

Robin Wall Kimmerer blends scientific inquiry and Indigenous wisdom, illustrating how listening to plant and animal languages can deepen our ecological stewardship.

When a young lion at a city zoo escapes in an empty crate, he wakes up to find himself on the way to Africa. Now his animal friends—a strange menagerie including a giraffe, a koala, a squirrel, and a snake—must break out of the zoo, braving the concrete jungle of New York City to get him back. Young readers will love every fur-raising moment of this wild animal adventure that also features eight pages of full-color movie stills from the new CGI-animated Disney movie, The Wild

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target. Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

After her mother’s death, Sachie Wakamura is taken in by her estranged grandfather—the boss of a yakuza gang—and must navigate school life, family loyalty, and a budding romance with her gangster bodyguard, Rakuto.

Are trees social beings? Forester and author Peter Wohlleben makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

Isabella Tree’s Wilding chronicles the Knepp estate rewilding project in West Sussex, where free‑roaming grazing animals rebuild habitats and showcase a hopeful future for Britain’s countryside.