The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024

Award-winning environmentalist, author, and journalist Bill McKibben selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in the previous year.

“This was the most anomalous year (so far) in human history,” guest editor Bill McKibben writes, “the year in which the relationship between people and planet showed its most dramatic signs yet of unraveling.” The selections in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 reveal a trying year for our planet—from the Lahaina wildfire tragedy to the lush Amazon jungle slowly turning to savanna—while also celebrating the earth’s beautiful and mysterious ways—from the largest beaver dam on earth to the heroic innovation to prevent birds from crashing into Chicago’s expanse of glass buildings. These essays offer solace in trying times, showing a way for a better future. They are, as McKibben says, “a reminder that this world is still a lovely and deep place, well worth the fighting for.”

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 includes IAN FRAZIER • AMANDA GEFTER • DOUGLAS FOX • SARAH KAPLAN • BEN GOLDFARB • RAYMOND ZHONG • ALEX CUADROS • AND OTHERS

Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including the bestsellers Falter, Deep Economy, and The End of Nature, which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is also the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the winner of the Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called “the alternate Nobel.”

Jaime Green, series editor, is a science writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Aeon, Slate, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Astrobites, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.