Is the best book on the environment a picture book you can finish in a sitting?

I’ve read a lot of books on nature. Most focus on facts, figures, and information that don’t help. To the extent they provoke emotion, they do so heavyhandedly, lacking genuineness or authenticity. If you’re explaining, you’re losing, as a former U. S. President said, and most books on nature explain.

I just finished a book, Over, which you can review online in its entirety for free. It’s mostly a book of photographs. By aesthetic standards like composition, color, line, and form, the photographs are beautiful. Like many great works of art, it says something I knew but in a way I didn’t know it could be said. It illuminates my understanding of myself, what human means, nature, beauty, and purpose-level parts of life.

By measures of what they evoke, I’d call them nightmarish but their subjects exist on Earth, not our dreams. The point is not to evoke nightmares but to create and clarify purpose and meaning.

Click here to read it for free

Here are a few images from the book, which also contains a few prose essays, but the pictures do the job. If you’ve wondered where humans stand regarding nature, this book will clarify.