Before she published Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote three popular works of natural history on the ocean, the best known of which is The Sea Around Us (1951).

Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action (1995) tells a powerful story about one community that looked to the law to protect it from dangerous chemicals. Another classic work of environmental literature is John McPhee's Encounters With the Archdruid (1971), an engaging meditation on the then-current conflict over land use.

In Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (1996), Mark Dowie chronicles the history of the movement with an eye to the errors that have kept it from realizing its full potential.