The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025: A Collection of the Year's Most Insightful Essays on the Natural World, Climate Change, and the Wonders of Science Curated by Susan Orlean

by Susan Orlean, Jaime Green

“The best science and nature writing—which these stories represent—reminds us of the wide world and our connection to it, and the multitude of ways we make our place in it,” writes Susan Orlean in her introduction. This year’s collection masterfully guides us through exotic locations and groundbreaking research, leading us to consider complex and utterly fascinating questions about the world. How does it feel to camp in one of the hottest places on Earth? Is the ability to recognize and remember faces a sign of intelligence? What does it mean for a species to be wild or invasive—are city pigeons and rats less deserving than the coyotes that recently wandered down from Westchester? Encompassing the strangeness and, at times, severity of our world, these stories are urgent, vital, and ultimately inspiring. As Orlean eloquently observes, “Science keeps unlocking mysteries, revealing secrets, helping us heal. And as imperiled as nature seems, it remains amply, gloriously The world is still full of beauty.”

THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2025 INCLUDES: FERRIS JABR • EMILY RABOTEAU • RIVKA GALCHEN • BEN GOLDFARB • DAVID NAIMON • TOM MCALLISTER • KATIE ENGELHART • AND OTHERS

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Essays, Nature, Audiobook, Short Stories, Anthologies

298 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 21, 2025

About the author

I'm the product of a happy and uneventful childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland, followed by a happy and pretty eventful four years as a student at University of Michigan. From there, I wandered to the West Coast, landing in Portland, Oregon, where I managed (somehow) to get a job as a writer. This had been my dream, of course, but I had no experience and no credentials. What I did have, in spades, was an abiding passion for storytelling and sentence-making. I fell in love with the experience of writing, and I've never stopped. From Portland, I moved to Boston, where I wrote for the Phoenix and the Globe, and then to New York, where I began writing for magazines, and, in 1987, published my first piece in The New Yorker. I've been a staff writer there since 1992.

Reviews

[Aquila · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is full of fascinating and informative stories. I learned about bird calls, snake morphs, animal tracking, wildfires, breakthroughs in treatment for diseases, and so, so much more. Each engaging piece gave me a glimpse into a subject I knew little or nothing about and offered me a better understanding. I would recommend this to anyone that wants to be captivated by the world we live in.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I received The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025 from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Edie · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I have always been fascinated by science - I was a Physics major for a semester or two - this is the year I leaned into reading nonfiction, specifically about nature and nature related science. Is this collection of essays as brilliant as I think it is, or does it just happen to dovetail with my current interests? I don't know. What I do know is that I was hooked from the first to the last. Also, I appreciate finding new writers to follow and new publications to explore. The entries were researched enough to be interesting and well-written enough to be entertaining. Thank you to the contributors, narrators, editors - everyone involved in this endeavor. And to NetGalley for the audioARC.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this volume immediately after finishing editor Susan Orlean's excellent memoir, Joyride, where she describes her methods. She loves to uncover stories hiding in plain sight and also likes to be present in her narratives. By coincidence (the pieces are in alphabetical order by author), almost all of the early articles were in this vein. But later I discovered that Orlean was also generous to essays, musings and traditional third person journalism. In the end, this volume looked a lot like other installations in the series; not a bad thing as there is a reason I read these every year. One article that should not be missed is "The Smell Test" by Scott Sayare. It's about a woman who can detect very early stages of Parkinson's through her ultra-sensitive sense of smell. Stories about nature and medicine dominate, and I was a bit disappointed that physics and astronomy were not represented.

Thanks to Mariner books and Netgalley for giving me an egalley for prepublication review. This is becoming an annual tradition that I look forward to.

[Eduardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got this in TN to have something to read with coffee in my cabin. It’s a neat anthology of pop-science writing and essays collected into one yearly volume. Written by journalists, so these aren’t academic papers by any means. Standout for me was the worm-grunting story. I love worms. Highly recommend if you want something to read while pretending to WFH or need something fascinating in the mornings instead of scrolling your phone

[OG]

Annual industry read. Always a delight

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really great thought-provoking articles. Very intense to read them all together.

[Donna Huber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every year, I say I'm going to read that year's edition, and it always gets pushed to the bottom of the pile. Since the audio version was available for review, I thought I would give it a chance. I don't get to read as many science and nature essays as I would like, and it was great listening to them as an audiobook. Many of the articles appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, so they are easily accessible to non-science people. Read my full review at Girl Who Reads.

[Suz Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays in this anthology made me think about things I hadn’t really thought about before and think about things in new ways. I appreciated the variety in chosen stories. While every story made a worthwhile read, my favorites were as follows:

"Letting Naomi Die" by Katie Engelhart, which explores the notion of letting patients with debilitating mental illnesses, such as chronic anorexia, withdraw from treatment in favor of palliative care even if they risk dying.

"We Need to Rewild the Internet" by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon speaks to the danger of the lack of diversity in the internet infrastructure and looks to ecology for the solution. The importance of this topic is crystal clear after the recent Amazon AWS outage.

"The Snake with the Emoji-Patterned Skin" by Rebecca Giggs shows the ethics of the lucrative practice of breeding “designer” ball pythons for collectors who may view them more as pretty possessions than pets.

"Maui on Fire: When the Wildfires Came, a Young Couple Turned Toward Each Other to Survive Hawaii’s Deadliest Natural Disaster" by Erika Hayasaki, which shows how the community in Lahaina were not advised to evacuate to escape the deadly Maui wildfires. Nevertheless, the couple along with two family members navigated roadblocks, literal and figurative, to survive while their community was destroyed.

“The Whale Who Went AWOL” by Ferris Jabr introduces Hvaldimir, a beluga whale discovered in Denmark who was likely used by the Russian navy, and the people who he charmed into creating non-profits. “But rehabilitating a formerly captive whale is nothing like the triumphant leap to freedom in Free Willy; it’s more like helping a severely traumatized victim of abduction reintegrate with society.”*

“Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe” by Sharon Lerner provides disturbing insight into the effects corporate greed has on public health.

“When We Used to Glow” by Tom McAllister explores the decline of the lightning bug population.

“The Smell Test” by Scott Sayare: A woman’s keen sense of smell leads to the detection of diseases such as Parkinson’s using sebum.

In “This Is What It’s Like to Camp in One of the Hottest Places on Earth” by Leath Tonino, a man joins his friend for twenty-four hours in the Mojave Desert.

“After the Miracle” by Sarah Zhang shows how an innovative and costly drug indicated for cystic fibrosis changed patients lives in both positive and negative ways.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thanks to Mariner Books, an imprint HarperCollins Publishers, for providing an Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

*Please note that my review is based on uncorrected text, and the quoted material might be altered or removed from the final version of the book.

[Arathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started reading this book (a couple months back), this seemed to be an important read for these challenging times. Stories about life saving medicines and now having to face life (instead of death) seemed like a promising read about science and all the advances medical fields have been making and continue to make. Such important topics with the most complicated ethical dilemmas. However, as I kept reading, my own life and the lives of those around me started changing, and these concerns seemed more urgent. Save them at any cost doc, let us never lose the life of a person who means something to anyone.
That said, some of these essays made me stop reading this book entirely - I don't think any horror movie or book made me stay awake past my bedtime as effectively as "Letting Naomi Die." It made me wonder about trigger warnings for essay collections. "No Time to Die" made me upset in a strange way. People who want to live a long life despite no emotional insularity seem strange to me personally because I'm very much in the "I'm here for a good time not for a long time" camp- which means exercising and eating well despite my body's and my mind's well-documented revolt against both and their increasing ineffectiveness against all that ails me :)) "This Father Built a Gene Therapy..." made me mad. It made me think of sitting in a venture capital class listening to business leaders and students talk about the kinds of medical discoveries that can be and are profitable and the sickening feeling I get when I sit in on a lecture/talk about medical decision making or financial/economic models in the pharmaceutical fields. It's a crazy world out there to hear men talk about things they've never had to encounter personally.
This book could have had a stronger introduction, I think. I'm not sure about the other science and nature books, but the essays and short stories from this year (but not poetry) had some of the most excellent introductions. Maybe next year will be when the introduction will talk about all the things I was thinking about when I started this book. Overall, great book that will make you think (and write a very ranty essay or two).

thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the ARC

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a fan of compilations - it's a great way to immerse myself in perspectives that are new to me and sometimes in areas that I know nothing about. I've read earlier "Best of" books in a variety of genres but I was intrigued to see Susan Orlean as the guest editor for 2025. Her introduction admits that she avoided hardcore science in college so she could focus on literature and the humanities. But as an author, her research into the subjects of her books meant she spent a lot of time in various scientific realms. The selections in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025 bring together curiosity to learn more about our environment and our interactions within it with an appreciation for how an author can share their enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, and wonderings to a larger audience. There are 20 pieces so this is just a snippet of all the great work published over the past year, but this was an interesting and diverse cross section with each piece giving me something to ponder and consider. In a few pieces, I learned something completely new (in an area I didn't even know existed) while other pieces reframed issues for me forcing me to question some of my long-held assumptions. Some pieces sound the alarm about what lies ahead, others highlight the great strides we are making. Some pieces were straightforward journalistic narratives, others were philosophical observations of our living world. Many "Best of" books are a mix of great and not-so-great pieces, but, for me, each article in this book was compelling, thought-provoking and well-written. The pieces celebrate science, the value of questioning, and the sheer scope of things we don't yet know.

Many thanks to Mariner Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this e-arc.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading this series for a few years now, and this is the first year where I loved almost every essay in the collection. There were essays where I felt like I learned something like: "The Snake with Emoji-Patterned Skin" by Rebecca Giggs, "Pecking Order" by Rivka Galchen, and "The Smell Test" by Scott Sayare. There were also essays that really moved me like "Letting Naomi Die" by Katie Engelhart, "Maui on Fire: When the Wildfires Came a Young Couple Turned Toward Each Other to Survive Hawaii's Deadliest Natural Disaster" by Erika Hayasaki, and "After the Miracle" by Sarah Zhang. And the essays that left me angry and horrified: "Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe" by Sharon Lerner and "This Father Built a Gene Therapy for Hiss Son. Now Comes the Harder Part: Saving Others' Children, Too." by Jason Mast.

It was a fascinating collection that I enjoyed reading.

This was also my first time listening to this series in an audiobook. I loved the different narrators for the essays, and I thought the length of each essay was perfect for audio.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an early copy.

[Roberts Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025
Edited by Susan Orlean and Jaime Green

For more than a century, The Best American series has served as a literary compass, guiding readers toward the sharpest and most imaginative nonfiction of the year. In the 2025 edition, Susan Orlean , whose prose has long bridged journalism and art , curates a collection that feels both timely and timeless.

Across twenty essays, this anthology captures the restless curiosity and quiet awe that define modern science writing. From the fragile balance of ecosystems to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, the pieces remind us that science is not a realm apart from life , it is life, seen clearly.

Orlean’s editorial voice brings coherence to diversity: field notes from distant landscapes sit comfortably beside meditations on technology, biology, and the nature of discovery itself. Together, they form a conversation about our place in a world both endangered and expanding.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025 is not just a mirror of where knowledge stands , it’s a window into where wonder still thrives.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really incredible stories, most notably: the history and science of worm grunting, palliative care for patients suffering from eating disorders, avian intelligence, and the story behind 3M’s cover-up of “forever chemicals.”

That last one, in particular, is one every person should read or listen to. Everyone should know the execs and corporate lawyers who poisoned the world and got rich doing so, everyone should be appalled that a society can call itself civil while allowing 3M and other manufacturers of the hostile, allergy-inducing, cancer-causing, health crisis we all live in to continue operating with nary but a slap on the wrist. Liquidate 3M, let none of the people who knew what they were doing see the light of day.

Other stories were just alright/I wished they explored their subject matter further. The ball python breeding story, in particular, was interesting but had maybe one or two paragraphs exploring the ethics of the practice. I wanted more.

I listened to the audiobook version and the readings were generally good, unnoticeable, easy to listen to

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like essays, I know I like essays, so why do I never read them? (When I remember to think about it) I feel guilty for not reading The New Yorker or listening to NPR, because I know I should use the tools I have to stay more informed. Maybe I just needed a more curated list.

All the pieces in here were incredible, interesting and informative and well-written, even though the topics span a wide range. Several pieces related to medicine were a bit hard for me in places (other readers with chronic health issues may want to make sure they're not having a feeling-fragile day when reading those, but I do recommend them) but are worth the read.

I didn't love all of the narrators, but nothing was so obtrusive that I can specify now why I felt that way. One of the female narrators added emphasis by drawing out a word, which became annoying as it happened frequently. It sounded like this person maybe wasn't a professional narrator, maybe a radio person or other sound-adjacent professional. The other narrators were pretty good.

eAudioARC from NetGalley.

[Andrea Wenger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of science and nature essays explores the wonders and complexities of our world, from extreme environments to the nature of intelligence and the human impact on ecosystems. Through compelling storytelling and insightful analysis, these essays offer an urgent and inspiring look at the planet and our place within it.

This book mostly focuses on technology and the life sciences rather than the hard sciences. The introduction and first essay were a lot more political than I expected. The essays were all excellent but didn’t necessarily align with my interests, and I ended up skipping some. The collection will appeal to those with broad interests in these fields. I enjoyed the audiobook narration.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and engaging read. I listened to the audiobook, which switches between several narrators. I thought they were all easy to understand and clearly expressed the informative style that the nonfiction requires.

As most anthologies go, there are hits and misses for me from article to story. I was most entertained by the worm grunting one! As an ecologist and restoration biologist it was fascinating.
The less engaging ones for me were ones on medical conditions, but they were still informative and worthwhile reads. I recommend the audiobook, as it made it feel like I was listening to informational podcasts that enrich my understanding of the world, and keep me informed.

Thank you to Net Galley, Susan Orlean, Jamie Green and the various authors for the ARC of this audiobook, all opinions expressed in this review are my own.

[Cherryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

** Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review **
This anthology is as much about storytelling as it is about science, which is why it’s such an engaging read. The chapters range from deep dives into climate change to intimate accounts of animal behavior and human innovation. Each selection blends hard facts with a sense of wonder, making the science accessible without losing its depth. I was especially taken with the pieces that paired personal narrative with global issues. The variety keeps you turning pages, eager for the next discovery. A must-read for anyone who loves to learn through story.

[Denice Langley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collections of short stories are one of my most recommended books to family and friends. When asked for author recommendations, I always offer up the numerous collections in my personal library, as this is where I find so many wonderful authors that I would never have chosen. Short stories require an author to flex their writing skills, capturing readers in fewer pages than many chapters in a novel. They must immediately immerse readers into a story in progress and bring the characters to life so quickly, all the "meat" of the mystery is revealed in just a few pages. This collection includes the best of the best and will be appreciated by my reading circle as we choose new books to share.

[Kaitlyn Cotton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the collections that I have read this year, this one has been my favorite. It covered many nature stories ranging from cozy to stunning, as well as innovative, groundbreaking, and hopeful scientific discoveries. My favorite essays include “When We Used to Glow,” “Eleven Stills,” “After the Miracle,” “The Smell Test,” and “This Father Built a Gene Therapy for His Son. Now Comes the Harder Part: Saving Others’ Children, Too.” There were a few duds (to be expected in a collection), but overall I really enjoyed it and would recommend to anyone else with a love for science & nature.

Thank you to Mariner Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy.

This is the stuff helping me to still believe in the betterment of all humankind. I'm unsure what I was expecting going into the writings, but they definitely delivered it. Each entry is just enough to allow a quick read before bed or slow take over lunch and afternoon tea/coffee.
All were good; however, these stories stood out to me. The brackets are my short take.
Rewilding the Internet [how do we become free again]
3M gaslighting the dangers of PFAS forever chemicals [made me rewatch Silkwood]
Eleven stills [factoids on steroids]
Gutbucket [deeply spiritual]
After the miracle CF [hope in science restored]

[claudesbookcase · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher for this arc!
I’ve read a couple of the best American writing collections, and this one was just as good. I really enjoyed the one about ball python breeding as I knew nothing about that field before this.
4 stars

[Lisa Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fantastic. I admit I'm lazy and I love learning about things without doing the work myself, and it's fascinating to see what researchers actually do. Some of this was depressing but it was all important, and the narration was perfect for making everything even more interesting.

[Donna Luu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice collection of articles: I'm glad to see a wider variety (one past year was all climate change). The most memorable were the medical innovations: This Father built a gene therapy, The smell test, and After the miracle.

[Alex Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. Instead of focusing only on climate change (like last year), this year the articles are varied and really well chosen.

[Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Claudia Santaly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will probably be my favorite book of 2025, unexpectedly so! Absolutely amazing collection, and learned SO much from this book, can’t rec enough!

[JASARA HINES · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great yearly highlight of some of the most interesting science and nature articles. Very informative and thought provoking.

[Annie’s Daddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another good entry in the series. Readable and accessible science writing.
highlights
worm Chargers
do animals know they will die
the snake with emoji pattern skin
the whale who went AWOL
I tried to train my color vision
when we use to glow
smell test
after the miracle