There are so many narratives that seem buoyed by a desire to promote nature as a positive, transformative force. But I'm not sure how many books or films that have been released in the last several years — and subsequently received a critical mass of positive acclaim — are all that similar to Birding For a Better World. In large part because of how frequently it feels like these books and films hyperfocus on finding personal transformation through athletic feats and pushing yourself to the limit.

If mainstream media darlings don’t focus on competition with others, they're all too often about someone proving to themselves that it’s possible to overcome a seemingly impossible challenge or insurmountable health condition. As a disabled individual who has spent years struggling against physical limitations, that mindset — that my disabilities are just a hardship to be overcome in pursuit of some grander experience — feels super limiting.

And at heart, it all just feels like a nature-themed, man-vs-wild version of hustle culture.

It's easy to find examples of this narrative in documentaries that champion professional athletes. Not least is Free Solo — an Academy Award-winning film that captures rock climber Alex Honnold's struggle to pursue the first-ever unprotected climb up a 900-meter vertical route up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. In Honnold's hero's journey, the park may play a starring role, but it's also just a backdrop and an unforgiving obstacle course that demands to be conquered in pursuit of Honnold's quest for self-realization.

That feels easy to criticize. But beyond the world of professional sports and the hypermasculine, mainstream face of adventure tourism, many slower, more meditative inquiries also share the same overall theme.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson and his childhood friend Stephen Katz are unfit but otherwise healthy human beings who decide to challenge themselves by thru-hiking portions of the Appalachian Trail. They aren't professional athletes. They aren't at all prepared. But they push past their own personal barriers and rise to the challenge and seemingly demonstrate that, just like professional athletes, anyone can treat the wilderness as their own personal Everest and that the struggle and the physical pain are what help us change.

Books like Braiding Sweetgrass break from this mindset; they meaningfully advocate for us to decolonize our relationship with nature — and stop seeing it as an unwieldy force to be conquered. But so many other books do not. And while I don't want to make others feel like I think it's not meaningful to pursue their own metaphorical El Capitan, narratives that center physical effort at the expense of self-care just don't feel empowering to me anymore.

For all these reasons, it's a joy to discover that Molly Adams and Sydney Golden Anderson, the authors behind Birding for a Better World, intimately understand that. This should feel unsurprising — they previously founded the Feminist Bird Club, a group dedicated to making outdoor spaces more inclusive, particularly for LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disabled individuals. But it doesn't make it feel any less meaningful that their book puts less emphasis on nature as the backdrop for conquering adversity through physical feats and a lot more focus on self-care, social justice, and inclusive community building.

According to Birding for a Better World, birding is "the simple act of enjoying wild birds." It should be open to anyone, but the authors take care to demonstrate that it so often unjustly isn't. For example, organizers may advertise a "bird walk" even though walking isn't a prerequisite to enjoying birds. They may fail to provide accessibility information about a birding event's chosen location.

Or a group of birders may make it seem like birding is first and foremost a competition — a Pokemon-style quest only for adventurous, fit explorers up for a challenge. To outsiders, it may appear that you aren't "really" birding if the birds you spot are only from the residential vantage point of a kitchen window. And that spotting a house sparrow or a rock pigeon — some of the birds you might easily spot from the window of a house on a residential, urban street — just isn't as cool as identifying a rarer bird. But these are myths, the book points out, and as a community, we have the power to avoid these and other missteps and actively work to make marginalized communities feel welcome to experience and participate in the frenzied joy of nature.

It's a delight to me that the book doesn't simply focus a single chapter on social justice. Every chapter feels energized by it while still finding time to cover many of the bases you may expect to learn about in a beginner-oriented birding guide. For example, the book provides ample advice on how and where to find birds, how to identify them by visual and auditory cues, and all the gear and educational resources you might want to try out to improve your birding experience.

In addition to this 411 on where to find and appreciate feathery friends, the book provides mindfulness activities, journaling prompts, and short personal narratives from community members of different chapters of the Feminist Bird Club. Altogether, it paints a super positive picture of how birding can become a choose-your-own-adventure style escape that enables anyone to get out of their own head and into nature in whatever way feels most accessible and enjoyable for the moment.

Cover image by Bird Collective, an organization raising awareness about native birds that helps fund projects to conserve them.