There’s no obvious connection to the birthdays of illustrious dead presidents or to St. Valentine. But for whatever reason, February seems to be a big month for books about the environment. LIME hasn’t yet had the chance to read these hot-off-the-press titles, but here’s a quick look at three books on Planet-related themes.

Novelist Suzanne Matson’s The Tree Sitter tells the story of a college junior who forsakes her cozy Northeastern world to join a group of tree sitters (a la Julia Butterfly Hill) in an Oregon forest. The group’s activities become increasingly violent, tragedy strikes, and the protagonist, Julie, must weigh “whether her own life is an even exchange for the trees’,” according to Publishers Weekly. The PW review said of Matson’s novel: “thoughtfully told, this story of the all-encompassing blaze of first love and an uneasy eco-activism is surprising and honest.”

For something completely different, journalist Erik Reece expands on his recent Harper’s magazine story to bring us Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. In his first book, Reece chronicles the almost unimaginable process of coal mining known as “mountaintop removal,” in which, over the span of a year, strip miners shear off the top of a mountain in Kentucky. PW called this an “elegiac book—much more than just an eyewitness report on ecological decimation.”

Switching gears again, William T. Vollmann’s new book Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres tells, in a way only Vollmann could, of Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth revolves around the sun. Without this understanding, much of modern science – including climate science – would not exist. Vollmann won the National Book Award for fiction last year.

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