Rachel Carson: A Life to Inspire

Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear
By age 11, Rachel Carson was a published author, with the appearance of A Battle in the Clouds in St. Nicholas Magazine. She always wanted to be a writer, though her subsequent life pulled her in many other directions. Linda Lear tells a compelling story of Rachel Carson’s early career as a marine biologist, and her sudden emergence as a bestselling author with the 1951 publication of The Sea Around Us.
But the most dramatic period lay ahead, culminating in the landmark book, Silent Spring, and her ensuing battles with the pesticide industry. She bore these responsibilities well, despite a series of health setbacks that made Silent Spring an excruciating labor. (Paul Brooks, Rachel’s editor, counted it as a miracle that the book was ever published).

Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature recounts the trials of Rachel Carson’s life, but also the great joys: her love of nature and the sea — and her constant sense of wonder (and obligation) that never diminished.

Rachel Carson will always be an indispensable author for the Rocky Mountain Land Library. We have a complete set of her books, along with several biographies for readers of all ages!

Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear, Rachel: The Story of Rachel Carson by Amy Ehrlich & Wendell Minor, Rachel Carson: Preserving a Sense of Wonder by Thomas Locker & Joseph Bruchac

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Exploring Home, wherever it may be

Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places

John Stilgoe, professor of Landscape History, has spent a lifetime studying the mysterious and complex inner workings of cities and towns. With this book, he encourages more of us to get out and explore our home ground. As an antidote to all the distractions of our digital age, Stilgoe prescribes the kind of unplanned exploration we all excelled at as children. Outside Lies Magic guides us toward knowing our common landscape better, from the electrical grid over our heads to the watercourses that once determined our histories — and no doubt will again. William Stafford, in his understated way, wrote that the greatest ownership of all is to look around and understand. Enjoy your local rambles — there’s a story around every corner!

and, from the Land Library’s shelves, here are some street-smart guides for all your explorations:

Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology by David Williams, The Sibley Guide to Trees by David Allen Sibley, Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, A Field Guide to Roadside Technology by Ed Sobey, The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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Planting seeds on the banks of the Missouri

Buffalo Bird Woman was born in an earth lodge in 1839, along the Knife River, in present day North Dakota. She grew up to be an expert gardener of the Hidatsa tribe, growing corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers along the fertile bottomlands of the Missouri River. In 1917, anthropologist Gilbert L. Wilson published Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians, a faithful transcript of his interviews with this remarkable woman.
In this book (since retitled Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: Agriculture and the Hidatsa Indians), Maxidiwiac (as she was known in Hidatsa) talks of field preparation, planting, harvesting and storage — along with the songs and ceremonies that lead to a good crop. You get a sense of what a social occasion gardening was. When the first green corn was plucked, the women and children would gather, breaking off a piece of stalk, sucking the sweet juice — “merely for a little taste of sweets in the field.“

Reading this book brings back a lost world, especially life beyond the garden rows:

Squash Dolls

“Little girls of 10 and 11 years of age used to make dolls of squashes. When the squashes were brought in from the field, the little girls would go to the pile and pick out squashes that were proper for dolls. I have done so myself. We used to pick out the long ones…squashes whose tops were white or yellow and the bottoms of some other color. We put no decorations on these squashes….Each little girl carried her squash about in her arms and sang for it as for a babe. Often she carried it on her back, in her calf skin robe.” from Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden

and here’s a few more excellent titles on Native American agriculture. There are many, many more in the Land Library’s collection!

Native American Ethnobotany by Daniel E. Moerman, Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation by Gary Paul Nabhan, and Pueblo Indian Agriculture by James A Vlasich

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Kindred Souls?

Yesterday’s post, The City Alive, ended with Joseph Mitchell’s day by day, season by season description of the Hudson River, as it slides by Manhattan. His evocative words, written from a very different place, brought to mind a passage that has been a touchstone for us since the Land Library’s beginnings. Here are the words of the Kiowa-Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday:

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.
He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.
He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk. — from An American Land Ethic in The Man Made of Words

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The City Alive

Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker writer, was the great wandering and listening soul of New York City. True, you won’t find any of his titles at local Nature Centers, but his sketches of the urban scene shows us a writer immersed in his home landscape. From Fulton Fish Market to McSorley’s Saloon, Joseph Mitchell observed his given plot of land keenly and compassionately, like the ideal naturalist that he was. His work, long out of print, has been preserved in a wonderful anthology, Up in the Old Hotel, and his work will always be a part of the Land Library permanent collection.

The Rivermen, from Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor

I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running — a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide — and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls as long as a half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.

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The Insect Man

Victor Hugo described J. Henri Fabre as the insect’s Homer, and Charles Darwin praised him as an incomparable observer. Born in 1823, Fabre spent his entire life in a small patch of Provence. A rare traveller, Fabre instead found worlds of wonder at his doorstep, describing the hidden lives of many a creature, with special attention paid to insects. Chronicle Books has published a wonderfully illustrated anthology The Passionate Observer, containing selections from Fabre’s massive Souvenirs Entomologiques.

The Land Library also has a full shelf of Fabre’s original works (translated to English), along with an earlier collection, Fabre’s Book of Insects.

And once again, not to be forgotten, our Waterton Canyon Kid’s Library has a half dozen young adult titles on the great French naturalist’s life and work. Here’s an especially good one:

Margaret Anderson’s Children of Summer is told by Fabre’s youngest son Paul, who was frequently enlisted in many of his father’s field studies. Paul tells of his life with Dad; a father who never lost the feelings of an ever questioning child. The living insect was his focus, their daily round so mysterious to us all. This is a wonderful book to encourage any young naturalist to seek out abundant life in hidden places!

FABRE on finally gaining his open air laboratory

“This is what I wished for…a bit of land, oh, not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favored by thistles, and by wasps and bees….here without distant expeditions that take up time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could contrive my plans of attack.” from The Passionate Observer

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RMLL’s Official Olympic Guide, Part II

More than just the thrill of victory & the agony of defeat is on display at this winter’s Vancouver games. Over the next many days, we’ll all see dramatic images sweeping down from high mountain glaciers to the lush rainforests of Canada’s Pacific Coast.

If this inspires you to visit British Columbia, or to simply learn more, here are some excellent titles from the Land Library’s collection that will aid your explorations. (Yes, there are many, many titles from beyond the Rockies on the RMLL’s shelves!).

Learning more about the First Peoples of British Columbia might be a good place to start. There are several good studies available of the Haida, Salish, and Tsimshian peoples. Ethnobotanist Nancy Turner has many excellent books to her credit, including Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples, a rich compendium of edible plants, from water parsnips to high-bush cranberry.

And here’s two intriguing mythological studies of the coastal Haida: A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst and Gary Snyder’s He Who Hunted Bird’s in His Father’s Village.

No story of British Columbia can be told without acknowledging salmon’s central part in this region’s natural and cultural history. Here’s two unique titles from the Land Library’s salmonoid shelf, along with a beautifully illustrated children’s book from David Suzuki:

Taking all of this in, and transforming it into art is the work of artist and author Emily Carr. The Land Library is lucky enough to have many volumes of Carr’s own writings, along with several collections of her artwork. We even have a few fun books on Emily Carr at our Waterton Canyon Kids Library!

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Official Land Library Guide to the Winter Olympics

inukshuk (plural inukshuks or inukshuit)
1. A structure of piled stones, designed to resemble a humanoid figure and traditionally constructed by the Inuit.
2. In the likeness of a human being.

Snow or no snow, the Vancouver Olympics are underway. We were excited to see the official 2010 Winter Games logo, based on the classic Inuit cairns that inhabit the arctic north. Maybe it’s the sheer simplicity of form & materials, but we’ve always loved the notion of inuksuit. (In fact, the Land Library’s logo of a simple rock cairn was inspired by the stark beauty of inuksuit.)

Were they used for navigation, or as a marker for hunting grounds, or possibly as a food cache? Here’s a few books from the RMLL’s shelves that can help you decide. And if you would like to learn even more, read about the work of Norman Hallendy, author and inuksuk scholar.

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No Child Left Inside

We keep adding great books to the RMLL’s Kids & Educators Library in Waterton Canyon. Here’s a wild life to fire up young naturalists for a lifetime of field discoveries!

The Wild Muir
Lee Stetson, editor

Here, in the great naturalist’s own words, is a collection of John Muir’s most thrilling adventures: encounters with bears and rattlesnakes, precarious rides on icebergs and avalanches, and that famous glacier hopping Alaskan trek with the dog Stickeen. Muir’s passionate love for wilderness and exploration shines through. Suitable for any age, this wonderfully illustrated collection is an especially exhilarating introduction to John Muir for any young adult.
The Land Library has many, many books by and about John Muir, for all ages!

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Healthy Food, Local Farms, & Stronger Communities

Food lies at the intersection of land and community. In recent years several authors (Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, David Mas Masumoto, Alice Waters, to name a few) have embarked on a wholesale re-examination of our complex relationship to something so vital, and culturally rich.

There’s a recent book that deserves to be on everyone’s list of essential reading: Mark Winne’s Closing the Food Gap: Resettling the Table in the Land of Plenty. Winne exposes the chasm between two food systems in America — the one for the poor, and the one for everyone else. Winne draws on his twenty-five year experience as the director of the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, but there are also telling stories from across the country on our blighted food economy, growing rates of obesity and diabetes, and other health problems.

But this book also finds renewed hope in thriving community gardens, farmers’ markets, CSAs, and other innovative approaches. Closing the Food Gap is alive with the voices and stories Mark Winne has encountered over a lifetime of grassroots work in this all important field.

The Jamaican Way
Lessons from the Watkinson Community Garden in Hartford, from Closing the Food Gap

“On my knees in the dirt one day, digging in my tomato plants, I looked up to see Mr. Marley and Mr. Bennett looking down at me, shaking their heads disapprovingly. I asked if there was something wrong. They said, “Mon, ya don’t plant tah-mah-tows that way!” and then proceeded to demonstrate what they considered to be the correct technique. I was in a quandary. Should I continue to use the tried-and-true method I learned as a child…? Or should I take the advice of these two Jamaican men now regarding me sternly? Suddenly, I remembered what my colleague Jack Hale had said: “The most important word in community garden is not garden.” I now plant tomatoes the Jamaican way.

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