But someone had thrown it away…

“One cold, windy morning early in spring, a bulldozer was pushing a big pile of garbage around a landfill, when it uncovered an empty plastic bag. The woman driving the bulldozer didn’t notice the bag and drove on. It was a bag for carrying groceries, just the color of the skin of a yellow onion, and it had two holes for handles. It was a perfectly good bag, but someone had thrown it away.” from Bag in the Wind

And, so begins Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s first book for children. A gust of wind lifts a billowy bag out of a landfill, and a “hero’s journey” of a sort begins as the bag responds to the eddies of neglect, re-use, and conservation. The bag in the wind becomes a character you care about, along with all the human lives it flies by — especially Margaret, a little girl who somewhere learned to “waste not and want not.”

Ted Kooser tells a memorable story of care and old-time values, and Barry Root’s warm watercolor and gouache paintings are a perfect complement.

Our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library is mostly full of books on the wonders of nature, but we also have many titles that harken back to the old lessons of waste not, want not. Books such as these:

Recycle! A Handbook for Kids by Gail Gibbons, and Garbage Helps Our Garden Grow: A Compost Story by Linda Glaser, a book that tracks a cluster of kids: scraping their dinner plates into a kitchen bucket, then out to the backyard compost bin, and eventually to the rich soil that results:

a rich soil, that is described so well in Raymond Bial’s A Handful of Dirt, which, of course, makes a perfect home for An Earthworm’s Life (a really fun & vivid book by John Himmelman).

Waste Not, Want Not — and Let the Cycle be Complete!

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A Gift for the Ears, Pulled from the Night

“I could literally feel the obsession of John Himmelman with these animals, and it is contagious. This wonderful, engaging book brings us up close, in terms of the sensual, intellectual, and historical aspects of night-singing insects and the people who love and study them. Cricket Radio…will open up a new window to the natural world that is available to almost everyone, everywhere.” — Bernd Heinrich

Here’s a wonderful new book that we’ll keep close at hand this summer, as night time temperatures soar, and the steady chirp of crickets lulls us to sleep. John Himmelman’s Cricket Radio: Tuning in the Night-Singing Insects vividly brings to life the songs of crickets and katydids, and their constant chorus of lures and warnings.

Himmelman describes a rich and complex natural history behind the sounds we often relegate to background chatter. Cricket Radio is a book that will teach you to listen with new ears. As John Himmelman writes: “Consider yourselves among the fortunate who can pull from the night a gift for the ears freely given.“

John Himmelman is a veteran cricketeer, and the author of several books, including his Guide to Night-Singing Insects of the Northeast (also pictured above). And here’s a few more related books from the Land Library’s entomology shelves:

Crickets and Katydids, Concerts and Solos by Vincent Dethier (a Land Library favorite and the subject of an earlier post), Field Guide to Grasshoppers, Katydids, and Crickets of the United States by John L. Capinera, et.al, Insect Musicians and Cricket Champions of China by Berthold Laufer (a wonderful & quirky volume that we stumbled across in a dusty used bookstore in Chicago), which became the inspiration for a more recent study of the cultural aspects of singing insects:

Insect Musicians & Cricket Champions: A Cultural History of Singing Insects in China and Japan by Lisa Gail Ryan.

For more on the fascinating world of insects, follow these links!

–The Singing Insects of North America

–The Insect Man: The Life & Times of J. Henri Fabre

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The Little Known Bookends of a Remarkable Life

“The Origin of Species is without a doubt the most famous book in science…but to remember Darwin for that magnum opus alone would be as foolish as to celebrate Shakespeare only as the author of Hamlet. His lifelong labours — six million words in nineteen published works, hundreds of scientific papers, and fourteen thousand letters — generated an archipelago of information, a set of connected observations that together form a harmonious whole. Biology emerged from that gargantuan effort as a unitary subject, linked by the idea of common ancestry, of evolution.” — from The Darwin Archipelago by Steve Jones.

Even the most famous of lives resists easy analysis and final judgments. Truth be told, all lives are endlessly illusive and far richer than we can imagine. That might explain why we especially love these two books on Charles Darwin, one of the most studied-over, written-about figures in modern times.

While acknowledging Darwin’s most famous book, evolutionary biologist Steve Jones instead focuses on Darwin’s neglected later works, in his just published book, The Darwin Archipelago: The Naturalist’s Career Beyond Origin of Species. Darwin’s later works (& obsessions!) were distinct, and seemingly unconnected: The Descent of Man, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Yet Jones sees the connection:

“His literary canon makes sense only when considered as a whole. At first sight it’s subjects seem disconnected…but in truth all share a theme: the power of small means, given time, to produce gigantic ends.”

But before there can be a literary canon, there’s the days of exploration, of stumbling around, of slowly finding your way, right? If The Darwin Archipelago tells the story of Darwin’s later years, luckily there’s an equally fascinating recent book that describes the step-by-step unplanned evolution of a young naturalist with a whole world ahead of him: Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks. Haupt is a gifted writer, and her fresh insights into Darwin as a young, uncertain man made her book one of the all-time favorites of the Land Library’s monthly Book Club. Here’s a glimpse at the unique contributions of Haupt’s book:

“Darwin’s very personal scientific methods grew out of the observations contained in his field notes, and in their creases he foists upon us his strict but beautiful maxim. Nothing in the natural world is beneath our notice — he almost whacks us on the head with it. Nothing.”

Over the years, the Land Library’s selection of books by (and about) Charles Darwin have grown from a couple of shelves to well over two bookcases. There’s no good way to represent those books here, except to highlight two recent volumes, published during Darwin’s 2009 bicentennial year, both excellent places to begin your explorations!

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From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin’s Four Great Books (The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals), with an introduction by E.O. Wilson, and Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z by Richard Milner, a 500-page compendium of all-things Darwin, and the scientific revolution he helped ignite.

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Wild Horses Running Free

“Wild horses, with swiftness, strength, and freedom, have always had the power to evoke passion. From Lascaux’s cave artists in southwestern France fifteen thousand years ago to modern America, the image of the wild horse running free on an open plain has inspired the human spirit and captured the soul like few other things in nature.” – J. Edward de Steiguer

Their origins can be traced to the prehistoric savannas of North America, but by the time of the Spanish conquistadors, no horse had galloped across America’s landscape for over 18,000 years. With the Spanish’s unwitting “re-introduction” of horses, the modern era of the American horse began. In short order, the horse became central to both Native American culture and the ongoing history of the American West.

The University of Arizona has just published a thought-provoking and wide-ranging history of this great icon of the West — J. Edward de Steiguer’s Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America’s Mustangs. De Steiguer traces the horse’s deep evolutionary past, along with its natural history and behavior; all leading up to an detailed look at the mustang’s current tenuous hold on our western lands. How far should management of our public lands go, and do we still have room for wild horses to roam?

Wild Horses of the West tackles these tough questions, and along the way we meet many remarkable characters, including Velma Johnstone, better known as Wild Horse Annie, a wild horse advocate whose life-long passion finally found voice in the halls of Congress:

Velma Johnstone was recently the subject of a first full-length biography: Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs by David Cruise & Alison Griffiths. One of the Land Library’s favorite books on wild horses is Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. (We were fortunate enough to have Deanne Stillman read from Mustang at a memorable Rocky Mountain Land Series program).

Here’s a few more excellent titles from the Land Library’s shelves!

The American Mustang Guidebook: History, Behavior, and State-by-State Directions on Where to Best View America’s Wild Horses by Lisa Dines, Honest Horses: Wild Horses in the Great Basin by Paula Morin, Nobody’s Horses: The Dramatic Rescue of the Wild Herd of White Sands by Don Hoglund.

And here’s a beautiful photographed book on the wild horses from the Little Big Horn region of Montana:

Among Wild Horses: A Portrait of the Pryor Mountain Mustangs by Lynne Pomeranz

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The Story’s the Thing

“Thousands of naturalists, historians, archaeologists, and other specialists are engaged in the work of revealing, to such visitors as desire the service, something of the beauty and wonder, the inspiration and spiritual meaning that lie behind what the visitors can with their senses perceive. This function of the custodians of our treasures is called interpretation.” — Freeman Tilden

Every visitor to our national & state parks, our historic homes, battlefields, and museums, owes thanks to Freeman Tilden and his slim little volume, Interpreting our Heritage. Now in its fourth updated edition, Tilden’s book has influenced park rangers and interpreters since its publication in 1957.

Tilden was passionate about connecting people to the heart and soul of the special places we seek to preserve — sites as diverse as Colonial Williamsburg, Yellowstone National Park, and the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Each site has a story to tell, and Tilden’s book shows the way (and yes, that’s Freeman Tilden pictured on the cover of the 50th Anniversary Edition of his book). One of Tilden’s chapter headings sums it up nicely: The Story’s the Thing.

Here’s two more volumes from the Land Library’s shelves that can help unlock the stories behind our nation’s natural and cultural heritage:

Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life by David Glassberg, and Conducting Meaningful Interpretation: A Field Guide For Success by Carolyn Widner Ward & Alan E. Wilkinson.

In lasting tribute to Tilden’s work, the National Park Service’s annual Freeman Tilden Award is given for excellence in interpretation. The 2009 winner was interpretive park ranger Shelton Johnson. Shelton is especially well known for his Buffalo Soldier presentations in Yosemite National Park — telling the story of African-American soldiers in the early days of the park.

Shelton Johnson recently extended the range of his vast interpretive skills with his new novel set in the time of Yosemite’s buffalo soldiers: Gloryland.

“National Parks, for me, provide a doorway into a transcendent experience. A sense of something that’s greater than yourself….I remember one day I was walking in the Cook’s Meadow in the central part of Yosemite Valley. There was a woman there, and she was just looking up and around her, and she just kept saying. ‘Oh, oh my, oh my.’ And I went up to her and I said, ‘Ma’am, are you all right?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I’m just fine. I just …oh, oh my.’ I didn’t have to talk to her about the transcendent experience. She was having one.” — Shelton Johnson, interviewed in Ken Burns’ film The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

PLEASE give yourself a treat and watch Shelton Johnson describe a wintry day in Yellowstone National Park. It’s two minutes of sheer inspiration, and little wonder Shelton won the Freeman Tilden Award!

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They Are Still Among Us

We live surrounded by the ghosts of giants. Mastodons once foraged in Manhattan and trod along the banks of Lake Michigan, where Chicago’s skyscrapers now stand. Bear-sized beaver dammed North American streams; herds of camel and horses roamed the plains. — Sharon Levy

Last October 2010, workers were digging a retention pond, high in the Colorado Rockies, just outside Snowmass Village. The retention pond remains on hold, for what they discovered that day was the greatest Ice Age fossil find in Colorado history. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science, quickly dispatched a “response team” and in the first few weeks of digging, they have uncovered 8-10 mastodons, 4 mammoths, Ice Age deer and bison, and one Jefferson ground sloth. Work will continue this spring, but Colorado is already in the throes of paleo-fever!

(For more on the Snowmass excavation, visit the Denver Museum of Nature & Science website, and take a glimpse at the film clip at the end of this post!).

A newly published book gives the Snowmass finds a special relevance in our climate-challenged age — Sharon Levy’s Once & Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About the Fate of Earth’s Largest Animals. Sharon Levy nicely sets the stage for the changes to come:

“Our ancestors knew these great beasts intimately. Homo sapiens evolved in a world thronged with monster mammals; Stone Age Europeans painted portraits of woolly mammoth, cave lion, cave bear, giant deer, wild horse, and ox. Ancient artists hunted these creatures, relished their meat, carved tools from their bones — until the giants suddenly disappeared.“

As Once & Future Giants makes clear, the fate of the mastodon and woolly mammoth may have a lot to tell about our future world — and especially the future lives of polar bears, African elephants, Siberian tigers, and many more of our fellow creatures.

Also pictured above: National Geographic Prehistoric Mammals by Alan Turner — technically a book for young adults, but actually a wonderful pictorial tour of the prehistoric world for readers of all ages.

With the excitement surrounding the historic Snowmass excavation, the Land Library has been dusting off its volumes on the world of prehistoric mammals. What a story they tell!

Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids: 65 Million Years of Mammalian Evolution in Europe by Jordi Agusta & Mauricio Anton, Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution by David Rains Wallace.

Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America by Paul S. Martin, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History by Claudine Cohen.

The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared by Peter Ward, Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant by Richard Stone, Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe by R. Dale Guthrie, and Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age by Adrian Lister & Paul Bahn.

If you were lucky enough to grow up entralled by sabertooth-laden murals at your local natural history museum, you’ll love William Stout Prehistoric Life Murals, along with Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age, a new volume from our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library, and recently strongly recommended in the pages of Natural History magazine.

Stay tuned for a new season of fresh finds at Snowmass! Meanwhile, please enjoy this quick clip:

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The City: Humanity’s Greatest Invention?

In the past few years there has been several books that highlight the often-neglected green qualities of cities. The logic of these books is hard to dismiss. More than two-thirds of Americans live on 3% of land that we describe as urban, a clustering of the human population that preserves even more open space. Also, city dwellers, on average, use 40% less energy than suburbanites.

Edward Glaeser has written the latest such challenge to any easy thoughts we’ve ever had about urban living: Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richar, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Glaeser, a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, argues that our success as a country, and as a species, depends of the health and wealth of cities. Triumph of the City is an extremely important and thought-provoking book, no matter where you live. Edward Glaeser is familiar with the pitfalls of history, as we teeter between urban squalor and urban splendor, yet he still shares this hopeful vision:

“If the future is going to be greener, then it must be more urban. Dense cities offer a means of living that involves less driving and smaller homes to heat and cool. Maybe someday we’ll be able to drive and cool our homes with almost no carbon emissions, but until then, there is nothing greener than blacktop. For the sake of humanity and our planet, cities are — and must be — the wave of the future.”

And, if the urban future is to be bright, it needs to shine at the neighborhood level, and that’s why we especially love Jay Walljasper’s book The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking (pictured above) — a volume full of practical solutions for the continued revitalization of the urban landscape.

You all know that the Land Library has thousands of volumes on rural lands, farms & ranches, along with the wilderness reaches of the Rockies, Africa, Tibet, and beyond. But, for a multitude of reasons, we have a strong affection for our books on city life. Here’s a few more titles we can easily recommend!

Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood by Peter Medoff & Holly Sklar, City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village by David Sucher

And two classic books that opened the eyes of a new generation to the special places that truly makes a neighborhood: The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, and Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities (both by Ray Oldenburg).

For more on the life of the City here’s two of our favorite past posts:

–On gaining the tools for fun urban explorations.

–Joseph Mitchell, the great wandering soul of New York City!

And here’s a link to all our past City Lives posts — enjoy!

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Brilliant Bee Books, This Time for Kids!

As you might know from recent posts, the Land Library is partnering with the Denver Botanic Gardens on a new Book Club devoted to Bees & Beekeeping. We’ve had a lot of fun looking over all of our bee books, and along the way we realized just how many wonderful books we have for kids on bees, beekeeping, and honey. Here’s more on one of our favorites!

Stephen Buchmann is a beekeeper and a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona. He is the author of two books for adults, The Forgotten Pollinators, and Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey and Humankind. Looking to the next generation of naturalists (& beekeepers!), Buchmann has written a fun new book for teens: Honey Bees: A History of Bees and Honey. Actually, this is one of those books that even an adult can greatly benefit from. In less than 200 pages Buchmann gives us an entertaining primer on bees, honey, and the centuries-old traditions of beekeeping.

For a younger audience, there’s Linda Oatman High’s Beekeepers, a lovely picture book about the gentle guidance a grandfather gives to his granddaughter. The young girl accepts the challenges of beekeeping (‘the hum of the bees’ wings grows louder and louder, and my heart races with the sound“), and in the end Grandpa knows he has trained “a fine keeper of bees“.

Doug Chayka’s illustrations have a warm honey glow, and we especially loved his depictions of the bee yard, the wooden hives, the beekeeper’s veiled, long-sleeved overalls, and all the beekeeping equipment, including the metal smoker used to calm the agitated hive.

Some of our favorite shelves at the Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library are the ones devoted to insects. Kids seem to have an endless curiosity about the world of bugs. Over the years we have tried hard to keep pace with their natural curiosity — especially when it comes to bees! Here’s a few favorite titles from our shelves:

Brilliant Bees by Linda Glaser & Gay Holland, The Life and Times of the Honeybee by Charles Micucci.

Honey in a Hive by Anne Rockwell & S.D. Schindler, How Bees Make Honey by Louise Spilsbury, Honey Bees and Hives by Lola M. Schaefer.

The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe by Loree Griffin Burns (part of Houghton Mifflin’s excellent series, Scientists in the Field).

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Work, Enjoy, Together Now

The intersection of food, people, and the land has produced some of the most positive and vibrant writing of today. One of our favorites in the recent crop of good books is Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker. The authors visited twenty farms over the course of a single summer. Each farm is profiled with extensive interviews, along with beautifully evocative photographs. The farms are innovative in different ways, but most are dedicated to missions of sustainable agriculture, food justice, and the strengthening of their local food systems.

Here’s just three of the inspiring farm projects featured in Farm Together Now, along with links to each organization’s websites:

–City Slicker Farms: bringing fresh, healthy food to the inner city neighborhoods of Oakland, California.

–Anarchy Apiaries: a one-man operation in New York’s Hudson River Valley, with the mission of raising honeybees in a natural way, in the hopes of reducing Colony Collapse Disorder among the hives.

–The Acequiahood of the San Luis Peoples Ditch: founded in 1852, this cooperative farm organization manages the common ownership of water in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The ditches (acequias) delivers the water, and also ties together the entire community.

All twenty farm projects have inspiring tales to tell. The authors of Farm Together Now returned from their travels with this thought:

“By understanding how these individuals are creating solutions for their lives and the lives of those whom they care about, we feel more optimistic about our future. We present their stories here because we know that a new food system can only emerge if the diversity and complexity that these folks embody are part of the discussion.“

For more on Farm Together Now, be sure to visit farmtogethernow.org.

Also featured above: Lisa Hamilton’s Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. With the ease of a born storyteller, Lisa Hamilton profiles three farmers bucking the agribusiness establishment — a Texas dairyman, a New Mexico rancher, and a North Dakota farmer. The Land Library strongly recommends Deeply Rooted, along with books such as these:

Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community by Thomas A. Lyson, Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture by Darrin Nordhal, and Mark Winne’s Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. A few years back, Mark Winne joined us for a wonderful Rocky Mountain Land Series presentation, and he is the subject of one of our earlier posts.

For more good books on this rich topic, click here, and explore!

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