Recently, we highlighted naturalist David Lindo, author of The Urban Birder, in our post See the World as a Bird Would See it. Here’s one of our favorite passages in David’s new book. You never know what will inspire a young mind!
“When I was a youngster, the first naturalist I came into contact with was Gerald Durrell. I have already mentioned that Gerald inspired me to write notes, and gave me a romantic dream of being an explorer, traveling across the world in search of weird and wonderful animals. It’s a romanticism that many of us carry in our hearts but very few of us ever actually realize. I guess what I learned from reading his books was that having an interest in nature need not mean that it has to be boring and technical. It was all about fun and adventure. It felt as though anyone could get out there and do what he did. Reading My Family and Other Animals I identified with his account of being a child in Corfu, as he was of a similar age to me and had a great inquisitiveness for wildlife. The fact that I could not relate to his middle-class background, his lifestyle on Corfu and the whole slew of pets he had did not matter; it was his love of wildlife that shone through for me. Reading his books stoked the fires of my interest and kept me going…. — David Lindo, from The Urban Birder
We’re always looking out for accounts of early impressionable contact with the printed word. Here’s some of our favorites from past posts!
We were prepared to not like this book, thinking it might be a photo-rich, thin-on-substance look at kitchen gardens and healthy food. Well, were we ever wrong! A preview copy of Michelle Obama’s first book just came across our desk, and we’ve spent the morning paging through it. American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America is definitely photo-rich (the images are wonderful, especially the ones with visiting schoolkids), but this book goes into impressive detail chronicling the history of kitchen gardens in America, and tells scores of inspiring stories about contemporary backyard, school and community gardens across the country.
The White House Kitchen Garden is a very visible piece to a larger national effort. In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched Let’s Move!, a nationwide initiative to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity by bringing healthier food into schools and encouraging kids to get outside, and be more active.
American Grown hits the bookstore shelves on Tuesday, May 29th. Spend a glorious Memorial Day weekend planting your own seeds outside, but find time to watch these fun film clips of the White House Kitchen Garden, from its first planting in 2009, through all the subsequent harvests. Then, on Tuesday, storm your local bookstore for a copy of this wonderful book!
There’s so much good work being done, and so much more to do. The Land Library hopes to establish it’s second Kids Nature Library, this time in inner-city Denver. And we have more than enough books to launch a truly unique Urban Homestead Library for Denver families, gardeners, urban farmers, beekeepers, and the like. Help us make it happen!
For more on White House food initiatives, check out this website with a name you won’t want to forget!
“Mark Fiege has written a book so original and so necessary that a reader can be excused for being both astonished and wondering why no one has written a book like this before. It is easy to say that human history never takes place outside the natural world; it is quite another thing to write a history that demonstrates it with the subtlety and grace Mark Fiege does in The Republic of Nature.”
Come meet the author — this Saturday! In the meantime, here’s a short clip on The Republic of Nature:
Mark Fiege’s publisher, the University of Washington Press, has just released yet another intriguing volume to add to the Land Library’s growing collection of environmental histories:
James Morton Turner’s The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics Since 1964, examines how the idea of wilderness has shaped the public land debate since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. William Cronan calls Turner’s book, “the most deeply researched, analytically rigorous, and elegantly written study of American wilderness politics since the 1960s.” And here’s more, from the author himself!
“Fans of Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution will be delighted by Sowing Seeds in the Desert, his last book. It is a rich treasure trove detailing how his own philosophy of farming evolved and how he decided to apply what he learned on his own farm in Japan to other parts of the world. His insights into the tragedies of taking Western, industrial agriculture to places like Africa to ‘enrich the national economy,’ and his alternative approach of working with indigenous farmers to enable them to become self-sufficient are instructive for all of us.” — Frederick Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher
Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) was a farmer and philosopher who was born and raised on the Japanese island of Shikoku. In 1975 he wrote The One-Straw Revolution, a best-selling book that described his life’s journey, his philosophy, and the farming techniques that came to him as he worked closer and closer with nature. This small volume eventually was translated into twenty-five languages, and helped make Fukuoka a leader in the worldwide sustainable agriculture movement. He continued farming until shortly before his death in 2008, at the age of ninety-five.
Here’s a wonderful film clip on the life and work of Masanobu Fukuoka:
Masanobu Fukuoka in the field, along with his earlier book The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost (out of print, but on the Land Library’s shelves).
As many of you know, the Land Library hopes to open an Urban Homestead Library in Denver, full of books on living green in the city, with titles on organic gardening, urban farms, beekeeping, city-bred chickens, goats, pigs — plus many more topics on living lighter on the land. The works of writers such as Masanobu Fukuoka, Wendell Berry, and Liberty Hyde Bailey will form the philosophical backbone of this collection. Help us make this happen!
“We must reconnect with nature, with the world that ultimately defines our existence and produces our food and medicines. Indeed, the tiny pills that we hold in our hands and that heal our ailments originated, in most instances, not from humankind, but from the natural world. They are fundamentally out of nature.” — Kara Rogers
In many ways, we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding the true benefits that nature provides. We all depend on the “ecosystem services” of food, nutrient cycling, clean air, and water. Vital to human health, plants also provide a storehouse of medicinal cures and healing compounds. Most scientists estimate that we are nowhere close to tapping all the curative powers of nature — just at this perilous time of habitat loss and declining biodiversity.
Kara Rogers’ Out of Nature: Why Drugs from Plants Matter to the Future of Humanity, explores how plants have been used for millenia in traditional systems of healing, and how they form the basis for modern medicine as well. This book also draws a direct line between the extinction of species and the extinction of future cures:
“In the modern era, habitats and the species they contain are at the greatest risk of extinction that they have ever known. The consequences on all fronts, from the aesthetic qualities of nature to the functioning of ecosystems to human health, are severe. In terms of medicine and our ability to fight disease, protecting Earth’s plants and the compounds they produce has become a necessity.”
An estimated 2,000 new species of plants are discovered each year. Modern plant hunters continue to span the globe, as did their renowned predecessors such as Joseph Hooker, George Forrest, and Joseph Banks. For more on the plant hunters of the past, and the global explorers of today, here’s one of our favorite past posts:
Will Allen’s parents were sharecroppers from South Carolina, but their son never dreamed of being a farmer — he had other plans for his life. After years on the hardwood floors of professional basketball, Will Allen built a successful career as an executive at Procter & Gamble.
But here’s the unexpected turn. Cashing in his retirement fund, Will bought a two-acre plot of land, a half mile from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project — set in the middle of a food desert with only convenience stores and fast-food restaurants to serve local residents. In the face of tremendous obstacles, that two-acre plot grew into Growing Power, the nation’s preeminent urban farm — a food and education center that now produces enough vegetables and fish to feed thousands. And along the way, jobs have been created, public health has improved, and a community in need has come together. Today, Growing Power helps develop community food systems across the country.
We’re excited to add Will Allen’s new book to our growing collection of books on the urban food movement. The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities is an inspiring place to begin!
In 2008, Will Allen was awarded the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” for his work on urban farming and sustainable food production:
“Will Allen’s remarkable story, told with eloquence and compassion, conveys the universal value of social justice and real food.” — Alice Waters
Growing Power has become an educational tool for the urban farm movement, especially focused on teaching the next generation of farmers & health-minded consumers.
Here’s a few more recent books from the Land Library’s Urban Homestead shelves!
“Will Allen is a hero and an inspiration to urban farmers everywhere. Now, with The Good Food Revolution, we learn how Allen rediscovered the power of agriculture, and in doing so transformed a city, its community, and eventually the world….Told with grace and utter honesty, I found myself cheering for Allen and his organization, Growing Power.” – Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, and The Essential Urban Farmer.
It’s early yet, but this may be one of the publishing events of the year: Joy M. Kiser’s America’s Other Audubon — a beautifully illustrated book that resurrects an all-but-forgotten natural history classic. Here’s much more about this wonderful new book, best told by the following publisher’s notes:
“Most people are familiar with John James Audubon and his seminal book, Birds of America. But few are aware of another monumental volume of stunning artwork, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, created by a remarkable American family.
Inspired by viewing Audubon’s lithographs at the 1876 World’s Fair, twenty-nine year old artist Genevieve Jones (pictured above) began work on a companion to Birds of America, but this time illustrating the nests and eggs that Audubon left out. Her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father paid all publishing costs, and Genevieve and her girlhood friend learned lithography and undertook the work of a lifetime.
Tragically, Genevieve Jones’ life was cut short by the sudden onset of typhoid fever. She died at age thirty-three. Her family, deeply in mourning, labored for seven more years to finish the project in her memory.”
Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, alongside Genevieve Jones’ illustration of the Wood Thrush’s egg and nest.
Ninety copies were originally printed in 1886, and only about twenty-five copies now exist. Originally the Jones family took subscriptions for the eventual publication of the book. Among the original subscribers: President Rutherford B. Hayes, and a young Harvard college student by the name of Theodore Roosevelt.
Joy M. Miller writes in America’s Other Audubon: Howard (Genevieve’s nest-hunting younger brother) spent the rest of his life trying to market remaining copies of Gennie’s book. In the end many were given to his children and grandchildren. He never stopped believing that Illustrations of the Nests and Birds of Ohio would one day be considered priceless.”
American Goldfinch nest, illustrated by Genevieve’s mother, Virginia Jones, and Genevieve’s depiction of a Warbler’s nest.
“If Audubon is the Robinson Crusoe of nature art, then the Jones are the Swiss Family Robinson. America’s Other Audubon is a vital work of scholarly reclamation that will, I hope, introduce a wide world to the remarkable Genevieve Jones and the familial collaboration her life and death inspired.” — Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies.
Genevieve’s Memorial Portrait (courtesy of the Pickaway County Historical Society), alongside her illustration of an Indigo Bunting nest.
“The story of the gifted-but-doomed amateur, the passion of the undertaking shake us. The beauty of the plates and their accessibility, until now denied all except a few who owned the rare original book, make this a rich gift to all who find interest in the natural world.” — Annie Proulx
“While reading Cheryl Strayed’s stunning book about her arduous solo journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, I kept asking myself, What would I do if I were stripped bare of everything — money, job, community, even family and love? Thoreau once siad, ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’ For Strayed, it is clear that in wildness was the preservation of her soul. She reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.” — Mira Bartok, author of The Memory Palace.
In the wake of her mother’s death, and the further tumult of a life suddenly adrift, Cheryl Strayed challenged herself to hike eleven-hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to Washington State. And to hike that route alone.
Here’s one of our favorite passages from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. In the middle of the night, two trails cross, somewhere along the Pacific Crest Trail:
“I woke two hours later with the vaguely pleasant sensation that tiny cool hands were gently patting me. They were on my bare legs and arms and face and in my hair, on my feet and throat and hands. I could feel their cool weight through my T-shirt on my chest and belly. ‘Hmm.’ I moaned, turning slightly before I opened my eyes and a series of facts came to me in slow motion.
There was the fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp.
There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me.
And then there was the final fact of all, which was a fact more monumental than even the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands, but hundreds of small cool black frogs.
Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me.
Each one was the approximate size of a potato chip. They were an amphibious army, a damp smooth-skinned militia, a great web-footed migration, and I was in their path as they hopped, scrambled, leapt, and hurled their tiny, pudgy, bent-legged bodies from the reservoir and onto the scrim of dirt that they no doubt considered their private beach.”
Unexpected encounters are the mileposts of all the trails we hike. Here’s three more trailside readers — excellent companions for Cheryl Strayed’s Wild:
In the Sierra: Mountain Writings by Kenneth Rexroth. Kim Stanley Robinson has edited this fine collection of Rexroth’s (1905-1982) prose and poetry, set in the High Sierra. Robinson describes Rexroth’s tumultous San Francisco life: “Rexroth always had an enduring island of calm, located on the other side of the state: the Sierra Nevada of California.” Also pictured above: For more adventures, and lessons learned along the trail, the Land Library recommends a wonderful two-volume set: The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader (California, Oregon & Washington). Both books feature “boot-tested stories” spun by real PCT hikers, along with selections from well-known wanderers such as John Muir, Mark Twain, Mary Austin, Wallace Stegner, Barry Lopez, William O. Douglas, and Jack Kerouac, among others.
“The destinies of communities over similar shale gas reserves — in Alabama, Louisiana, Wyoming, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, and other places — are linked to the Marcellus region by local geology and global energy concerns. In all these shale gas regions, the relationships people have with the land, and with their neighbors, are as complicated and multidimensional as the topographical and geological terrain. Here, too, there are cracks. They are created by forces that sometimes pull in opposite directions, at other times collide with great force, and often are buried from view.” — Tom Wilber, Under the Surface
The story is complex, and in no way easy. What you have, in pockets across the country, is a natural gas reserve trapped in rock, that if released, might meet our domestic demands for decades. Along comes an extraction technology, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), that involves injecting drill holes with a mix of water, sand, and chemicals under pressure great enough to split rock and free the gas within (described in a short film clip below).
That frames what has become a fierce debate about the safety and advisability of fracking. Will it contaminate the underground aquifers? What about the surface waste, and the close proximity of drill rigs to people’s homes? Fracking has quickly become a debate over energy, climate change, health, water, jobs, and the economy.
The Marcellus Formation underlies significant parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York State. Its gas-rich shale has spurred a modern day “gold rush”, and that’s the tale Tom Wilber tells through the voices of gas company representatives, local residents, farmers, politicians, and government workers. Eric Schaeffer, former director of the EPA Office of Civil Enforcement had this to say about Under the Surface:
“Tom Wilber’s thoughtful review of the Gold Rush mentality that drives the fracking industry should give pause to those who think cheap natural gas is the answer to our energy problem. Under the Surface makes sure we hear from those who support development of the Marcellus Shale formation, as well as the skeptics.”
And here’s an earlier book, also focused on the Marcellus Shale:
The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone by Seamus McGraw (“This is an environmental tale on the surface, yet something more powerful lurks beneath the soil of this wonderful book. Seamus McGraw is really writing about the enduring complexities and contradictions of the United States. He goes beyond the easy stereotypes of greedy promoters preying on farmers and gives us the unvarnished truth about a twenty-first century energy rush in a place we never expected it.” — Tom Zoellner, author of Uranium). Also pictured above: Sandra Steingraber has written several books on the environmental hazards of everyday life. Her most recent, Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, includes an examination of the health concerns surrounding hydraulic fracturing.
Whether you live above the Marcellus Shale, or along the Rocky Mountain Front, fracking and our entire energy future will remain a critical issue for years to come. The Land Library hopes to keep current with all the information that we’ll need!
A drilling rig in Meshoppen, Pennsylvania. Once a rig is in place, the work of gas extraction goes on around the clock. — from Seamus McGraw’s The End of Country.
