Although the Land Library has thousands of titles focused on the American West, we have long sought a global reach, believing that lessons of land and community knows no boundaries. The Land Library has especially strong collections of books focused on Africa, China, Tibet, Mongolia, Latin America, Canada and the boreal zone worldwide — along with all-things-Arctic.
We’ll continue to grow our global collections, and we hope to have more world-wide postings in the future. In the meanwhile, here’s an excellent book to start us on our journey!
Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook, edited by Robert Torrance. This is a truly massive anthology (1,224 pages), as well as a sweeping history of the human response to nature from ancient times to the dawn of the Modern Age. Robert Torrance casts a wide net, including selections of children’s stories, tribal myths, sacred scriptures, poetry, philosophical and scientific writings. Gary Snyder writes, “What is encompassed, on a scale vaster than we could have imagined, are the many ways in which human beings have understood and represented the natural world. There are themes of gratitude, playfulness, and intimacy with the wild, running through most of it…”
Here’s a few more thought-provoking books that we’ll return to in the months ahead:
Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Maathai, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, translated by David Hinton, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman, Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe by George Schaller
Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust by Richard C. Foltz, et al, Houses and Homes by Ann Morris & Ken Heyman (from our Waterton Canyon Kids Library), Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World by Helena Norberg-Hodge
