“The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.” — Carlos Fuentes
Good news! The Land Library continues to work toward opening a Urban Homestead Library in inner-city Denver, along with our second Kids and Educators Nature Library. We’ve been devoting more and more of our resources to find some of the best urban nature books available. These books are wonderful tools, and a powerful remedy for ever taking your home town for granted!
Books such as these, that help you learn about:
BIRDS, BEES…
AND TREES!
NEW NEIGHBORS…
FOOD…
and PLENTY OF FUN PLACES TO EXPLORE!
For the rest of this month, we’ll be featuring many more books on nature in the city — all leading up to the April 27th Colorado premiere of the award-winning film The Legend of Pale Male:
The Land Library is proud to be a co-sponsor of this benefit screening for The Bloomsbury Review, a national literary treasure that has been celebrating and promoting great writing since 1980. We’ll be celebrating two legends that night — The Bloomsbury Review, as it launches into its next chapter, and Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk of Central Park, now courting his eighth mate somewhere over midtown Manhattan!
WHEN & WHERE: Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm at Denver’s Montview Presbyterian Church
For more information on the April 27th premiere, call 303-455-3123, or 800-783-3338, or visit The Bloomsbury Review website!
“Jeff Speck understands a key fact about great cities, which is that their streets matter more than their buildings. And he understands a key fact about great streets, which is that the people who walk along them matter more than the cars that drive through them. Walkable City is an eloquent ode to the livable city and to the values behind it.” — Paul Goldberger, author of Why Architecture Matters.
Jeff Speck is a veteran urban planner, and he has written one of the Land Library’s favorite books to the year: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. This is a book that literally changes the way you look at the place you live. After reading this book, we have a better appreciation why some city blocks energize us, while others seemingly sap whatever life force we have!
Jeff Speck’s General Theory of Walkability says that a walk needs to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. It needs to engage us at a human level. Getting walkability right brings enormous benefits:
“Walkability is both an end and a means, as well as a measure. While the physical and social rewards of walking are many, walkability is perhaps most useful as it contributes to urban vitality and most meaningful as an indicator of that vitality. After several decades spent redesigning pieces of cities, trying to make them more livable and more successful, I have watched my focus narrow to this topic as the one issue that seems to both influence and embody most of the others. Get walkability right and so much of the rest will follow.“
Reading Walkable City reminded us of one of our favorite passages from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking (also pictured above). She definitely knows all about walkability!
“I lived in rural New Mexico long enough that when I came back home to San Francisco, I saw it for the first time as a stranger might. The exuberance of spring was urban for me that year, and I finally understood all those country songs about the lure of the bright lights of town. I walked everywhere in the balmy days and nights of May, amazed at how many possibilities could be crammed within the radius of those walks and thrilled by the idea I could just wander out the front door to find them. Every building, every storefront, seemed to open onto a different world, compressing all the variety of human life into a jumble of possibilities made all the richer by the conjunctions. Just as a bookshelf can jam together Japanese poetry, Mexican history, and Russian novels, so the buildings of my city contained Zen centers, Pentecostal churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, burrito places, movie palaces, dim sum shops. Even the most ordinary things struck me with wonder, and the people on the street offered a thousand glimpses of lives like and utterly unlike mine.“
Author Jeff Speck, caught in a bind, and yearning for the Walkable City:
“…since midcentury, whether intentionally or by accident, most American cities have effectively become no-walking zones. In the absence of any larger vision or mandate, city engineers — worshiping the twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking — have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to but not worth arriving at.” — from Walkable City
There’s nothing like the rambling meditation of a good walk. Over the years the Land Library’s Book Club has discussed two books on this theme — both are among our all-time favorites:
Connecting to Landscape and Yourself, simply by taking a walk: The Walk by William deBuys (solitary New Mexico hikes, along the same route over many years), and Chet Raymo’s customary walk to work, one that opens his eyes to worlds beyond: The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe.
If you live in a town or city, we hope you enjoy your explorations! Here’s a few good books to help you along the way:
A couple of years ago, the Rocky Mountain Land Series was lucky enough to host Gary Lincoff for his authoritative (and extremely fun) book, The Complete Mushroom Hunter. In his latest book, The Joy of Foraging, Lincoff takes on the entire plant kingdom. This is a wonderfully illustrated handbook, and Gary’s enthusiasm is certainly infectious. He’ll have you searching out nuts, wild fruits, edible greens — and even seaweeds. Along the way, you’ll learn much more about the place where you live.
That’s exactly what happened to John Lewis-Stempel. Looking around his English farm he saw a trout flash in the brook, mushrooms sprinkled across his fields, and a squirrel eating hazelnuts. That led him to think, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could live on what nature provides for free? The result is one of the most unusual and well-written books we’ve read in quite sometime: The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food (also pictured above).
Here’s John Lewis-Stempel on the humble hazelnut: ” There is no sensible reason for me to be out at eleven at night, shining a torch up into the leaves and incipient catkins, gathering hazelnuts. Whatever is left on these few last trees will remain till first light, when I will have to come back anyway with a shepherd’s crook to pull down the high branches, an exercise impossible to combine with torch-holding. I am picking solely to do something to satisfy a squirrel-like urge to store up for the oncoming winter….
Hazelnuts are more amenable to the jaw when roasted, when they become starchy, like semolina. Roasted hazelnuts can also be pressed for oil. The process is laborious and the amount of pale amber oil that can be obtained from a pound of nuts is to be measured in parts of a teaspoon. Hazelnut oil is precious. Outside of duck fat, it is the only cooking oil I can obtain from the land.”
Here’s two more books on the art of feeding free!
Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, Langdon Cook’s foraging tale from the Pacific Northwest, and A Feast of Weeds: A Literary Guide to Foraging and Cooking Wild Edible Plants by Luigi Ballerini.
As for urban foraging, we’ve been really inspired by the work of this group:
The London Orchard Project plants new community orchards, rejuvenates neglected ones, and (in one of their strokes of sheer genius), they map existing London fruit trees, all ripe for foraging:
For more on foraging in the wild, here’s one of our all-time favorite past posts:
We love this film! The Apple Pushers is an exuberant, life-affirming documentary that takes on some of the most urgent issues of our day — namely food justice, obesity, and immigration. All these concerns are closely related, as writer and director Mary Mazzio so artfully shows.
New York City, like every metropolitan area across the country, was faced with food deserts throughout the city — neighborhoods where finding a red ripe apple was a challenge, but where fast-food reigned and obesity rates soared. There isn’t a single fix for this problem, but here’s one we love: flood those food deserts with over a thousand street vendor carts, and bring fresh fruit and vegetables to neighborhoods in need.
For more on The Apple Pushers, be sure to check out their very informative website!
And here’s two more excellent books on the urban food movement!
Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty by Mark Winnie (a book we keep going back to, again and again), along with Will Allen’s The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities, the subject of a recent Land Library post, Greening the Food Desert.
“Ever since the Neolithic, the world has had an unquenchable thirst for water. Meeting that need was a key driver of social, economic and political change within the ancient world, one that played a fundamental role in both the rise and then fall of ancient civilizations. That unquenchable thirts continues today, perhaps more desperate than it ever has been before.” — Steven Mithen
Scientists estimate that 75 percent of the globe will face freshwater shortages by 2050. Clearly water is one of the great emerging issues of our time, and here is a book that puts it in a much-needed historical context. Steven Mithen’s Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World explores more than 10,000 years of man’s management of one of the most vital substances on earth.
Some civilizations fell, others engineered solutions, but all had much in common. Steven Mithen:
“Concern about water…is something that we share with the ancient Maya, Hohokam and Chinese. Those who built the canals in the Yellow River Valley of China, the Salt River Basin of Arizona, in the rainforests around Edzna and Angkor, and in the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial plain did so thousands of years apart, with no knowledge of each other and within completely different cultures. But they all shared similar ideas, plans and physical labours; they addressed the same questions about gradients and where to place head-gates; they found the same solutions imposed by the common properties of water and then engaged in the same fights against the accumulation of silt and protection against floods.“
Steven Mithen’s new book joins the Land Library’s collection of water books with a historic bent — books such as Brian Fagan’s Elixir: A Human History of Water (also pictured above), and the works of Kenneth R. Wright:
The Water Mysteries of Mesa Verde by Kenneth R. Wright, Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel by Kenneth R. Wright, Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, Ruth M. Wright, and Gordon Francis McEwan.
“Our understanding of Machu Picchu as an exemplary feat of hydraulic engineering is thanks to the work of Kenneth R. Wright. He first visited Machu Picchu in 1974 with his wife, Ruth, returning in 1994 to begin an intensive study of how the Inca hydraulic system worked.” — Steven Mithen
Tipon: Water Engineering Masterpiece of the Inca Empire by Kenneth R. Wright, Gordon Francis McEwan, and Ruth M. Wright, and Moray: Inca Engineering Mystery by Kenneth R. Wright, Ruth M. Wright, Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, and Gordon Francis McEwan.
For many more essential books on water and water management, be sure to take a look at some of our past posts!
And here’s a bit more from Professor Steven Mithen:
We posted this piece back on May 25th. In the midst of harvest season, and at the end of a hard-fought campaign, we wanted to take another glimpse at Michelle Obama’s new book!
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!
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:
“Land designated for use as allotments was usually simply land which did not find a more profitable use. It was seldom chosen for its horticultural potential, though of course the labour of the cultivators and their manuring of the soil have improved it over the years. For the sites were usually just the spaces left over, behind the houses or factories, limited in access from roads, or in the floodplains of rivers, or enclosed by the sweeping curves of railway lines.” — David Crouch, author of The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture
Long before community gardens began to pop up across America, there was the allotment. More than two hundred years ago, England began a social experiment, one whose goal was to give the landless laborer the means to provide for himself. And so, the allotment movement was born.
World War II gave new urgency to the movement as Britain sought to achieve self-sufficiency for the uncertain struggle ahead. Britain’s famous Dig for Victory campaign was launched, as seasoned gardeners and raw novices alike were recruited into a new allotment army.
Garden historian Twigs Way has written a fascinating history of those years, Digging for Victory: Gardens and Gardening in Wartime Britain (co-authored by Mike Brown), full of history, stories, photographs, and the rich imagery from the entire Dig for Victory campaign.
Twigs Way has also written a second volume, Allotments (pictured above), a very entertaining history of the allotment movement over the centuries.
Little by little, the Land Library has built up one of our favorite sub-sections devoted to a particular subject — books focused on allotments & community gardens across the globe. Here’s just a few of those volumes:
Allotment & Garden Guide: A Monthly Guide to Better Wartime Gardening, Twig Way’s annotated reprint of the monthly guides published by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture. As in her other books, Twigs has added many wartime graphics and posters, including the most iconic image of them all, the foot & spade Dig for Victory poster (pictured above).
Digger’s Diary: Tales from the Allotment, V. Osborne’s entries, originally printed in The Daily Telegraph, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture by David Crouch and Colin Ward (an indispensable and fun-to-read guide), and City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America by Laura J. Lawson
Following World War II, allotments saw Britain through the many years of austerity that followed. More recently, there has been yet another home-grown renaissance spurred on by the organic and grow-local movements. Allotments are alive, well, and here to stay — on either side of the Atlantic!
“Making space to look after, to show friendship and care — and other values not understood by the contemporary market place, allotment holding gives us a means to get out of our own home and join others in making good our future environment.” — David Crouch
And here’s a very fun film clip on a Royal visit to an allotment in Great Britain. It’s a fancier allotment than most, but we couldn’t pass it by, as it features Prince Charles — a longtime champion of both nature and vanishing rural ways:
Closer to home, for more on community gardens in the United States, here’s two good links:
“After a two-night battle with the Chukchi Sea, the message was clear: the village of Kivalina must be moved. Adapting to our environment was no longer possible. The only option left for the Inupiaq people of Kivalina was to get out of the way and let the impacts of climate change take their toll on the small barrier island.” — Colleen Swan, Kivalina Tribal Administrator
Coastal communities across the globe are serving as climate change’s canaries-in-the-mine. The tiny Alaskan village of Kivalina has been feeling the change for many years now. Sea ice no longer protects Kivalina from savage storms, and more and more of the island falls into the sea.
And, there are other signs of a new world coming. Tribal Administrator Colleen Swan:
“… for decades the people of Kivalina had noticed subtle changes that indicated a warming climate. These included poor ocean ice conditions that changed the way the community hunted on the ocean, and melting permafrost in many areas of Alaska, including the Inupiaq people’s aboriginal territory. Other changes included earlier than normal migration of sea mammals — a main staple of the Inupiaq people’s diet — and unpredictable weather conditions…“
Christine Shearer’s Kivalina: A Climate Change Story tells the Inupiaq’s story — a frustrating tale of environmental injustice, one that government, business (and all of us) have yet to address.
Also pictured above: the stories and photos of Climate Refugees (by the journalists & photographers of Collectif Argos) offers a global perspective on the first populations facing displacement by climate change — communities from Africa and the Himalayas, to the South Pacific and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.
And here’s two more volumes from the Land Library’s shelves, full of early warnings from the field:
The Big Thaw: Travels in the Melting North by Ed Struzik (“Stuzik’s thoughtful reportage offers readers an arresting portrait of how quickly the northern landscape, including every ecological nook and cranberry bog that humans and other species inhabit, is being transformed.” — Canadian Geographic), and The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change, edited by Igor Krupnik & Dyanna Jolly (an incredibly valuable resource!).
For more on the early signs of climate change, please read our earlier post on one of the most thought-provoking books of the past year:
We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a “slowmotion catastrophe” one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly. — David Suzuki
Here’s an organization we love! Seattle-based Readers to Eaters was established in 2009 with a mission to promote food literacy by directly engaging children and families to encourage a better understanding of what we eat, and where food comes from.
Husband-and-wife team Philip Lee and June Jo Lee describe their three-pronged approach to food literacy:
–Publishing: We publish books that give fresh and fun perspective on what we eat and how we eat through good stories, beautiful writing, and a deep appreciation of food cultures.
–Bookselling: Our mobile bookstore sells books about food at farmers’ markets, harvest festivals, and at conferences for science and reading teachers, librarians, nutritionists, food activists, and chefs.
–Education: We partner with community organizations to promote food literacy, including our Book-n-talk series with authors, chefs, farmers, and educators.
Readers to Eaters first book is Our School Garden! by Rick Swann, with illustrations by Christy Hale. This beautifully designed book definitely captures the sheer fun of tugging on a pair of mud books and exploring a school garden for surprises, row after row.
And of course, we loved this passage from Rick Swann’s author note:
“One of my favorite garden quotations is from the book How to Grow a School Garden: ‘School gardens are, in fact, libraries full of life, mystery, and surprise.‘ Being in a garden is like reading a good book: You’re never sure what is on the next page, but you can’t wait to get there and find out.”
As many of you know, the Land Library is working hard to establish a Urban Homestead Library for inner-city Denver. Seattle’s Readers to Eaters organization inspires us by their innovative ways of contributing to food literacy in the city. We need to find a home for all of thier books, and for books such as Hadley Dyer’s Potatoes on Rooftops: Farming in the City (also pictured above) — one of the best urban farming books we know of for older kids.
And here’s two more terrific books for Denver’s future Urban Homestead Library:
Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability by Michael K. Stone (how to connect the classroom to the garden, kitchen, and community beyond), and Kids in the Garden: Growing Plants for Food and Fun by Elizabeth McCorquodale (full of fun projects for the entire growing season).
