Vacant lots and rooftops across the country are being transformed into beds of lettuce, tomatoes, squash, beans — you name it! Along with fresh healthy produce comes revitalized neighborhoods, and a gradual emergence of a new local food system. Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival by David Hanson and Edwin Marty, tells the story of twelve urban farm programs across the country, including Denver Urban Gardens and the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, California.

Each profile is accompanied by the vivid images of photographer Michael Hanson. The cover photo features the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, in Brooklyn, New York — one of the most unlikely, yet inspirational urban farm projects in the country:

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm has become a vibrant community hub, with classes on beekeeping, plant sales, concerts, and even a kite festival!

On a related note the Land Library Book Club will be reading Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer in May 2012. Novella has just come out with a new, information packed book, The Essential Urban Farmer, co-authored by Willow Rosenthal.

For more on the urban food movement, check out our earlier post on farmers markets!

–A More Abundant Life

Classroom teachers would unroll their wall charts for the day’s lessons — bright and vividly colored canvasses, specifically designed so that pupils in the back rows could see. Most charts were devoid of text, a ploy of hopeful teachers to enhance class participation. Before the advent of richly illustrated school books (or slides), these charts opened a window to another world for generations of school kids.

A wonderful new book documents this lost art form: The Art of Instruction: Vintage Educational Charts from the 19th and 20th Centuries. This gorgeous over-sized book reproduces charts of many different styles, but most pages are devoted to the German firm of Jung-Koch-Quentell.

Here’s a quick visual tour of one of our favorite new books of the year!

Botanical Chart produced in France by Les Editions Rossignol

And here’s a stunning assortment of charts from Jung-Koch-Quentell:

Assorted botanical features, Garden Tulip, Tulipa gesneriana

Common Hair Moss, Polytrichum commune, Swiss Moss Fern, Selaginella helvetica

Red Starfish, Asterias rubens, Grass Snake and Horned Viper

Red Ant, Formice rufa, Housefly, Musca domestica

“The scientists have done their job — they’ve issued every possible warning, flashed every red light. Now it’s time for the rest of us — for the economists, the psychologists, the theologians. And the artists, whose role is to help us understand what things feel like. These stories are an impressive start in that direction, and one shouldn’t forget for a moment that they represent a real departure from most literary work. Instead of being consumed with the relationships between people, they increasingly take on the relationship between people and everything else. On a stable planet, nature provided a background against which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet we’re creating, the background becomes the highest drama. So many of these pieces conjure up that world, and a tough world it is, not the familiar one we’ve loved without even thinking of it. Those are jolts we dearly need; this is serious business we’re involved in.” — Bill McKibben, from his introduction to I’m with the Bears: Short Stories From a Damaged Planet

There are two new fiction collections that heed Bill McKibben’s call to enlist our unstable planet as a key character and source of fiction’s highest drama. I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, edited by Mark Martin, collects ten tales “shaping an emotional response to the deterioration of our global habitat.” Several leading contemporary writers lend their voices, along with authors from the realm of science fiction, such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Paolo Bacigalupi.

Science fiction is front and center in Welcome to the Greenhouse: Strange Tales of Climate Change, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. Both grim and hopeful futures are imagined in sixteen speculative stories by authors such as Brian W. Aldiss, Gregory Benford, Bruce Sterling, and Alan Dean Foster.

To borrow Bill McKibben’s phrase, science fiction often provides the jolts we dearly need. Here are just a few more provocative books from the Land Library’s shelves:

The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse by Dale Pendell, set in California’s future, long after sea levels have risen, Sixty Days and Counting, the third in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate change trilogy which also includes Forty Signs of Rain, and Fifty Degrees Below, and Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, a collection of cautionary stories for the planet from the author of the award-winning The Windup Girl.

Who knew the Land Library would have a Sci-fi section? We do, and we hope we can delve deeper into those earlier cautionary voices that spoke clearly of the times we are now living in. We would like to see this section grow. After all, we do love science fiction enough to know that the only way to close is to sincerely say to all — live long and prosper!

Nature’s diverse migrations all seem to follow the classic outline of age-old literature and mythology. A hero embarks on a great journey, and soon encounters unexpected adventures and mishaps along the way. Obstacles are overcome, and our hero reaches the journey’s end — somehow older, wiser, and at least for now, fulfilled.

The fall season seems like a particularly apt time to mark and celebrate the ancient migratory routes of countless species on earth. The urge always seems greatest as the seasons change. Pictured above are two of the Land Library’s favorite new books on animal migration. National Geographic’s Great Migrations provides a wonderful visual tour of the intrepid travelers of land, sea, and air. Ben Hoare’s Animal Migration: Remarkable Journeys in the Wild traces the routes of more than fifty species across the globe, highlighting many migratory hot spots that are under threat from human activities. Both volumes make you want to learn more — if only to stay out of the way of ancient routes beyond our understanding.

From The Grapes of Wrath to the migratory patterns of caribou, salmon and wildebeest, the phenomenon is all the same — an instinctual move toward a better world. Here’s a few more Land Library volumes that recognizes the hero’s journey, no matter what species you are:

Sea, Air & Land: Voyage of the Turtle by Carl Safina (tracking the migration of the leatherback, loggerhead, and green turtles), The Migration of Birds: Seasons on the Wing by Janice Hughes (a perfect place to begin for all avian-in-flux), and Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd by Karsten Heuer (an account by a Canadian wildlife biologist, who followed a caribou herd from their wintering home to their calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).

The classic story line of migration has not been lost on the authors and illustrators of children’s books. Here’s just a few of our favorites from our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library:

They Walk the Earth: The Extraordinary Travels of Animals on Land by Seymour Simon, and The Peregrine’s Journey: A Story of Migration by Madeleine Dunphy

Going Home: The Mystery of Animal Migration by Marianne Berkes, and The Serengeti Migration: Africa’s Animals on the Move by Lisa Lindblad

For more on the migratory inclinations of all of us on earth, please visit a couple of our previous posts!

–Neglected Histories, Moral Uncertainty, & the Harvesting of the West (migrant workers & the Great Depression)

–Pronghorn Passage (with a terrific film clip of the challenges pronghorn face along their ancient Wyoming migratory route)

“The last train ran on the High Line in 1980, reportedly pulling three carloads of frozen turkeys. With the end of train traffic, a self-seeded landscape began to grow among the gravel ballast and steel rails atop the out-of-use structure. Grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs took root and slowly took over the High Line.” — from High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky

In the 1930′s, an elevated railroad spur was built on Manhattan’s West Side. The High Line allowed for the efficient and safe transport of freight, without disturbing the street traffic below. But, with the growth of interstate trucking in the 1950′s, the High Line declined, and nature slowly took over.

This derelict structure was soon seen as an eye-sore and blight upon the neighborhood. In 1999, with demolition looming, Joshua David and Robert Hammond formed the Friends of the High Line. They imagined something different — a Park in the Sky:

“When we started we knew very little about preservation, architecture, community organizing, horticulture, fundraising, working with City Hall, or running a park.
Our lack of expertise was a key to the High Line’s success. It forced us to ask other people to help us. It was these others, who rallied around us, guided us, and did the work we did not know how to do, who made the High Line possible.” — from High Line

This unlikely urban tale is wonderfully captured in Joshua David and Robert Hammond’s High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky — a personal memoir of how High Line came back to life as one of the most innovative urban parks in the country.

For more, here’s an inspiring 4-minute film clip on the improbable history of the High Line!

“The other day, walking to work on the High Line, I felt like I was in some kind of Dr. Suess garden as I went past the foxtail lilies, with their tall yellow plumes; the serviceberry trees, full of edible berries, and the smoke bushes, with their feathery puffs tossing in the wind. I know the names of these particular plants, but I don’t know the names of most of the plants. It’s not about the individual plants — it’s the overall effect. Some people think of parks as being an escape from the city, but the High Line works because it never takes you away from New York. You are not in a botanical garden. You can hear horns honking. You can see traffic and taxis. It’s knitted into the city. And you’re not alone. You’re walking up there with other New Yorkers.” — Robert Hammond, from High Line

“We were inspired by others, and I hope the High Line will encourage people to pursue all sorts of crazy projects, even if they seem, like the High Line once did, the most unlikely of dreams.” — Robert Hammond, from High Line

For more on the High Line, be sure to visit the Friends of the High Line website!

“From 1900 to his death in 1946, Maynard Dixon roamed the American West’s plains, mesas, and deserts — by foot, horseback, buckboard, and ultimately, the dreaded automobile — drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays, and letters in a quest to uncover the region’s spirit.” — Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon

Early on, Maynard Dixon and the American West became inexorably linked. In 1901 he joined fellow artist Edward Borein on a rugged horseback trip through several Western states. What he saw changed his life, and can still be traced in the many paintings, sketches and illustrations that would follow.

Donald Hagerty has captured the remarkable life and work of Maynard Dixon in two recent books. The Art of Maynard Dixon is a large-format monograph, and the next best thing to viewing Dixon’s work in galleries across the country. As much as we love this hefty book, our favorite is Hagerty’s The Life of Maynard Dixon — an illuminating biography that is also one of the most brilliantly designed books we’ve seen in many years. Color images of Dixon’s paintings and illustrations accompany nearly every page of this incredibly rich biography.

The Life of Maynard Dixon is also full of black & white photos from Dixon’s life — here’s Dixon with his wife Edith Hamlin, a noted San Francisco muralist.

Hagerty also documents the more commercial work Dixon undertook. Dixon’s illustrations were featured in several magazines such as Sunset, Scribners, Colliers, Century Magazine, and McClures. To make ends meet he also crafted billboard images such as The Apache Trail via the Southern Pacific, 1917 (pictured above).

It’s a great joy to see the full range of Dixon’s work preserved in Donald Hagerty’s books!

This is the land of mesas, laid down in layers of colored sandstone, red, yellow, pink, and creamy white; carved and hollowed by the recession of forgotten seas; their sides often sheer, or broken into strange isolated slabs, turrets, buttes — the blind blunt architecture of a pre-human world. — Maynard Dixon

Here’s a short film clip, where you’ll have the chance to meet Donald Hagerty and learn more about the life and work of Maynard Dixon:

My object has always been to get close to the real nature of my subject as possible — people, animals and country. The melodramatic Wild West idea is not for me the big possibility. The nobler and more lasting qualities are in the quiet and most broadly human aspects of western life. I aim to interpret, for the most part, the poetry and pathos of the life of western people, seen amid the grandeur, sternness and loneliness of their country. — Maynard Dixon

White Buttes, Utah, 1944

Through long and sympathetic searching, he learned how the almost imperceptible contours of flat plains rise and fall as they flow toward the horizon and how the architecture of mesas and buttes marches rhythmically over the landscape, swelled with the freedom of a deep blue sky. — Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon

Open Range, 1942

I do not paint Indians or cowboys merely because they are picturesque subjects, but because through them I can express that phantasy of freedom of space and thought, which will give the world a sentiment about these people which is inspiring and uplifting. — Maynard Dixon

You can feel a definite chill in the air now, and for the past few weeks, Rocky Mountain meadows have been filling with elk in rut, as the mating season reaches high hormonal gear. Part of the bull elk’s strategy is to impress the females with their high-pitched bugle call. Bugling is most common early in the morning, and late in the day. No description can match the other-worldly sound itself:

For much more on elk, the Land Library strongly recommends the Smithsonian Institution Press’ North American Elk: Ecology and Management (pictured at the top of this post) — a 1,000 page tome on all-things-elk.

David Petersen, an author and naturalist from Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, has written a very insightful homage to North America’s elk (also called wapiti): Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World. And no elk-shelf would be complete without Olaus Murie’s classic study, The Elk Of North America. In 1927, Murie, a field biologist for the old U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, undertook the first study of elk in the wilderness of Wyoming’s Teton Mountains.

In 1966, Olaus, and his wife Margaret (Mardy) published a surprise best-seller, Wapiti Wilderness, which describes their adventure-filled years of living in the Tetons, studying elk, and forever remembering distant bugle calls on the frosty autumn air.

In the past few months, we have done numerous posts on food and the city. Just last week we wrote about the farmer’s market movement, and before that we touted several recent books on our greening urban landscape.

There’s no hotter topic today than urban agriculture — growing healthy local food in a myriad of neglected city spaces. Garden Cities: Theory & Practice of Agrarian Urbanism by Andres Duany presents a visionary outline that harmonizes urban and agrarian environments. But how to blend homes, industry, and agriculture?

The answer to that question can be found in the new book Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture by Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr. This thickly illustrated book profiles 40 projects (both conceptual, and actually built) that show how important architecture, landscape design, and urban planning are to the future of urban food systems. Carrot City demonstrates how industrial wastelands along highways and railways can be transformed into productive patches of healthy produce. Community gardens can be tucked under raised highways, or scattered across a network of edible front yards. Other projects successfully employ living walls and productive green roofs. Interior spaces offer great potential as well:

Niagara Community Food Centre — Toronto, Canada: a proposed market/greenhouse to be built along the city’s rail corridor (designed by Jordan Kemp Edmonds). The Greenhouse (pictured above) will employ rainwater harvesting, solar energy, and a geothermal storage system.

And talk about building both community, and a healthy food system! As we wrote just last week, schoolyards are, slowly but surely, transforming asphalt into something new:

The Edible Schoolyard, P.S. 216, Brooklyn, New York, a design by the Work Architectural Company: Schools offer a unique opportunity to energize families, and train the next generation of urban farmers!

Carrot City is an inspiring book, full of innovative ideas. Here’s two of our favorite books that move beyond the design phase, focusing in on a particular city, and the practical lessons learned along the way:

Growing a Garden City, Jeremy Smith’s story of how Missoula, Montana embraced the local food movement with city gardens, community-supported agriculture, and farm work-therapy programs. (This past year, Jeremy gave a wonderful slide show based on his book, for our ongoing Rocky Mountain Land Series). Also pictured above, here’s invaluable lessons learned from one of America’s pioneering urban food systems: Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens by Jeffrey Hou, Julie Johnson, and Laura Lawson.

There are many, many excellent books on this vibrant topic, including this classic book, from more than a hundred years ago:

Sir Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow was first published in 1898 (with the original title of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform). Howard’s passionate vision called for towns free of slums, and enjoying the benefits of both town and country. Howard’s work inspired the Garden City movement of the last century, and his influence is still being felt today. Ebenezer Howard’s unique approach is well captured in his intriguing Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities diagram (picture above) that accompanied the 1902 edition of Garden Cities of To-morrow.

For other great resources on the urban food movement, you might want to link back to a few our our earlier posts!

–Think Vertical (vertical farms in the city)

–Tools for the Urban Homesteader

–The Endless Bounty of Once Neglected Land (the English Allotment system)

“As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn’t think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past.” — Edna Lewis

Edna Lewis (1916-2006) had a remarkable career as a chef and writer of several best-selling cookbooks. Perhaps her most lasting contribution was her lifelong celebration of traditional southern cooking. She kept the tradition alive, and along the way inspired the next generation of cooks to make fresh magic from the local foods of the south.

As many of you know, the Land Library has a 3,000 volume Kids Nature Library in Waterton Canyon, southwest of metro-Denver. One of our most treasured books at the Kids Library is Robbin Gourley’s beautifully illustrated picture book, Bring Me Some Apples and I’ll Make You a Pie: A Story About Edna Lewis.

Edna was born on a small farm in Freetown, Virginia — a farm that had been granted to Edna’s grandfather, a freed slave. Robbin Gourley’s lyrical tale (and her lush and vibrant watercolors) follows Edna and her family throughout the growing season. Gathered fruits, vegetables, and nuts quickly make their way to the family’s table, with the surplus canned for the winter ahead. Every family member is involved, but it’s Edna who shows an early genius for making fun recipes from the simple foods at hand. The New York Times had this to say about Edna Lewis’ upbringing: Growing, gathering and preparing food was more than just sustenance for the family; it was a form of entertainment. Without fancy cooking equipment, the family improvised — measuring baking powder on coins and cooking everything over wood.

It was Robbin Gourley’s wonderful kids book that inspired us to learn more about Edna Lewis, and to slowly gather her cookbooks for the Land Library. After all, if she could give so much to preserving a precious regional tradition, we wanted to reciprocate a tiny bit by keeping her work alive on our shelves!

Somewhere along the way, we came across this inspiring documentary, Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie: Keeping Traditions Alive, written, produced, and directed by Bailey Barash. There’s much more to Edna Lewis’ life than you might imagine. This is a wonderful film!

In 1995, Edna Lewis was awarded the first ever James Beard Living Legend Award, for her creative years in the kitchen, and for books such as these:

In Pursuit of Flavor, and The Taste of Country Cooking, of which, Craig Claiborne wrote that it “may well be the most entertaining regional cookbook in America“.

Food traditions have long been a happy obsession at the Land Library. Here’s two of our favorites volumes:

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris, and The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge.

Edna Lewis was the co-founder of the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, a precursor to the Southern Foodways Alliance. For more on their ongoing work be sure to visit their website!

And for more on the great topic of food traditions, here are a few of our earlier posts!

–Recalling Voices, Tastes, and Traditions (on the great variety of ethic kitchens)

–From the Bronx Seedless Grape to the Paiute Tepary Bean: The Food Nations of North America (featuring one of the best books we know!)

–The Taste of Place (Rowan Jacobsen’s American Terroir, and more)

“Think of the outdoors as an instructional toolbox. In any climate, during any season…nature provides multiple venues and options for enhancing, enriching, and adding a much-needed change of pace and place to the instructional routine. Like a toolbox, the outdoors is readily accessible — just open the classroom door and step outside!” — from Moving the Classroom Outdoors

Educator Herbert Broda set out to find the most innovative outdoor learning programs across the country. He visited dozens of schools and nature centers, gathering the very best examples of “schoolyard-enhanced” learning in action. His book, Moving the Classroom Outdoors, shares a variety of approaches, including school gardens, outdoor classrooms, nature clubs, and schoolyard art projects.

Another wonderful resource is Taking Inquiry Outdoors: Reading, Writing, and Science Beyond the Classroom Wall (also pictured above), edited by Barbara Bourne. This anthology features educators who have used the natural world to encourage kids to sharpen their skills of reading, investigation, research, writing, and all the different ways of sharing what they have discovered in the field.

Here’s two books we have featured in earlier posts: Herbert Broda’s first book, Schoolyard Enhanced Learning: Using the Outdoors as an Instructional Tool, K-8, and Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation by Sharon Gamson Danks.

Speaking of schoolyard transformation, it’s hard to beat the story of what happened at Berkely, California’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School! Here’s a 4-minute clip that will make you wonder why this total learning experience isn’t available for every school kid:

The story of Alice Waters and the kids of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School is nicely told in Alice’s The Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea (pictured below), and for nuts & bolts ideas and inspiration, be sure to take a look at How to Grow a School Garden: The Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers by Arden Bucklin-Sporer & Rachel Kathleen Pringle (also the subject of an earlier Land Library post, A Gentle Rebellion, Where Some Dirt will Fly).

For more on the Edible Schoolyard Project, be sure to visit their website!

And for related book ideas, you may want to link-back to a few earlier Land Library posts:

– Child’s Play, Bush Houses & More

– The Green Hour

– To Make the World My Own

– The Insect Man