The Books We Share

“This is about so much more than books and reading. It’s about single-parenthood and childhood, about raising a loving, articulate kid, and all of it accomplished without anyone turning into the Alpha-Parent/Tiger-Dad.” — Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook

We LOVE this book, and there’s no way we can improve on the publisher’s description of Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared: “When Alice was in fourth grade, she and her father — a beloved elementary school librarian — made a promise to read aloud together for 100 consecutive nights. Upon reaching their goal, they celebrated over pancakes, but it was clear that neither wanted to let go of what had become their reading ritual. They decided to continue what they came to call ‘The Streak’ for as long as they possibly could.”

Their streak continued without fail for another eight years, until Alice went off to college. Alice Ozma’s The Reading Promise is an inspiring story about how books can change lives. It also comes along at a time when librarians & booksellers need a reassuring boost! For more, be sure to visit Alice’s extremely fun website!

And here is Jim Brozina (Alice’s dad), Alice Ozma, and their happy stack of books!

“If you have been read to as a child, you are much more likely to read to your own children when they come along. Create a family tradition that can be passed on.” — Jim Brozina, from his foreword to The Reading Promise.

Luckily, Alice Ozma includes their Reading Streak Book List at the end of her book. Here’s just a few wonderful titles (which are also on the shelves of our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library):

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman

My Daniel by Pam Conrad, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig.

“We called it The Reading Streak, but it was really more of a promise. A promise to each other, a promise to ourselves. A promise to always be there and to never give up. It was a promise of hope in hopeless times. It was a promise of comfort when things got uncomfortable. And we kept our promise to each other.
But more than that, it was a promise to the world: a promise to remember the power of the written word, to take time to cherish it, to protect it at all costs.” — Alice Ozma

Water 2012 & Beyond

“It’s common knowledge that you can survive for weeks without food. But how long can you survive without water? A few days, at most. Human beings are mostly water and our planet is mostly water — indeed Earth is often called the ‘water planet,’ its blue seas and white cloudy mists forming the dominant features we see from space.
Yet in many ways water is scarce. Ninety-seven percent of the planet’s water is undrinkable seawater, and most of the rest is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, or falls in romote places. Even so, we’d have enough water if we hadn’t invented a staggering list of ways to pollute and squander our birthright.” Bill McKibben, in Water Matters.

Several organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Land Library, have joined together to celebrate our most precious natural resource. We’re still in the planning stages, but Water 2012 will be a year-long collaborative effort to promote awareness of the history, use, protection, and stewardship of Colorado’s water. Over the next few months, the Land Library will determine the best way we can contribute to this needed effort. (If you have ideas, please let us know!).

As of now, here’s three contributions we hope to make for Water 2012:

— The Land Library’s Rocky Mountain Land Series (in partnership with the Tattered Cover Book Store) will pay special attention to new books on water issues — we’re all ready seeing some excellent titles on the horizon!

— We have also created a new Water category for our blog-archives, and we’ll be doing many more posts on water in the West, its impact across the globe, and in our lives.

— Lastly, for now, we hope to add even more water titles to what is already one of the largest subject categories in the Land Library’s 25,000 volume collection.

Throughout the next many months, the Land Library hopes to learn much, much more about this critical issue. Stay tuned for more on Water 2012 and beyond!

Meanwhile, here are just a few of the books we’re already pulled from our shelves. Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan (and pictured above) is an excellent place to begin. This collection gathers together essays by writers such as Maude Barlow, Barbara Kingsolver, Jacques Leslie, Bill McKibben, Sandra Postel, Elizabeth Royte, and more. A partial list of the essays included hints at the range of this thoughtful anthology: Why We Need a Water Ethic, Water in Myth & Religion, Acequias: Water Democracy in the U.S., A Short History of Dams, and Making Water a Human Right — all themes that we’ll return to in the year ahead.

And here’s a few more indispensable titles from the Land Library’s shelves:

Water: The Epic Struggle for Water, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon, Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What To Do About it by Robert Glennon, Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America by Chris Wood

Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains by William Ashworth, Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water by Maude Barlow.

“Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.” — Carl Sagan, quoted in Water Matters.

Brilliant!

We’re excited! Once again, through the kind donation of a very thoughtful Land Library supporter, we have just received a fresh batch of brilliant British nature books. It’s like walking into your local bookstore with every book brand new to your eyes.

Here’s one of our favorites: Patrick Barkham’s The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals (pictured above). In the grand tradition of a birder’s Big Year, Barkham sets out over the course of a single summer to discover how many British butterflies he can see. Along the way, he paints a vivid portrait of the admirable and eccentric butterfly collectors of the past, not to mention those he meets on the road. Margaret Drabble loved this book, commenting that “readers will be astonished by details of the teeming natural world that we so blindly inhabit.”

Another unique addition to the Land Library’s shelves is also pictured above, Nature Tales: Encounters with Britain’s Wildlife, edited by Michael Allen & Sonya Patel Ellis. This thoughtful anthology gathers together most of Britain’s leading writers and naturalists. Here’s just a few: Charles Darwin, Charles Waterton, Colin Tudge, Dorothy Wordsworth, Edward A. Armstrong, Edward Grey, Henry Williamson, J.A. Baker, John Clare, Kathleen Jamie, Mark Cocker, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Jefferies, Richard Mabey, Robert Mcfarlane, Roger Deakin, William Cobbett, R.M. Lockley — and that’s just a partial list. A wonderful collection!

And rounding out our latest brilliant box of British Books are these one-of-a-kind volumes:

Men and the Fields by Adrian Bell (the author traveled through East Anglia before modern agriculture altered the landscape forever. Ronald Blythe has called Bell’s book “among the best rural literature of the 20th century.”), The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre by Madeleine Bunting (what a wonderful place-based book — the multi-faceted story of a one-acre plot on the Yorkshire Moors), The Lie of the Land: An Under-the-Field Guide to the British Isles by Ian Vince (Vince brings to life a prehistoric Britain with red desert sands, molten rivers of lava, and great tectonic collisions).

The Nature of Scotland: Landscape, Wildlife and People by Magnus Magnusson & Graham White (a terrific primer & full of color photos), Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt (the Land Library is lucky enough to have several books on the U.S. Geological Survey’s work & explorations — now, here’s a book that tells a similar story of painstaking progress and adventure, this time on the British Isles), The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (a beautifully written look at the misty mountain environment of the Cairngorms. Jim Perrin, writing in The Guardian, had this high praise, describing The Living Mountain as “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.”).

A Year in the Woods by Chris Elford (the day-to-day adventures & sensitive observations of a forest ranger on the Dorset/Wiltshire border, At the Water’s Edge: A Personal Quest for Wildness by John Lister-Kaye (for thirty years John Lister-Kaye has taken the same circular walk from his home in the Scottish Highlands. His walk, and this book, describes the constant evolution of one of Britain’s best-known naturalists. Lister-Kaye is also the founder of the world-renowned Aigas Field Centre).

For more on Britain’s vast literature on the land, be sure to check out a few of our earlier posts!

—A Brilliant Box Of British Books: The New Naturalists

—A Brilliant Box of British Bird Books

—A Brilliant Box of British Bee Books

—Nuts for Huts

—Assume the Stillness of a Tree

The Work We Do

If Thomas Jefferson was with us today, he would want every library across his young republic to freely circulate American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land. This comprehensive, and extremely well-annotated anthology is edited by Edwin Hagenstein, Sara Gregg, and Brian Donahue — and here is what they set out to achieve: “American Georgics is a collection of representative agrarian writings of the past two centuries and more, from J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry. The collection reveals the great reach of the agrarian idea and its durability in American thinking — initially as an expression of mainstream rural culture, and later reborn as a dissenting vision of radical reform. Agrarianism begins with the understanding that the work we do, as individuals and as a society, is a critical factor in shaping our character. Agrarians continue to believe, with Jefferson, that there is something profoundly satisfying and valuable for human beings in working the earth, and that there is something equally important to the health of society in the way the land is cultivated.”

American Georgics‘ selections range far and wide — from James Madison’s Address Delivered before the Albemarle, Va. Agricultural Society (1818) to Aldo Leopold’s essay The Farmer as Conservationist (1939). Along the way, we hear the agrarian voices of writers such as George Perkins Marsh, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Henry A. Wallace, Louis Bromfield, Scott & Helen Nearing, Wes Jackson, and many, many more.

This book is a resource that the Land Library can’t do without, along with these books that we are incredibly fortunate to have on our shelves:

Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to New Agriculture by Wes Jackson (founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and a foremost spokesman for agriculture that takes nature as its measure), The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural by Wendell Berry (the central agrarian thinker of our day?).

American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace by John Culver & John Hyde (Wallace was one of the most influential Secretary of Agriculture in the twentieth century, Vice-president under FDR, and the Progressive Party candidate for President in 1948), The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land, edited by Norman Wirzba, The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays by Wendell Berry (May’s Land Library Book Club selection!).

Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape by David Foster, Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield (one of the bestselling books of the 1940’s), Virgil’s Georgics, Janet Lembke’s translation of Virgil’s classic agrarian poem.

Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings, edited by Zachary Michael Jack (Liberty Hyde Bailey, possessor of a wonderful name, dean of the Cornell University College of Agriculture, advocate of nature study as a way of engaging youth, and a leader in early twentieth century agricultural thought), A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture Since 1929 by Paul K. Conkin.

For a current day update of american georgics across the land, take a look at our earlier post:

Work, Enjoy, Together Now

The work lives on!

A Transect of Warblers

“A bird book for poets, precisely and evocatively observed, beautifully written. Would that such a eulogy existed for every family of birds.” — Peter Matthiessen on The Warbler Road

It’s hard to think of a more patient and perceptive observer of our country’s vast and lonely places than poet and essayist Merrill Gilfillan. In his latest book, The Warbler Road, Gillfillan goes in search of a darting diversity of wood warblers as they flit across the North American landscape. Gillfillan’s quest leads him east and west, north and south — but seemingly, always on the same road:

“I first heard of the Warbler Road just three years ago, read of it in a used bookshop in Carolina, and have thought of it regularly ever since. I was taken with the term itself: the very idea of a human byway, or most anything else for that matter, named after the wood-warbler group was rousing — no matter that only a few bird people called it that. I began to envision the place in the western Virginia mountains not only as a good area to see birds, but as a juicy conceptual transect in a most gifted part of North America, a transect or a partaking, in the tradition of Fuji viewing or honoring the solstice at Chaco Canyon. And gradually, inadvertently in truth, I began daydreaming the Warbler Road as a sort of Way, a way of ordering one’s priorities in life so as to proceed, at a core aesthetic level, from warbler to warbler…”

In twenty-six short essays, Merrill Gillfillan goes off in search of “the charged saturation of a treefull of warblers.” In its quiet way, The Warbler Road is a thrilling journey.

Over the years, the Land Library has gathered each Merrill Gillfillan book as they are published, titles such as these:

The Seasons (poetry), Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains, Rivers & Birds (essays).

And, before you start following your own warbler road, you might want to take a look at these helpful books:

Warblers of the Americas: An Identification Guide by David Quinn, David Beadle, & Jon Curson, Chasing Warblers by Vera & Bob Thornton, The Wood Warblers: An Introductory Guide by Barth Schorre

Elephants on the Edge

This may be one of the true publishing events of the past many years. The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal is the much-anticipated summation of what has been learned from the nearly forty year old Amboseli Elephant Research Project — the longest continuous elephant research project in the world.

The book’s editors (Cynthia Moss, Harvey Croze, and Phyllis Lee) report on their uninterrupted field study of over 2,500 individual elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Every topic imaginable is explored in this remarkable book — behavior, communication, reproduction, conservation, ethics, and more. Wildlife biologist Marc Bekoff writes: “The Amboseli Elephants is the most outstanding book ever published on these magnificent animals.”

Lead editor Cynthia Moss’ Amboseli field work began in 1973. Her earlier book Elephant Memories (also pictured above) follows one elephant family through thirteen years of good times and bad.

It’s amazing to think that it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that people mounted serious studies of elephants in the wild. Here’s a few more books from the Land Library’s shelves. They all share an urgency to learn and understand before it’s too late for us, and for the elephants:

The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa by Caitlin O’Connell, The Fate of the Elephant by Douglas Chadwick, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Katy Payne.

And there’s this important volume that begins with the sad but necessary premise that the future health and survival of elephants is dependent on human action:

Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence, edited by Christen Wemmer & Catherine Christen.

For more on the Elephants of Amboseli, be sure to visit the Amboseli Trust for Elephants website!

As many of you know, the Land Library’s collection has a global focus, not just books on the Rocky Mountains. One of our favorite sections of the library is focused on the natural history of Africa!

South Park’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch, future home of the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s global collection of books on people and the land — from the Arctic to the African savannas.

Always disappearing, always returning…

April is National Poetry Month, and for the Rocky Mountain Land Library, there’s no better way to mark the occasion than to share one of our favorite passages from Wendell Berry’s The Mad Farmer Poems.

As Wendell writes, “The joke of the Mad Farmer Poems is that in a society gone insane with industrial greed & insecurity, a man exuberantly sane will appear to be ‘mad.’”

from The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union:

Come into the life of the body, the one body
granted to you in all the history of time.
Come into the body’s economy, its daily work,
and its replenishment at mealtimes and at night
Come into the body’s thanksgiving, when it knows
and acknowledges itself a living soul.
Come into the dance of the community, joined
in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal
love of women and men for one another
and of neighbors and friends for one another.

Always disappearing, always returning,
calling his neighbors to return, to think again
of the care of flocks and herds, of gardens
and fields, of woodlots and forests and the uncut groves,
calling them separately and together, calling and calling,
he goes forever toward the long restful evening
and the croak of the night heron over the river at dark.

As you might have guessed, the Land Library has a full collection of Wendell Berry’s poetry, fiction and essays. His work inspires all we do! Here’s a few poetry volumes from our shelves:

Three by Wendell Berry: Farming: A Handbook, Window Poems, A Timbered Choir

March 2, 2011 — Wendell Berry receives a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, awarded “for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer, and conservationist.”

For more on Wendell Berry’s life & work, you can check out the Poetry Foundation‘s excellent website!

Caught in the Gyre

In David de Rothschild’s book, Plastiki — Across the Pacific on Plastic: An Adventure to Save Our Oceans, he writes about the five great oceanic gyres, especially the North Pacific Gyre, twice the size of Texas, which concentrates 3.5 million tons of discarded plastic. He also offers this chilling definition of a gyre’s grim hold on our plastic wastes: “A gyre is a place where currents meet and form a whirlpool type system — this forms a meeting place for ocean debris. Millions of tiny and large pieces of plastic accumulate here; due to the currents they remain trapped, breaking down over time to become smaller and smaller pieces of plastic until they eventually become plastic dust. This ‘dust’ will never go away but will instead stay in the ocean accumulating toxins and working its way into the food chain as more animals digest these invisible and dangerous items of plastic waste.”

Plastiki also reports this astounding incident:

“Did junk food kill a 36-foot gray whale that washed up dead on a beach near Seattle in May 2010? Biologists aren’t sure whether the whale mistook garbage for food or accidentally swept it in during normal feeding, but when they cut open its stomach, here’s what they found: 5 lengths of fabric, 2 lengths of duct tape, 1 sock, 3 feet of electrical tape, 1 sweatpant leg, 1 golf ball, 2 towels, fishing line, 15 inches of green rope, 1 Capri-Sun juice packet, 3 feet of nylon rope, 1 red plastic cylinder, 2 grocery bags, 30 scraps of plastic bags.”

Sad to say, Plastiki is full of the most depressing environmental news imaginable, but it’s also an incredibly inspiring book as well. The Land Library often goes to our own shelves for the pure inspiration of the remarkable lives of our fellow creatures. The following works of natural history gives us hope, and further fires our commitment to do a little less harm to this fragile planet of ours. What a world this is, to contain lives such as these!

The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Ocean’s Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creatures by Richard Ellis (his latest book, after a lifetime of whale studies), The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea by Phillip Hoare, The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales by Douglas Chadwick.

Gray Whale, artwork by Richard Ellis

Just the Facts, & They’re Hard to Ignore

FACT FILE from David de Rothschild’s Plastiki — Across the Pacific on Plastic: An Adventure to Save Our Oceans:

— 17 million barrels of crude oil are used to make the 29 billion plastic bottles Americans consume each year.

— A plastic bottle can take 450 years to degrade.

— Five out of every six plastic water bottles are not recycled.

— 80% of ocean pollution begins on the land.

— Each year, plastic litter in the oceans kills 100,000 turtles, dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals — and 1 million seabirds.

— A dead turtle found in Hawaii had more than 1,000 bits of plastic in its stomach and intestines.

— More than 85 million plastic bottles are used every three minutes.

— In taste tests, London tap water beat 20 brands of bottled water, and New York City tap water beat out Evian and Poland Spring.

For more on the Plastiki expedition, be sure to visit their website. And take a look at this terrific three-minute clip!

Kon-Tiki for Our Times

In March of 2010, explorer David de Rothschild, and a hardy crew of adventurers set sail from San Francisco Bay on a small boat (the Plastiki) made of 12,500 discarded plastic bottles, glued together with adhesives derived from sugar and cashew nuts. Four months later they made landfall in Sydney, Australia. Along the way, they brought worldwide attention to the plight of the oceans, and the toxic threat of plastics in the fragile marine environment.

Here’s the statistic that David de Rothschild read one day which inspired the entire Plastiki project: Every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic garbage (United Nations Environment Programme).

Rothschild knew he had to join with others to do something: “…plastic was the main human fingerprint on the oceans, then why not use it as the basis for a craft, a boat that would highlight this mess….The adventure of Plastiki, from San Francisco to Sydney, would showcase a new way of thinking about waste, and it would generate the stories to inspire more ways of thinking, more dreams, more adventures.”

Rothschild shares these new stories, along with ways to live saner on earth, in his new book Plastiki — Across the Pacific on Plastic: An Adventure to Save our Oceans. It’s a wonderful book, full of photos, and very helpful fact boxes and illustrated charts. Each member of the Plastiki team gets their own profile/interview, including Olaf Heyerdahl, grandson of the Kon-Tiki‘s Thor Heyerdahl, an early inspiration for the Plastiki adventure.

Stay tuned for our next post which will highlight some of the most disturbing details on plastic-pollution reported in the Plastiki book. For now, the Land Library can highly recommend these three titles from our shelves!

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn, American Plastic: A Cultural History by Jeffrey L. Meikle, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel (a just published book recommended by David de Rothschild — “the first step to creating change in understanding, and the first step to understanding anything to do with plastics is reading Susan Freinkel’s compelling, much-needed, and truly brilliant book.“).

David de Rothschild on a sea of trash, OR, David de Rothschild on the stuff boats (& dreams) are made of??

At the end of their journey, the Plastiki crew was even more committed to making a positive change in the world: “Change that can dramatically shift our daily habits away from the unnecessary and destructive addiction to single-use plastics, but even more important and urgent, a change in attitudes toward understanding, valuing, and protecting one of our planet’s most precious and important natural systems: the oceans.” — David de Rothschild