Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century by Stephanie LeMenager is an academic book and priced accordingly. In other words, this is not the sort of book you’d find in an airport bookstore. Perhaps it should be. This book provides historical and cultural insights into our complex relationship with oil — from the “peak discovery” period of the …
The interior section of Cape Ann, which includes Gloucester and Rockport, is called Dogtown. It was the earliest part of the Cape to be settled, and was later abandoned, so that its only occupants for many years were dogs, witches, and other assorted outcasts. It is still largely undeveloped. “Why here?” visitors ask,
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Edited by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Tim Folger, Series Editor… Science is a scary word. At least, it used to be for those of us who grew up messing around in the hazy world of literature and art, not empirical facts. Science was what made it …
Ashland Creek Press has just announced its new book award, The Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. The 2014 prize will be judged by New York Times bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler, whose most recent book is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. (Check out Shel Graves’ review of the book here.) The contest is open to unpublished, full-length prose …
On a bookshelf or reading list, this classic of vegetarian thought belongs beside Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Originally published in 1990 and reprinted in a 20th Anniversary Edition The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory describes the intersection between feminism, pacifism and vegetarianism (conversely male dominance, war and meat-eating). It examines the use …
Richard Oppenlander’s Comfortably Unaware is a book everyone on the planet should read. Unfortunately, the book’s biggest drawback is that it may not feel accessible to those who need to read it most. In Comfortably Unaware, Oppenlander makes the case for why the planet needs us humans to adopt a plant-based diet in order to …
Imagine. Three months in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, the place known as America’s Serengeti, lush with bison, elk, bear, coyotes, wolves and other wild beasts. This is where writer Rick Lamplugh and his wife Mary Strickroth choose to spend their winters, serving as volunteers at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch, where seminars on the flora and fauna …
Oliver A. Houck’s Taking Back Eden is one of those books that can offer great hope during tough environmental times. Published by Island Press in 2011, this book’s relevance is only going to grow as we face more environmental obstacles and challenges. Taking Back Eden, which presents environmental lawsuits brought in eight countries, offers an inspiring look …
Contributors to the Indiegogo campaign received We Animals, photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur’s beautifully designed coffee table book, just before the New Year. Published by Lantern Books, it features photos of individual animals used for entertainment, fashion, food, and research. It serves to highlight the barriers humans erect between themselves and other animals to assert dominance. The …
Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, by Lisa-an Gershwin (The University of Chicago Press, 2013) They’re here, and we’ve not just cleared out the guest room for them, we’re opened up the front parlor, the master bedroom, rumpus room, and kitchen. Soon we’ll be barricaded in the basement with a …
The Snow Leopard (1978), a beautiful true account of a wildlife research trek into the Himalayas, reads like a novel. It’s rich with sensory detail — capturing the sights, tastes, smells, sounds and textures of the author’s journey as well as his observations and feelings along the way. “It helps to pay minute attention to …
Firstly, in March, you can take a free online course on Practical Ethics taught by Peter Singer author, ethicist and professor of bioethics at Princeton University — how fantastic! — go sign up now. Singer’s book of the same name, Practical Ethics (1979), is his second most reprinted work. Secondly, if you haven’t read Singer’s …
Wolves–will they ever cease to create controversy and incite emotion? After all, they are just another four-legged, fur-covered predator–powerful, but certainly not the “beast of waste and desolation,” that Teddy Roosevelt called them. Hopefully, the time will come when our biases become obsolete and people accept Canis lupus as the survivors they are. But we …
Alan Weisman’s Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? follows his fascinating book The World Without Us, this time asking the question: What will become of the world with us? And not only with us but with a whole lot more of us. As with his previous book, Countdown is wide-ranging work …
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is a meticulously researched and fascinating look at what would happen to our planet if humans were suddenly to disappear. It is at once a glimpse into the history of our planet (both before us and after us) and a look into the future and what we’ll leave …
