New and forthcoming environmental books (March 2024)

Here are some of the latest books to land on our desks. Please take a moment to scroll down and check them out! Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth by Margaret Klein Salamon with Molly Gage Overwhelmed by climate anxiety? Transform your angst into action to become the hero humanity …

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Book Review: The Quickening

Cover shows an image of a polar landscape with fanciful coloring; behind the book's title is a blue sky over a view of several icy peaks, colored in yellow, blue, and pink, with the ocean waves on the bottom of the image.

Humans have bestowed many rather grandiose names upon the region we otherwise know as Antarctica. It has been called the Last Continent, the Last Wilderness, the End of the Earth. Even before any person had set eyes on the southernmost continent, early maps often included a speculative polar landmass labeled Terra Australis Incognita, the “unknown …

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Book Review: Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo

In Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive author Daniel Vandersommers explores the evolution of the National Zoo as well as the far more limited evolution of society’s empathy for the animals within its walls. The National Zoo opened in 1891, thanks in large part to the advocacy of William Temple …

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Book Review: How To Be Animal, A New History of What it Means to Be Human

By Melanie Challenger, (Penguin Books, March, 2021) To call someone an animal is considered a grave insult, but it is also the truth. We, the humans, we are all animals. It’s not something we like to admit, but if Melanie Challenger is correct in her thinking, embracing our animalness will help humanity better deal with …

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Book Review: FOLLOWED BY THE LARK by Helen Humphreys

Henry David Thoreau’s words were my companion during the writing of this novel. I read through all of his journals and his voice guided mine. I appreciated his wise and witty counsel and hope that this book conveys some of his mercurial spirit. –Helen Humphreys In Followed by the Lark, a new book by Helen Humphreys, …

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Book Review: Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean

Let me begin this review by saying that university presses and small presses have published some of the most creative and thought-provoking environmental literature I’ve read over the past few years. In this case, I want to praise the University of California Press for publishing the impressive work of author Christina Gerhardt and her collaborators, …

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Book Review: To get to the other side: Crossings

In Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet author Ben Goldfarb shines a light on the millions of animals who perish on our roads. There are four million miles of paved roads in the US on which a million animals die each year. Goldfarb notes the tragic irony of our road …

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Environmental Armageddon in Cannabis Country

“An ideological descendant of the Gold Rush, the green rush serves as yet another get-rich-quick fantasy founded on the erasure of Native People …aptly named the green rush, this surge in cannabis production evokes gold-rush era ideology of manifest destiny, resource extraction, and wealth accumulation.”  –Dr. Kaitlin Reed (p.123) Dr. Kaitlin Reed, a Yurok woman scholar, …

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Book Review: A Darker Wilderness, edited by Erin Sharkey

New this year from Milkweed Editions is a must-read essay collection of powerful Black nature writing. Originated and edited by Erin Sharkey, A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars is a stunning and needed anthology. These essays by eleven contemporary writers address the presence of Black people and their contributions not only …

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Book Review: The Gatekeeper of America’s Seasons: Edwin Way Teale’s four iconic environmental books

Author Edwin Way Teale, a somewhat forgotten naturalist extraordinaire, was a pleasing lyrical writer who followed the seasons across America in cross-country car trips with his wife Nellie four times in his lifetime.    These coast-to-coast meanderings across America resulted in four signature natural history books:  North With The Spring (1951), Autumn Across America (1956), Journey Into Summer (1960), and the Pulitzer …

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Book Review: The Nature Book, a novel

By Tom Comitta Coffee House Press, 2023 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart  “No words of my own can be added anywhere in the novel,” writes The Nature Book’s author, Tom Comitta, with a nod to the Oulipo group[1] and a whiff of Sol LeWitt[2], as he defines the constraints and rules of this extraordinary novel. Every …

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Book Review: The Garden Politic: Seeds of evolution and revolution

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, activist, author and orator, was also a gardener. In 1949 he published an article about growing pumpkins and in it he wrote: The ground was prepared –seed sown– and the planet cultivated by our own colored hands; and although the soil is American, it took no offense on the account of …

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New and upcoming environmental books

It’s time for an update on all the fascinating new books we’re heard about but don’t (yet) have time to read. Hopefully one or more of these titles will pique your interest… THE ENVIRONMENTAL UNCONSCIOUS: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton By Steven Swarbrick Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisisWhy has …

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Book Review: The Nutmeg’s Curse

When the U.S. Army set out to eliminate Native Americans, they first “eradicated the web of life that sustained them,” most notably by slaughtering all the buffalo that they depended on, then depleting the land itself with herds of imported cattle. “The genocide of the Amerindian peoples was the beginning of the modern world for Europe – bringing vast wealth to those countries.”

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