So many amazing books. So little time to review them all…
Solar Adobe: Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture
By Albert Narath
How a centuries-old architectural tradition reemerged as a potential solution to the political and environmental crises of the 1970s
Against the backdrop of a global energy crisis, a widespread movement embracing the use of raw earth materials for building construction emerged in the 1970s. Solar Adobeexamines this new wave of architectural experimentation taking place in the United States, detailing how an ancient tradition became a point of convergence for issues of environmentalism, architecture, technology, and Indigenous resistance.
The Moral Circle
By Jeff Sebo
Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humankind, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. In The Moral Circle, philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include all potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies.
As the dominant species, humanity must ask: which nonhumans matter, how much do they matter, and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology? The Moral Circle explores provocative case studies, such as lawsuits over captive elephants and debates over factory-farmed insects, and compels us to consider future ethical quandaries, such as whether to send microbes to new planets, and whether to create simulated worlds filled with digital minds. Taking an expansive view of human responsibility, Sebo argues that building a positive future requires radically rethinking our place in the world.
Tizzy & Me
By N.M.L. Hazard
Illustrations by Alice Priestley
Red Deer’s first Early Chapter Book, Tizzy and Me: Fifteen Ways to Love a Mink is a funny, endearing, and page-turning story of friendship and learning how to stand up for what you believe in.
On the first snowy day of school, seven-year-old Georgia is upset to discover that her best friend Winona is wearing a coat made with real fur. What comes next is a battle to help her friend understand and Georgia — with the comforting presence of her dog, Tizzy — must find a way to make things right. As the two girls learn more about animals that live in fur farms, they realize they must stand up for them — but how can they help the minks and make a difference?
Interpreting Meat: Theorizing the Commodification and Consumption of Animals
By Teddy Duncan Jr.
Meat is the essential object dislodged in human-animal relations: in its commonplace, everyday ubiquity and distanced violence, it defies the innocuous or protective-paternalistic stance that we ordinarily take towards animals. Through looking at meat’s status as a fundamental and visceral part of human-animal relations—particularly its commodification and consumption—this book exhibits how animals fit into human discursive practices and how this discursive position determines our perspective of animals and, subsequently, our treatment of them. Modernity is a distinct stage of meat production and accordingly, the meat-commodity must be examined in all its contemporary specificity as an economic, linguistic, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and material object. Using theoretical prisms that have been largely overlooked in animal studies, such as Marxian analysis and Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis, and rejecting popular approaches, such as analogical thinking and effacement of human-animal difference, this book offers new insights into the meat-commodity—and new ways to orient ourselves towards animal life and death.
Blockade: Diaries of a Forest Defender
By Christine Lowther
In the early 1990s, ancient temperate rainforests on Vancouver Island became the stage for mass blockades against clearcut logging in Nuučaańuł territory. Until the more recent struggles at Fairy Creek, Clayoquot Sound hosted the largest act of civil disobedience in Canada. National news coverage at the time showed mothers with their babies, grandparents, business people, and many other unlikely activists standing on the logging road or locked to makeshift structures, risking arrest to defend these rare, evolved ecosystems. Christine Lowther was arrested in 1992 for lying across the Clayoquot Arm bridge while MacMillan Bloedel fallers tried to drive to work with their chainsaws. Blockade is her gripping, first-hand account of the joys, struggles, and victories of this historic movement.
John is co-author, with Midge Raymond, of the Tasmanian mystery Devils Island. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and Where Oceans Hide Their Dead. Co-founder of Ashland Creek Press and editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program).
