I was once told that a weed is simply a plant out of place. Indeed, one person’s weed may be another person’s precious resource. In Love Them to Death: Turning Invasive Plants into Local Economic Opportunities, editor Wendy L. Applequist has assembled a diverse mix of essays documenting the many ways that “invasive” species are …
Even before beginning the research for her book My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People & Their Animals, Leslie Irvine had been thinking about what it means for a human to care for an animal. A decade before beginning the book, she’d encountered a man, with his dog, asking for money along a median on a …
In Your Neighbor Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement author Tom Harris has written a comprehensive history of the battles won and lost in the UK, US and around the world as animal rights activists fought to free animals from testing laboratories and put the vivisection industry out of business. Harris is an authoritative …
I’m happy to share a new selection of environmentally themed books — including poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Please check them out… Green to Grey: An Environmental Anthology Edited by Ian Thomas Shaw and Timothy P. Niedermann The eclectic stories in this anthology speak to our changing climate and degrading environment—the transformation of our world from …
The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science and Poetry By Maria Popova Illustrations by Ofra Amit Storey Publishing, 2024 If books are medicine, The Universe in Verse by Maria Popova is a cure-all. In a scant 100 pages, it demands nothing but your loving attention, and in return, it feeds your battered …
Chad Hanson’s gorgeous book The Wild Horse Effect: Awe, Well-Being, and the Transformative Power of Nature combines beautiful imagery of the West and wild horses with reflections on mindfulness, nature, and the science of awe. Sociologist and photographer Hanson shows how “the wild horse effect”—witnessing these majestic wild animals in their natural environment—can evoke our …
Nearly 30 years ago, the first genetically modified (GM) seed produced a tomato known as the Flavr Savr. The tomato was engineered for longer shelf life which was where it spent most of its time. Consumers didn’t like the way it tasted and it soon went the way of history. But that didn’t stop Monsanto …
In his book Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, Arik Kershenbaum notes that animal communication is a young science, and this addition to it, focusing on seven animals, six of them nonhuman, is a fun and fascinating read. In looking at these six nonhuman species, Kershenbaum concludes that nonhuman “animals can talk. Just …
If history is written by the victors, then this book is a much-needed step forward in our awareness and understanding of the non-human animals who have suffered at the hands of humans for millennia. Judging by the title, I expected to find a book weighing in at a thousand or more pages. But at just …
Tin House, 2023 Hermann Hesse once wrote that the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees. There is also great pleasure to be had from reading about trees, and now you can enjoy arboreal texts translated into Tree. Conceptual artist Katie Holten has reimagined the alphabet, centering trees instead …
By Kate J. Neville Texas Tech University Press, 2024, The Sowell Emerging Writers Prize Winner I read Going to Seed right before the U.S election, when I was full of hope for the future of the earth, frantically writing postcards and going to purple states to canvass door-to-door, ready to usher in a woman president. …
