In less than two weeks the virtual The Nature of Cities Festival begins. The event is designed and run by The Nature of Cities, a registered not-for-profit based in New York. And, like the name says, it is focused on “building cities that are better for nature and all people.” The festival will be held March …
We are thrilled to announce the 2021 Siskiyou Prize winner and finalists! It was another record year of submissions, and we couldn’t be more pleased to see so many writers tacking climate change, the oceans, animal issues, and so many other topics related to the planet we call home. It’s inspiring to see how powerful …
The subtitle of the must-read book The Insect Crisis by Oliver Milman is The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World. Tiny empires indeed. Consider the following: Three out of four species on this planet are insects. There are more species of assassin fly on this planet (7,500+) than the entire world of …
If you were expecting a book called “Environment” to include an inspiring exploration of how trees communicate, poetic scenes of dolphins swimming gracefully through a blue ocean or an examination of sparkling lakes in gorgeous national parks, you’d be in for a downer surprise. The environmental overview that is Environment by Rolf Halden is instead—as the plastic …
We’ve mentioned these amazing residencies in the past but deadlines are coming up for the year ahead and I wanted to mention them again — also since I suspect many of us are eager to go somewhere, anywhere… Friends of Lakeside Lab 2020 Writer in Residence (Iowa) As in the past, the residencies will take …
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022 (Published in the UK as The Sea is Not Made of Water) Life Between the Tides is my kind of book. British author, Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West, sets out to write about tide pools and the intertidal zone, but those subjects turn out to be just launching …
Passing along an interesting writing opportunity… Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities Stories are how we come to know the world. They shape our propensity to believe in, engage with, and respond to, the world around us. They inspire and confront, open and close, breathe and compress, the landscape of imaginative possibility. With each issue …
Julian Sancton’s Madhouse at the End of the Earth tells the riveting, page-turning story of the Belgica’s multinational expedition to Antarctica, led by Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache. This may be not be among the best-known stories of Antarctic exploration, but it is certainly among the most harrowing, as well as the most haunting, with an abundance of …
Not on My Watch: How a Renegade Whale Biologist Took on Governments and Industry to Save Wild Salmon by Alexandra Morton Guest book review by Gene Helfman. A colleague of mine, a federal agency biologist, finishes his emails with, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Alexandra Morton has been outraged for decades. Not only …
Notes on Wonder By Brian Doyle Little, Brown and Co, 2019 During that small window of time this year when it seemed safe enough to travel abroad, this book was given to me by a friend to take along on a cruise down the Danube River. Get it? One Long River of Song. But the …
In 2016, we began compiling lists of the best books we read that year (new or old, it didn’t matter). And now here we are in 2021, and we’ve got another wonderful list of the best environmental books we’ve read this year. These may not be the books you’ll find in the top lists of …
