Reviews
-
Tree Omnibus
The trees are singing. If only we would listen. Tolkien suggested it might be quite hard to hear them, since they sing on a whole different time scale. David George Haskell is listening with microphones and an acute biologist’s senses. The Songs of Trees was one of last year’s best naturalist books, beautifully written and…
-
Water, Water Everywhere
A toponym is a place name, a notion of maps, signs, and our heads but rarely actually written onto the land itself. These names are packed with the histories of the peoples who did the naming. Rivers in particular hold onto ancient names, however filtered by later folk, as this nation so amply demonstrates. George…
-
Timber!
We caught Ted Levin talking about his book, America’s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake this week at the Linnaean Society. It’s a damn good book and deserves to be read far and wide. Too many people fear and loath snakes, an irrationality that leads directly to massacre. There are still bloody snake-killing…
-
Ants in Your Stockings
Better than coal, right? Hell, what isn’t? The Eleanor Spicer Rice series of books about ants are for the younger naturalist, but we can all learn a thing or two about these omnipresent critters in these pages. I perused Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants and Dr. Eleanor’s Ants of New York City; Chicago and…
-
Raptors
In Raptor: A Journey Through Birds, James MacDonald Lockhart loosely follows William MacGillivray, the nineteenth century ornithologist, from Scotland south, searching for the fifteen species of British raptors. You may recall MacGillivray from the Audubon connection: he was John James’s ornithological ghost writer. I was struck by this: MacGillivray called his knapsack a “machine.” A quick…
-
Deep Maps
William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth is an close exploration of the place now called Chase County, Kansas. The book is large and sprawling. I read it over several months, usually just a few chapters at a time, letting the details build up like the old prairie soils. Much, as he notes near the end, has been…
-
Wild Pigeons
“When an individual is seen gliding through the woods, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone,” so wrote John James Audubon on the Passenger Pigeon, which is of course now long gone. Audubon — who cribbed from Alexander Wilson more than…
-
Inexhaustible Thoreau
Forty-seven manuscript volumes, seven thousand pages, two million words: the journals of Henry David Thoreau have been edited, extracted, and analyzed over and over again. Beginning with himself, since he used his journals for notes and drafts of articles, books, and speeches. It was his practice to write every day (life, of course, made exceptions);…
-
Earth in Mind
David W. Orr’s Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment & the Human Prospect has been turning my mind over and fertilizing it with good compost. “My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an…
-
We Are Petroleum Junkies
Hydrocarbons are a dog-damned miracle. The things we get out of crude oil, from fuel to explosives, from fertilizers to clothing, from pharmaceuticals to candle wax, from pesticides to plastics, from asphalt to inks… it’s just mind-boggling. Mostly we think of gasoline, but that’s not the half of it. The stuff both powers and rules…
Backyard and Beyond 