books
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Why Birds?
Why not mammals, asks Simon Barnes in The Meaning of Birds. He doesn’t use the example of dogs and cats, but these do illustrate our affinity for our fellow warm-blooded, lactating fur-balls. Of course, these are domesticated animals, tamed for precisely their human-philic characteristics. Wild mammals, which we nevertheless try to cute-ify and commodify, know…
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Beech Nuts
The root of the word book is the same as that of the word beech. The late poet C. D. Wright’s posthumously published Casting Deep Shade is an “amble inscribed to beeches and co.” Appropriately, this book itself is a lovely thing. The unusual trifold cover makes it highly inappropriate for subway reading, but there…
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Consider, if you will, the lobster
Andrew Selkirk, the inspiration for DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ate a lot of crawfish and spiny lobsters while marooned in the Juan Fernandez Islands. When he returned to Scotland, he took up lobstering. This is the kind of thing you learn in Richard J. King’s Lobster. This book is one of the Animal Series from Reaktion…
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In Beringia
“We polar whales are a quiet inoffensive race, desirous of life and peace… I write on behalf of my butchered and dying species. I appeal to the friends of the whole race of whales. Must we be murdered in cold blood? Must our race become extinct?” An editorial in The Friend, October 15, 1850. This…
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The Corporate Killers
Over and over again, industry has attacked science to further the profitability of… killing. The paradigm is Big Tobacco: cover up your own evidence and fund obfuscation and denial. The oil and gas oligarchy has followed that playbook: they knew about global warming decades ago; they knew pumping carbon into the atmosphere would heat the…
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Wilding
Some good news! Isabella Tree’s Wilding: Returning Nature To Our Farm has been published. This is a revelatory story of a family’s abandonment to natural processes of their losing-proposition farm in the clay-laden Weald, some 44 miles southeast of London. Tree is a very fine writer. It’s worth reading this just for the great way…
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Paulson on the Odonata
Dennis Paulson’s new Dragonflies and Damselflies: A Natural History‘s is a great introduction to odonating. Paulson has written the standard field guides to American/Canadian odes as well as dozens of journal papers on odonates. The pictures in his field guides are too small; that’s these guide’ principal fault. But consider: there are 461 species to…
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To Market, To Market
Are we locusts? In telling the “hidden histories of seven natural objects” consumed by humans, Edward Posnett ponders the question in Strange Harvests. True, he puts it in other words, but that’s what it boils down to. Female Common Eider (Somateria mollissima) with ducklings in Iceland, 2010. Edible birds nests, civet coffee, sea silk (byssus),…
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Some Books
Francis Hallé’s Atlas of Poetic Botany is delightful. It’s a botanist’s record of encounters with remarkable life forms, tropical plants that walk, listen, mimic (like a chameleon, yes), among other things. I hadn’t known that rubber trees were native to the New World. However, they can’t be grown plantation-style in the Amazon because if they’re…
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Underland
The Old English word unweder means bad, bad weather, a storm or tempest “so extreme that it seems to have come from another climate or time altogether” writes Robert MacFarlane in Underland. Exploring the rapidly shrinking ice of Greenland near the end of his new “deep time journey,” he’s in the thick of this uncanny…
Backyard and Beyond 