Good Reads & Views

Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger
Nonfiction

What it’s about: The story of algae, the origins of life, and the multi-billion dollar industry with innovators, farmers and scientists all trying to use algae to solve our urgent energy problems.

Reviewers say: “A fun and fascinating deep dive into the natural history, current uses, and vast potential of algae. Who knew that the slimy green stuff we commonly encounter as seaweed and pond scum is a driving force behind all of life as we know it?...Accessible and enthralling” (Kirkus). "Even readers who never expected to enjoy a book about slime will find this an informative and charming primer to "the world's most powerful engines"" (Publishers Weekly).

Extras: Recipes for Dulse and Cheddar Scones, and Irish Moss Blancmange, among others.

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Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
Nonfiction

What it’s about: On travels around the United States to see where sea level rise is already affecting our world, Rush encounters persistent flooding, disappearing land, old trees newly dead of salt poisoning, people—sometimes whole communities—driven from their homes, as well as people fighting to try to protect the land or help its inhabitants adapt to the new normal. Since the book came out, the first location profiled, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, had to be evacuated by helicopter and boat ahead of Hurricane Barry.

What the reviewers say: “Timely and urgent, this report on how climate change is affecting American shorelines provides critical evidence of the devastating changes already faced by some coastal dwellers.” (Publisher’s Weekly)

You might also like: How the World Breaks by Stan Cox

The Plant Messiah by Carlos Magdalena
Nonfiction

What’s inside: The autobiography of a horticulturalist who has traveled to the ends of the earth to locate endangered plant species in the wild, figured out how to propagate them in the greenhouses at the world-renowned Kew Botanic Garden in London, and then struggled to find ways to protect them as they are reintroduced into the wild

Who it’s for: Anyone who loves adventure and passionate commitment to an important goal

Don’t miss: The photo of the author’s excited baby son sitting on a waterlily pad.

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman
Nonfiction

Human tinkering has brought the world to the place it is today, where climate change and mass extinction are ongoing threats. But human tinkering may also save us. Ackerman explores the places where people are looking for solutions, in ecological restoration, green building, 3-D printing, genetics, medicine, and more. A poet and essayist, Ackerman sees room for hope where today’s headlines seem to leave none. A thoughtful and beautifully written look at a possible future.

Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell, PhD
Nonfiction

The author of the groundbreaking The China Study has written a book about nutritional science and its implications. He proposes that a whole foods, plant based diet, or WFPB, is the logical, sensible way to go, but there are many obstacles, as represented by this direct quote: “You could argue that improving health care through nutrition and other lifestyle factors would even be ‘anti-growth’, making it practically anti-American. After all, when someone avoids the operating room because they adopted a healthy diet, they aren’t contributing to GDP. A diet of cheeseburgers, large fries, and Cokes is good for the economy when it’s purchased, but it’s even better when it leads to heart disease and a big hospital bill.” He makes a very convincing case for a new way of thinking about nutrition.

Paradise Lot by Eric Toensmeier
Nonfiction

Permaculture is a movement which combines perennial edible plants, domestic animals, and a greenhouse into a self-maintaining whole. Most experiments are done on a large scale, but Toensmeier and his friend Jonathan Bates had a vision of creating a garden which could sustain them on a tiny, barren urban lot. This book is the chronicle of a dozen years of planning, planting, uprooting, and trying to figure out a way to make a living at the same time. By the time their growing families forced them to move on, the lot was well on its way to being a paradise.

The Practical Naturalist: Explore the Wonders of the Natural World
508 PRA

Produced in association with the National Audubon Society, this guide has a distinctive visual approach that beautifully illustrates the marvels of the natural world. Chapters on the web of life, weather and sky, farm and field, forest, grassland, tundra, coast, etc., have easy to read entries and illustrations that include simple activities such as observing clouds and identifying types of bark.
A great introduction to nature for adults and kids alike.

Beyond the Stony Mountains: Nature in the American West from Lewis and Clark to Today by Daniel B. Botkin
508.78 BOT

Botkin is a Professor Emeritus of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (1990).  Replete with over 100 photographs, maps, and charts, Beyond the Stony Mountains retraces the route taken by Lewis and Clark along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers from Saint Louis to the Pacific Coast in 1804-1806 and combines comments by Lewis and Clark with fascinating information about those areas today and the ecological changes during the intervening period.

Coal River by Michael Schnayerson
333.822 SHN

In Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, in 1972 an impoundment of toxic slurry composed of chemicals used to clean coal broke though unsafe banks and killed 125 people.  Hundreds of similar spills from mountaintop removal mining continued to flood homes, threaten lives, and ruin croplands and gardens on lower slopes, including one in 2000 in Martin County, Kentucky, when 300 million gallons of slurry spilled.  Journalist Michael Schnayerson carefully documents his indictment of abuses by coal companies such as Massey Energy, abetted by easily obtained permits for thousands of acres from the Army Corps of Engineers, the state EPA, and government officials influenced by campaign donations from the mining industry.  Results from uphill legal battles by public-interest lawyers and organizations such as Coal River Mountain Watch to persuade the mining industry and government agencies to enforce standards required by the Clean Water Act and other federal legislation intended to protect the environment are still pending.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
978.032 EGA

Even if you were a history major in college or graduate school, you probably did not fully comprehend the devastation in “The Dustbowl” in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas during the 1930s. On one day alone, Black Sunday on April 14, 1935, over 300,000 tons of top soil blew through the air, reaching as far as Washington, D.C. Dust storms were frequent and life for settlers was a constant struggle to survive and clean up. After a homestead act had opened the arid area to settlement after 1901, life was easy. With the new steel plows settlers could plow thousands of acres previously used as grassland for cattle, there was sufficient rain for a decade or two, and prices for wheat were good, so they could take out mortgages to purchase more and more expensive agricultural machinery, plow more land, and build new frame houses to replace sod homes and shacks. But without grass to hold the dirt in place during the next inevitable cycle of drought, they awoke in mornings to find that fine dust had filtered in to cover everything and they literally had to shovel dirt out of living rooms. Crops failed, and banks foreclosed. Lungs filled with dirt and people died. Pulitzer prize journalist for the New York Times Timothy Egan does a masterful job of telling a story based on interviews with survivors and other sources.