Archives de catégorie : Nature

SEED TO DUST by Marc Hamer

‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets Vita Sackville-West’

SEED TO DUST
by Marc Hamer
Harvill Secker (UK), April 2019 | Greystone Books (US), October 2019

Working through a year in the garden of a large country estate, a gardener explores the path that led him there. His days are spent with the magnolias and roses, moths and beetles and the distant lady who has employed him for the past thirty years. A broken biographical telling of the journey, mythology and poetry of an outcast boy who just wanted to be somebody’s flower, to an old man who has and is everything that he wants. Intimate, moving and full of beauty, Marc’s meditative prose fills the heart with an appreciation for the life we live, making SEED TO DUST the perfect companion for his critically-acclaimed first book, HOW TO CATCH A MOLE.

Chosen by the American IndieBound.org for its Indie Next List (which promotes the best books in the country at independent bookshops).

Marc Hamer was born in the North of England and moved to Wales over thirty years ago. After spending a period homeless, then working on the railway, he returned to education and studied fine art in Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. He has worked in art galleries, marketing, graphic design, as a magazine editor and taught creative writing in a prison before becoming a gardener.

FEASTING WILD de GinaRae LaCerva

A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods―and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursued.

FEASTING WILD:
In Search of the Last Untamed Food
by GinaRae LaCerva
Greystone Books, May 2020

Anthropologist and geographer GinaRae LaCerva’s fascination with hunting and gathering quickly exploded into a personal obsession that sent her on a quest to taste the wild foods we still eat and the ones we have forgotten: from wild boar in Borneo, to a lobster bake on an island in Maine, to gathering herbs near Kierkegaard’s grave in Copenhagen. She didn’t expect to find something much more profound—an untamable love affair and the elusive pleasure of simple sustenance. Along the way, she illuminates that the history of food is also the history of environmental conservation, examines the rapid transformation of wild food from nutritional necessity to luxury good, explores how this shift reflects our attempts to tame and commodify “natures” of all kinds, and ultimately finds that her own sense of adventure is just as unruly as the natural places she explores.
This impeccably researched narrative history uncovers something essential about what it means to love the planet in the age of extinction. Equal parts environmental history and adventure narrative, FEASTING WILD weaves together extensive field research and personal narrative to interrogate our concept of nature, investigate how our insatiable appetites have contributed to the current landscape of environmental crisis, and question what we might do about it now.

GinaRae LaCerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer who has traveled extensively to research a variety of environmental and food-related topics. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, La Cerva holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Originally from New Mexico, she lives in New York.

IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE de Lauren E. Oakes

Eloquent, insightful, and deeply heartening, IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE is a case for hope in a warming world

IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE
by The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World
by Lauren E. Oakes
Basic Books, November 2018

Where mountains meet ocean in Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago, white skeletons of dead yellow cedar trees stand in stark contrast to the verdant landscape of old-growth forests. Researchers spent nearly three decades deciphering the cause of the majestic species’ mysterious death: the culprit, they discovered, was neither pathogen nor pest, but instead climate change. In the wake of this discovery, Lauren Oakes, a young scientist, wondered if what the people in this region were experiencing—whatever ways they were finding to cope with their rapidly changing environment and the loss of this sacred tree—might be a scrying glass into the future.
IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE is her six-year-long attempt to answer what happens after the trees die, not only to uncover the future of a handful of magnificent forests, but what lessons could be translated to people in other parts of the planet, where other tree graveyards have become frighteningly common. It chronicles her adventures along the outer coast of southeast Alaska, into various communities spread across the archipelago, and into labs and offices at Stanford University. From thousands of plant measurements, she discovered forests flourishing again in time. From hours of interviews with loggers, naturalists, native Tlingit weavers, and others who value this tree, she found a disparate community of people developing new relationships with the emerging environment.
IN SEARCH OF THE CANARY TREE is a story about finding faith—not of the religious variety—but in the possibility for adaptation and action. Against a backdrop of dying forests and in a scientific profession plagued with pessimism, Oakes became an unexpected optimist. Part Lab Girl, part Into the Wild, THE CANARY TREE is an unforgettable story of science, natural history, and personal discovery.

Lauren E. Oakes is an ecologist and human-natural systems scientist. She is a lecturer in the Program of Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She earned her PhD from Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources and her bachelor’s degree from Brown. She has written about her research for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and her work has been profiled by the Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic, and Christian Science Monitor, among other outlets.

DAS BLAUE WUNDER de Frauke Bagusche

A marine biologist dives down with us into the mysterious world of the oceans

DAS BLAUE WUNDER
(The Blue Miracle)
by Frauke Bagusche
Ludwig, May 2019
256 pages, With a 16-page 4c image section

There are amazing things going on under water: at night the sea mysteriously sparkles, the tiniest of organisms (plankton) have the greatest power, and the fish are by no means taciturn but instead communicate loudly with one another. Marine biologist Frauke Bagusche has some fascinating tales to tell – stories of the smallest and the largest living creatures in the world. She explains where the smell comes from that tickles our nostrils while we are walking along the beach; what causes the sparkle we see in the water at night; and why the sea steers not only our emotions but also our destiny and that of the entire planet. Her account, in which she explores her own intimate relationship with the sea, is based both on the results of the latest scientific research and her personal experience. Because no matter where we are, we are bound to the blue miracle with every breath we take.

Frauke Bagusche, born in 1978, is a marine biologist. After gaining her doctorate at the University of Southampton in England she was responsible for marine biological stations on the Maldives and sailed 9,500 kilometres across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean in order to draw attention to the litter pollution of the oceans. She gives lectures and holds seminars on subjects connected with marine biology.