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564. The $64 Tomato

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Frank and Lisanne

Author:    William Alexander

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Environment, Food, Nature

304 pages, published March 2, 2007

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Bill Alexander writes about his struggles to create an ideal garden on the acreage that comes with a house he and his wife buy in the Hudson River Valley of New York.  What follows is an adventure rivaling the Perils of Pauline.

Quotes 

“Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count.”

 

“The great, terrifying existentialist question: If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I’ve always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses , and do something about it.”

 

“Environmentalists blame the farmers for overdosing with pesticides, and the farmers blame the consumers for demanding blemish-free fruit.”

 

 “One event is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, and three a pattern.”

 

“but I had set the precedent of declaring my preference for the solitary pleasures of gardening over social events.”

 

“Well, ah don’t weed; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.”

 

My Take

The $64 Tomato was a very fun read.  With acerbic and humorous anectdotes, author Bill Alexander brings to life his mighty struggles to create the perfect garden.  This book confirmed my life long aversion to the big garden and made me happy with the few potted herbs and plants that I maintain along with the volunteers who populate our outdoor mountain area.

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540. Migrations

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Charlotte McConaghy

Genre:  Fiction, Environment

256 pages, published August 4, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Migrations chronicles the life and adventures of bird specialist Franny Stone who leaves behind everything to trek to Greenland so that she can follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica.  Franny joins the crew of a fishing boat as her only hope of completing her mission.  Set in a world where all animal species are quickly becoming extinct, Migrations contemplates the ramifications of a climatic apocalypse.

Quotes 

“It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.”

 

“A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.”

 

“But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.”

 

“It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.”

 

“I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.”

 

“We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.”

 

“It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.”

 

“He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.”

 

“We’re the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we’re the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot and not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe.”

 

“I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.”

 

“think of the courage of this and I could cry with it, and maybe there’s something in his eyes that suggests he understands a little of that.”

 

“Yours is a terrible will,” he told me once. And that is true, but I have been a casualty of it far longer than he has.”

 

My Take

While there is some interesting imagry and concepts in Migrations, I had a hard time warming up to this book.  Probably because I really didn’t like the self absorbed and self destructive protagonist Franny.  However, others in my book group really liked it, so it might just be me.

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521. Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Shellenberger

Genre:  Non Fiction, Environmental, Public Policy

272 pages, published June 23, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Apocalypse Never, longtime environmentalist Michael Shellenberger addresses the alarmism surrounding climate change and other environmentalist issues.  Responding to these claims and the rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided to a deep dive and separate science from fiction.  He reports that carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade, deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades, and the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.  Shellenberger also discovered that people who are the most apocalyptic environmentalists also tend to oppose the most obvious solutions like nuclear power.   He believes this is due to the desire among secular people to use environmentalism as a substitute for religion.

Quotes 

“nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.”

 

“The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.”

 

 “Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too.”

 

“Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat.”

 

“All of which raises a question: if nuclear power is so good for the environment and necessary for replacing fossil fuels, why are so many of the people who say they most fear climate change so against it?”

 

“Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent.”

 

“unless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.”

 

“Oppenheimer explained that nuclear weapons had created a revolution in foreign policy. No defense against them was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.”

 

“environmentalists were “self-righteous, elitist, neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth . . . and who would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat, and rural blacks, to permanent poverty.”

 

“350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.”

 

“It is hard to imagine a more “pay-to-play” relationship than the one between Steyer and his grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media’s double standard.”

 

“What is inappropriate is accepting fossil fuel funding while attacking others for doing the same. Even less appropriate is lying about it.”

 

“IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.”

 

“Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.”

 

“Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them for a simpler reason: we love them.”

 

“Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into the environmental sciences.”

 

“nature gracefully, gradually self-regulates species and environments”

 

“Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.”

 

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad.  And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.”

 

“people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity. Given that’s what climate activists have been taught to believe, it’s understandable that so many of them would be so angry.”

 

“Just as the far higher power densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high-energy, urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. And, as we have seen, for some advocates of renewables, that has always been the goal.”

 

My Take

In  Apocalypse Never, longtime environmentalist Michael Shellenberger lays out in painstaking detail how destructive much of the current environmental alarmism is to humanity, especially those humans at the lower rungs who require abundant energy to improve their economic plight.  A bit slow and dense in parts, but still an informative read that challenges the conventional orthodoxy.

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388. American Wolf

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Nate Blakeslee

Genre:    Nonfiction, Animals, Nature, Science, History, Environment

320 pages, published August, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

American Wolf follows the story of Rick McIntyre, a park ranger in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, who spends all of his time studying and teaching about wolves.  We also learn a great deal about the different wolf packs that inhabit Yellowstone and the legal fight to protect them.

Quotes 

“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.”

 

“Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”

 

“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way.”

 

“But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf… than he is any other animal.”

 

“By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?

There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”

 

My Take

Well, I learned a lot about wolves after reading this book.  If you have an interest in them, then I highly recommend this book.  If you don’t, you still might like it.

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294. The First 1,000 Days: A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children—And the World

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth

Author:   Roger Thurow

Genre:  Non Fiction, Health, Environment, Food, Public Policy

282 pages, published March 3, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The First 1,000 Days refers to the time period of pregnancy and a child’s first two years of life.  During this crucial time, whether or not a pregnant woman and her baby receive proper nutrition, medical care and hygiene can have an enormous impact on the rest of that child’s life, and in turn the social and economic health of the nation in which the child is born.  Author Roger Thurow explores various aspects of this global issue by profiling poor women and children in Uganda, Guatemala, India and Chicago.  Great progress has been made, but as The First 1,000 Days poignantly illustrates, there is still a long way to go.

Quotes 

“The time of your pregnancy and first two years of life will determine the health of your child, the ability to learn in school, to perform a future job. This is the time the brain grows the most.”

 

“Your child can achieve great things.” 

My Take

The First 1,000 Days is a well researched, compelling read.  It is heartbreaking to read about the abject poverty suffered by many people in the world, especially women and babies.  Reading this book really made me appreciate how good we have it in the United States.  Our lives are truly golden. The encouraging news is that progress is being made on several fronts to improve the global health of children.  Access to better nutrition and health care has improved and is continuing to improve.  Hopefully, the next decade will see a dramatic reduction in infant mortality and stunting.

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293. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Alli Angulo

Author:   Florence Williams

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Health, Environment

304 pages, published October 20, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In The Nature Fix, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain.  In her quest to discover the beneficial impact of nature, Williams’s research takes her to Korea, Finland, and California.  She discovers that the natural world has incredible powers to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships.

Quotes 

“Annie Dillard once said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

 

“Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off depression, lets go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves.”

 

“We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.”

 

“We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.”

 

“Beginning in the early 1980s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan noticed that psychological distress was often related to mental fatigue. They speculated that our constant daily treadmill of tasks was wearing out our frontal lobes.”

 

“people are happiest when they are well enmeshed in community and friendships, have their basic survival needs met, and keep their minds stimulated and engaged, often in the service of some sort of cause larger than themselves.”

 

“Among his dozens of influential studies are those showing that exercise causes new brain cells to grow, especially in areas related to memory, executive function and spatial perception. Before Kramer’s work, no one really believed physical activity could lead to such clear and important effects. Now people everywhere are routinely told that exercise is the single best way to prevent aging-related cognitive decline. Kramer’s studies helped change the way the profession”

 

“The difference in joy respondents felt in urban versus natural settings (especially coastal environments) was greater than the difference they experienced from being alone versus being with friends, and about the same as doing favored activities like singing and sports versus not doing those things. Yet, remarkably, the respondents, like me, were rarely caught outside. Ninety-three percent of the time, they were either indoors or in vehicles.”

 

“The idea of solvitur ambulando (in walking it will be solved) has been around since St. Augustine, but well before that Aristotle thought and taught while walking the open-air parapets of the Lyceum. It has long been believed that walking in restorative settings could lead not only to physical vigor but to mental clarity and even bursts of genius, inspiration (with its etymology in breathing) and overall sanity. As French academic Frederic Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking, it’s simply “the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.” Jefferson walked to clear his mind, while Thoreau and Nietzsche, like Aristotle, walked to think. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” wrote Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” 

My Take

The Nature Fix confirmed something that I have long suspected to be true.  There are significant psychic and physical benefits to spending time in nature and the absence of time in the great outdoors can have deleterious effects on human beings.  And the more time spent outside, the better.  Not groundbreaking, but a good reminder to spend time in nature every day.

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188. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Darla Schueth

Author:   Dan Egan

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, History, Environment, Animals

321 pages, published March 7, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, author Dan Egan recounts the history of the Great Lakes which amazingly hold 20 percent of the world’s freshwater.  Like the American Bison which were hunted to near extinction, we learn how the formerly pristine, enormous bodies of water have been maltreated after the colonization of America.  The mistreatment of the lakes got so bad that they on the verge of becoming dead seas.  Multiple species of fish were wiped out when invasive predators were inadvertently introduced which caused huge, thick algae blooms to appear.  However, all is not lost.  Egan ends the book on a promising note, showing how the Great Lakes can be restored and preserved for future generations.

 

Quotes 

 

 

My Take

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed a book about the history of the Great Lakes.  The credit has to go to author Dan Egan who knows how to take a historical narrative and spin it into a tale of intrigue and suspense.  I was not surprised at all to learn that this book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  After finishing The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, I want to take a trip to the Upper Midwest and Canada so I can check them out for myself.  Highly recommended.

 

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