Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
With more than a little irony, we offer you an excellent video interview which introduces Chris Hedges’ new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. We will feature a review of this book in Vol. 2 #35, due out September 4.
Part 1 of 2:
Part 2 of 2:
Friday, August 21st, 2009
“Toward an Urban Naturalism”
A Review of
Crow Planet:
Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness.
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.
Reviewed by Chris Smith.
Crow Planet:
Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt.
Hardback: Little, Brown Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
As many of you will know, I have for some time now been exploring and reflecting on what an urban naturalism might look like. Thus, I was very excited to find Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s new book Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, in which she too ponders what it might be like to be a naturalist in the city. As a means to probe the depths of this question, Haupt has chosen the crow, a bird whose presence in almost any environment, even ones that have been highly humanized, is a reminder of the reality that “no matter how urban or suburban, … no matter how drastically removed we as a culture and as individuals may have become from any sense of wilderness or wildness or the splendid exuberance of nature, we will nevertheless be thrust, however unwittingly, into the presence of a native wild creature on a near-daily basis” (11). Haupt takes this ubiquitous presence of the crow as a sign of hope that humanity will not destroy the tenacious complexity of wild life.
Over the course of the book, Haupt names and describes essential facets of an urban naturalism and does so using stories from her own experience of watching crows. First and foremost, the presence of crows is an energizing one, spurring even the most ecologically-sensitive of us out of a hopeless lethargy. They remind us that even in the grittiest of cities we are a part of nature and we must seek to reconcile the whole of our lives with wild life in all its manifold forms, wherever we are. Noting our tendency to sentimentalize Nature and ignore the “ravenous uses of natural resources” in our everyday lives, Haupt writes: “When we allow ourselves to think of nature as something out there, we become prey to complacency. If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here doesn’t really matter” (35). (more…)
Friday, August 21st, 2009
“Preserving Cuisine,
Preserving Culture.”
A Review of
In Late Winter We Ate Pears:
A Year of Hunger and Love.
by Dierdre Heekin and Caleb Barber.
Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.
In Late Winter We Ate Pears:
A Year of Hunger and Love.
Dierdre Heekin and Caleb Barber.
Paperback: Chelsea Green, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
(Don’t miss the tasty recipe from this book that appears at the end of the review!)
Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber, as wife and husband, as well as proprietors of the acclaimed restaurant Osteria Pane e Salute, have collaboratively produced a new book that is part story-telling and part cookbook, all of which centers around their restaurant and home in Vermont, and the Italian food and places they are in constant conversation with. Food and eating as a means of remembering – other places, times, people – becomes the central narrative throughout In Late Winter We Ate Pears: A Year of Hunger and Love, as all of the items on their menu connote specific times of year, conversations with other cooks and friends, trips to new cities, or the land on which the food was grown. Divided into narrative and recipes, this book is arranged seasonally, “each season the recipes focus on dishes that use ingredients available at that time of year. Within each of these four sections we offer enough recipes so that the reader can choose to create a four-course meal appropriate to a particular season…These recipes are for simple, comforting, and graceful food” (6).
Friday, August 21st, 2009
A Brief Review of
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture.
2nd edition.
Toby Hemenway.
Paperback: Chelsea Green, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
By Brent Aldrich.
Last summer, when I leapt headlong into vegetable gardening, Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture was one of a few books that I spent some significant time with, wondering how to get my small plots of mostly hot-weather crops to look anything like even the diagrams of densely-planted, highly diversified plants in this book. A second edition of Gaia’s Garden is now available, and I’m still working on the “ecological garden” described therein.
Gaia’s Garden is manual, field guide, narrative, and theory for “ecological gardening,” that is, a garden that “both looks and works the way nature does. It does this by building strong connections among the plants, soil life, beneficial insects and other animals, and the gardener, to weave a resilient, natural webwork. Each organism is tied to many others. It’s this interconnectedness that gives nature strength…This multifunctionalism – wherein each interconnected piece plays many roles – is another quality separating an ecologically designed garden from others” (7-8). So forget about straight rows of monocultures and instead think “keyhole garden beds,” “multipurpose plants,” “garden guilds,” and “food forests.”
Perhaps the most substantial new material in this edition is the chapter “Permaculture Gardening in the City,” bringing this book into conversation with other high-productivity practices such as Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening and John Jeavon’s How to Grow More Vegetables. Although the ideas presented in the first edition of Gaia’s Garden could mostly be adapted to fit city-sized lots, Hemenway makes a significant contribution to gardening in the city by reminding that “to garden ecologically in metro areas, a smart strategist will play to the city’s strengths and mitigate the weaknesses. The great strength of any city – the reason people go there – is the social capital: the synergies and opportunities generated by creative people working together” (230). In this scenario, neighbors fill in the gaps for one another: “My neighbors’ yards had become my orchard. I realized that I didn’t need to plant all my favorite fruit trees. I just needed to plant the ones that were missing from the neighborhood” (231).
By describing the inherent complexity and diversity in the garden, Gaia’s Garden then extends its reach to the larger community, and is perhaps suggestive of Wendell Berry’s description of the “Great Economy,” in which “everything in the Kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it.”
Friday, August 21st, 2009
A Brief Review of
The Armchair Birder:
Discovering The Secret Lives of Familiar Birds.
John Yow.
Hardback: UNC Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
By Chris Smith.
John Yow’s new book THE ARMCHAIR BIRDER: DISCOVERING THE SECRET LIVES OF FAMILIAR BIRDS, despite the marketing hype in its promise of “secret lives,” is an excellent literary introduction to forty-two of the most common North American birds. While admittedly not a field guide, Yow’s writing draws heavily from the classic literature of birding – e.g., the works of Audubon and Arthur Bent’s twenty-one volume Life Histories of North American Birds, among others – as well as his own birding experience. The classic tradition of naturalism emphasizes the role of reading and study in the exploration of nature (and L.L. Haupt reiterates the significance of study in her book on urban naturalism, Crow Planet, reviewed above), and for the ornithologically-inclined naturalist, this book serves well to open up an ever-expanding world of study that would nicely complement one’s field studies. Yow gets to the heart of the wonder that energizes the birder in his brief introduction:
[The birds] I’ve concentrated on here are widely familiar, and chances are good that you can already identify most if not all of them. But, if you’re like me, identifying them is the beginning, not the end of the journey. If you’re like me, knowing what they look like just whets your appetite for knowing what they’re up to. (x)
The book is divided into four seasonal sections, each containing birds whose presence is prominent during that season, and each bird’s chapter is illustrated with a grayscale version of an Audubon painting of that bird.
Since I was reading Crow Planet at the same time as The Armchair Birder, I was eager to see how Yow portrayed the crow. Although his treatment of the crow is laden with many of the negative tones with which crows are typically addressed (plundering farmers’ crops, raiding the nests of game birds, etc.), he does end on a positive note citing both Audubon and Thoreau in praise of the crow’s tenacity – one of the traits of course that Haupt finds most meaningful.
Yow’s writing is colorful and engaging throughout; for instance, he conjures the analogy between Woodstock and a description of a goldfinch “music festival” as described in 1904 by naturalist John Burroughs in The Life Histories. Yes, The Armchair Birder is indeed fine birding literature, drawing upon and extending a rich tradition of birding literature, making it culturally relevant for the twenty-first century.
Friday, August 21st, 2009
It’s not too late to enter if you haven’t already!!!
We’re celebrating the beginning of a new school year by giving away books!
We have seven book prizes that we’re giving away:
To win, you must:
The contest will run from now until Monday August 31 at 11:59PM EST.
On September 1, we will draw winners at random from all eligible entrants.
Friday, August 21st, 2009
YELLOW-BIRD
Liberty Hyde Bailey.
Yellow-bird and yellow-bird, you and I
Were friends and good friends in the days gone by—
We teetered away so high up and high
Upward and downward out under the sky.
Ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee, ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee
The meadows and meadows for you and for me.
Often and oft in the blue summer day
Long have I lain on the wagons of hay
And followed you bounding ’way and away
Till my soul and soul no longer could stay.
Ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee, ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee
The sky and the sky is unhampered and free.
Slowly and slow in the midsummer’s rest
In sun of the east and heats of the west
I’ve tiptoed away in wonder-bound quest
To your sky-tinged eggs and thistle-down nest.
Ka-.chèe-ka-ka-kee, ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee
There are none so ready and ready as we.
Copse-land and garden in winter and late
I sight you in crews of gray-brown and slate—
And May-month and June in prouder estate
All golden and jet with a gray-brown mate.
Ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee, ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee
I wonder and wonder what kith you may be.
Days-end and days-end and closing of gloam
Stilled heights of far sky and clouds white as foam
I lie on my back and under the dome
You twinkle your wings and drop away home.
Ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee, ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee
The night and the night and we ever are three.
Yellow-bird and yellow-bird, you and I
Still are friends and friends as the days go by
And away we gallop so high and high
From tree-top to tree-top under the sky.
Ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee, ka-chèe-ka-ka-kee
I fly and I fly to the hills and the sea.
Friday, August 21st, 2009
Ultra-brief Reviews
By Chris Smith
The Green Psalter: Resources for an Ecological Spirituality.
Arthur Walker-Jones.
Paperback: Fortress Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Small Footprint, Big Handprint:
How to Live Simply and Love Extravagantly.
Tri Robinson.
Paperback: Ampelon Publishing, 2008.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]
The Green Psalter by Arthur Walker-Jones is a new book from Fortress Press that probes the Psalms for a deep wealth of “resources for an ecological spirituality.” The Psalms have long served as the backbone of Judaic and Christian worship, thus it is quite fitting as we worship a God who is reconciling all creation to have our attention turned to the broader ecological themes that have been latent in the Psalms since they were originally conceived in the ancient Israelite people. There are strong themes of peace, justice and liberation here; perhaps the most striking chapter was the final one on ecojustice in hymn psalms. Of these psalms, Walker writes: “From an ecological perspective, these psalms are significant because they identify God with creation, and creation is alive, active, interrelated, and has an intrinsic worth and a voice” (134). If you long to more holistic forms of worship in the church, then you will want to be sure to find a copy of this book and study it well!
Despite its hokey title, Tri Robinson’s little book Small Footprint, Big Handprint: How Live Simply and Love Extravagantly is an excellent book with which to initiate conversation about a more holistic faith in Christ – it even has discussion questions at the end of each chapter! While the sections on lessening our footprint were very good, especially the ones on reducing the complexity of our lives, the one on the “big handprint” (i.e., “making a lasting positive impact”) seemed to be very individualistically focused and raised a whole bunch of tricky theological and ethical questions about service and impact. This would be an excellent book for striking up a conversation among those who haven’t though too much about the significance of HOW we live as Christians, especially in a Sunday school class or bible study group.
Friday, August 21st, 2009
BOOKS AND CULTURE reviews several
Recent Books on Chastity and Culture
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/columns/bookoftheweek/howtoreframetheconvochastity.html
Lies. Jessica Valenti talks about a lot of them in The Purity Myth: lies about statistics, lies about women, lies about sex. In fact, she talks so much about deception that the main truth she wants to advance gets pushed to the closing and opening pages of the book. That truth is that women are “more than the sum of our sexual parts,” a message she desperately wants her readers to take to heart, rejecting the far more common claim that “a woman’s worth lies in her ability—or her refusal—to be sexual.”
How exactly does one instill a healthier sense of worth? Valenti thinks it’s by taking away the shame in sex and “arm[ing] young women with the knowledge that sex should be a collaborative, pleasurable experience that has no bearing on whether they are ethical people.” Except, of course, that “collaborative” and “pleasurable” are obviously deemed good, as opposed to competitive and unpleasant, selfish and painful—modes of experience that would presumably be unethical. And indeed, she’s against both violent and unwanted sex, which is for her defined not just by “no” but the absence of “yes.” Sex isn’t really amoral, then. No, her problem is that sexual morality or the lack thereof still has such bearing on (women’s) worth.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/columns/bookoftheweek/howtoreframetheconvochastity.html
The Purity Myth:
How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women
Jessica Valenti.
Hardback: Seal Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
A Wild Constraint: The Case for Chastity.
Jenny Taylor.
Paperback: Continuum, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Friday, August 21st, 2009
Register Now!
THROUGH THE CONSUMING FIRE:
ECONOMIC FAITHFULNESS IN AN AGE OF CONSUMERISM
COMMUNITY – CONTENTMENT – CREATIVITY
Friday Nov. 13 and Saturday Nov. 14
Englewood Christian Church
57 N. Rural St. Indianapolis
Main Speakers:
Shane Claiborne – Will Samson – Kelly Johnson
The website is now up and registration is open!
http://www.englewoodcc.com/consumingfire/
Consumerism is one of the greatest challenges facing the church in North America today. Ultimately, consumerism is a form of self-indulgence that does great harm to our brothers and sisters around the world and indeed to all of Creation. At the Through the Consuming Fire conference, we will explore what economic faithfulness would look like – particularly as shaped by denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following Jesus.
Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=73979927805&ref=share#/event.php?eid=70646854370
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