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The Butterfly Season: What 64 Butterflies Taught Me about Nature's Great Mysteries and the Meaning of Life by Lea KorsgaardThe Butterfly Season is a luminous account of one woman's quest to see all sixty-four species of butterflies native to Denmark in a single year. Part field diary, part mythological tapestry, part existential reflection, Lea Korsgaard's journey unfolds across seasons and geographies, through meadows, marshes, and ancient coastal lands, as she discovers the mysteries and miracles of the natural world. On the first day of the year, Korsgaard sat at her desk, making a list. It was a typically cold, quiet January day, and the possibility of the new year--of new discoveries and new challenges--reawakened an old dream of hers: to see every Danish butterfly species in one year. At first, the goal felt impossible--Korsgaard knew almost nothing about butterflies--but she persevered, creating a color-coded tracking system that mapped butterfly regions and flight times with meticulous care. As the project developed, what was at first a simple exercise in discovery became an intimate reckoning with transformation and rebirth, the butterfly's fleeting existence knitting together beginnings, endings, and the life made in between.
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Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World
by Richard Louv
The internationally bestselling author of Last Child in the Woods seeks a deeper personal connection to nature during this time of ecoanxiety and upheaval by exploring his own backyard. Long beloved for his insightful, inspiring nature writing, Richard Louv returns with his most personal book yet. Noticing is about discovering who you are by exploring the natural world. Louv shows how, by tapping into the thirty or more human senses we have, readers can develop skills--sensory, scientific, artistic, and spiritual--to see and experience the otherworlds of nature. Through personal essays, rich with descriptions of the California wilderness around his home in the most biodiverse county in the nation, Louv draws on wisdom from influences as far-reaching as neuroscience, nature photography, Indigenous traditions, and mindfulness to foster what he calls bioenchantment. He offers a new, deeper understanding of what it means to see a tree, know a fox, and to become fully human.
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The Ultimate Shell Seeker's Guide: Building a Better Beachcombing Strategy
by Ashley Oliphant
The Ultimate Shell Seeker's Guide is the book that beachcombers have been anxiously waiting for an expert to finally write. Join Dr. Ashley Oliphant as she reveals the secret calculus that the best beachcombers in the world are constantly working in their brains as they decide when and where to plan their next hunt.
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Discover the Art of Field Sketching: Nature-Inspired Techniques for Pencil, Pen, and Watercolor
by Kristin Link
An empowering guide to the many ways of noticing, connecting with, and documenting the world around you, based on the renowned workshop that Kristin Link has been leading in remote Alaska for over a decade. For over 15 years, artist and illustrator Kristin Link has taught everyone from children to experts to draw everything from a single acorn to a breathtaking mountain vista. Now her popular field sketching course is available as a guide that anyone can use. Discover the Art of Field Sketching is a nature illustration book for artists of all skill levels. It starts with the basics of pen, pencil, and watercolor, then introduces more advanced techniques for complex landscapes and animals in motion. It features visual subject matter for wherever you live: you can learn to sketch a night sky, a backyard bird, or a squirrel in the park as well as a rugged mountain wilderness. The book includes 30 step-by-step lessons, and many more inspiring examples of finished products. It also focuses on the meditative and philosophical aspects to field sketching, like slowing down, presentness, and learning to love nature of all sizes.
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Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her--and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
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Don't Be Trashy: A Practical Guide to Living with Less Waste and More Joy: A Minimalism Book
by Tara McKenna
We're all trapped in a convenience-based and wasteful cycle, but Tara McKenna offers an alternative: an approach to reducing waste for a more sustainable and ethical life that emphasizes progress over perfection. This isn't about fitting all of your waste into a Mason jar or going zero waste overnight. For real, long-lasting change that will enhance your life, McKenna guides you through a year of reducing waste, month by month, with lifestyle topics ranging from decluttering and developing a capsule wardrobe to streamlining your kitchen, pantry, and bathroom--slowly!--to significantly reduce the inflow of single-use plastics. This is an opportunity to become a more conscious consumer, as McKenna emphasizes the importance of a circular economy, and soon you'll be investing in home goods that'll last for decades. Ultimately, it's about transitioning to a minimalist mindset--a mindset that, coincidentally, will be good for your wallet--and the planet--in the long term--
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Trash!: A Garbageman's Story
by Simon Pare-Poupart
A Montreal garbageman's sharp and funny memoir, in which he attempts to convince people to stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears. This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean. Pare-Poupart's story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more respectable fields, he is still on a truck -- out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him. His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan. Trash! explains and questions efforts to clean up a business with longstanding conventions of its own, a last bastion of well-paid employment for people who cannot fit in anywhere else. Aligned with great books about work from Zola to Orwell to Lucia Berlin, and in dialogue with societal critiques like How To Do Nothing, Trash will change how you think about your waste and the people who handle it.
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| Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World by Edward HumesPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes reveals the wasteful habits of modern life and offers numerous examples of communities pursuing more sustainable futures in this thought-provoking and ultimately hopeful book. In the follow-up to his 2012 book Garbology, Humes gives detailed breakdowns of multiple categories of waste and suggestions for converting our economy into a circular model that recycles more of what it produces. |
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| Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman's Trashy Journey... by Eve O. SchaubMemoirist Eve O. Schaub (Year of No Clutter) provides a detailed account of her family’s attempt to produce nothing that will end up in a landfill for an entire year. The fact that the year coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic added complicated wrinkles, like the necessity of medical waste. Schaub’s candid and occasionally funny book offers useful tips for reducing (if not eliminating) household waste alongside thoughtful explorations of consumerism and civic responsibility. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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