Open Book: Nature Edition

Hey friends,

Are you the kind of person who reads one book beginning to end before you start another? Or, are you like me and have piles of books everywhere in your house, some partly read and some just waiting for the right moment? I used to feel a bit guilty about the sheer quantity of books, and the ones I hadn’t started, but lately, something shifted, and I see them all as opportunity and possibility. And I will never run out of books to read in my house.

I’m planning a few running features for Cadence, and I’ll start one today – Open Book. It’ll be an occasional newsletter about what I’m reading.

One of the topics I’m most drawn to these days is the environment and climate change. I’m in the midst of reading three nature books, including a spiral-bound massive missive “Foundations in Gardening: Growing & Caring For Plants (from University of Wisconsin-Madison’s horticulture program). Sometime this summer I realized my eggplant plants were bursting with purple and white flowers and vibrant velvety leaves but hadn’t produced an actual eggplant. Why is that? I’ve grown gardens in Washington DC, Denver and Madison, and every year am delighted by some things and perplexed by many others. I want to grow more of our own food and understand more about native plants and pollinators.  So I’ve embarked on a several-month course to delve into botany, wildlife and of course, weeds. It’s a step toward becoming a “master gardener” – so far I’ve taken two quizzes and finally learned how to test my soil. On the other side to the missing eggplants, for some reason tarragon is booming this year, tall and unruly and growing back faster than I can trim it for dinner.

When I want a break from the factual tenor of “Foundations in Gardening” I’m turning to the latest book from Robert Macfarlane, “Is a River Alive?” It’s a poetic discussion of how we might recognize that rivers are living beings. It’s got a gorgeous glossary of words at the end to help us understand this flowing world  – from arborescent (“tree-like in form; branching”) to undersong (“an underlying song or melody or sound; an underlying meaning.”)

Macfarlane, who has also written of birds and caves, takes us on a journey to three places to meet the rivers – Los Cedros, an Ecuadorian cloud forest; Chennai in southeast India, and Nitassinan, northeast of Montreal. Macfarlane writes: “Everywhere I travelled, I asked people the same question: ‘what is the river saying? This is an old-growth question; it has been around a long time. The answers I received were beautiful, cryptic, troubling and illuminating.”

We recently had solar panels installed on our (100-year-old) house in Madison. So I’m also excitedly reading Bill McKibben’s newest book – “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.”  It’s literary political activism, has an urgency that begins with the dedication to his first grandchild, and continues with realistic hope about our shared futures.  McKibben writes: “Relying on energy sources that are abundant instead of scarce – the sun and the wind each day produce thousands of times as much energy as we could ever use – could even reconfigure our ideas of competition and conquest. Unlike oil and gas, sun and wind can’t be hoarded.”

I hope you’ll let me know too what you’re reading or writing – email me anytime at shannonhenrykleiber@gmail.com.

–            Shannon