Sheri was a bookseller here for over three years until love won her away from us (and we are thrilled for her!) She now lives in Cincinnati, where she is still very active in reading, writing and editing.
A security guard at a newspaper where I used to work once said that these days people had so many books and all you really needed was one. I didn’t disagree with him then, but in my mind I was already forming an argument. A life with just one book is like a monoculture. Field upon field of ripening wheat with nothing else on the horizon. To understand anything of complexity I need lots of information from many different perspectives. Reading many books about a subject provides a depth of understanding that shows how much everything is connected. My subject: the environment. I am obsessed with it and keep trying to understand why we are not protecting what is essentially our home and what we can do about it. Three books I’ve read recently gave me some answers and also introduced even more questions.
Anthill, a novel by E.O. Wilson is the second book I’ve read that helped me understand that religious beliefs would prevent people from caring about the environment. The first was Brenda Peterson’s I Want to Be Left Behind. It is amazing to me that a book can tell people that we as humans are supposed to dominate the earth and every creature in it, but there are those who believe just that. This novel is also the first book about saving the environment that I’ve read where the main character works within the system, instead of trying to break it down or change it. It is also an amazing chronology of the lives of ants.
The second book was recommended to me by Jonica. Crow Planet Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt brings humans into the frame of nature, instead of insisting that nature is out there, somewhere we don’t live. Her daily study of crows, why they proliferate around humans, and observations of their intimate lives, brings nature home into the very paths that we walk every day. She encourages us all to become naturalists, to notice the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary, and to cherish it. She also mentions that we don’t seem to know how to live with animals within our daily routines and recommends several other books, like Living with Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest by Russell Link. The way we take out the garbage, the question of whether it’s wise to feed wild animals, among other things, can affect the lives of the other animals living amongst us.
The third book, The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands, I saw in one of Robert’s catalogs and asked him to get it for me. I’ve always been fascinated by wolves and have read many books about them. This one captured me with comparisons between the nature of simians and lupines. Rowlands presents evidence of the cunning and violence of apes juxtaposed with the fierce honesty of wolves. Living with his wolf, Brenin, Rowlands delves into this perspective further and begins to question whether humanity would be more humane, if we just had a bit more of the wolf in us.
Comments