Find Your Way Back to Nature! Join Madison Public Library's Naturalist-in-Residence Alex Booker for a series of nature experiences this summer aimed at inspiring us all to rejoin the ecosystems that surround us!
Alex's Picks
Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. Available to download: eBook
Divided between sections on interviews of healers and their stories and a comprehensive collection of traditional African American medicines, remedies, and the many common ailments they were called upon to cure, Working The Roots is a valuable addition to African American history and American and African folk healing practices.
Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. Available to download: eAudio
This first-of-its-kind herbal guide takes you through the origins of herbal practices rooted in African American tradition--from Ancient Egypt and the African tropics to the Caribbean and the United States. Inside you'll find the stories of herbal healers like Emma Dupree and Henrietta Jeffries, who made modern American herbalism what it is today. You'll also find a comprehensive herbal guide to the most commonly used herbs--such as aloe, lavender, sage, sassafras, and more--alongside gorgeous botanical illustrations. African American Herbalism is the perfect guide for anyone wanting to explore the medicinal and healing properties of herbs.
Gardening
In The Seed Detective, seed guardian and award-winning film and television producer Adam Alexander tells of his far-flung seed-hunting adventures, revealing the surprising histories behind many of our everyday vegetables. How the common garden pea was domesticated over 8,500 years ago; that the first carrots originated in Afghanistan (and were actually purple or red in colour); how Eguptian priests considered it a crime to look at a fava bean and the the Romans were fanatical about asparagus. Available for download: eBook | eAudio
A visual feast of garden design inspiration and guidance that embraces diversity and teaches you how to create a lush, colorful, magical, and meaningful garden wonderland of your own.
The ultimate guide to growing food in the North Star and Badger states! This must-have guide to growing vegetables, fruits, and herbs provides you with insider advice on climate zones, average frost dates, and growing season details. Information includes details on sun, soil, fertilizer, mulch, water, and the best varieties for your region. A garden planning section helps with design and crop rotation, and monthly lists explain what to do from January through December. In-depth profiles of these states' best edibles help ensure a can't-miss harvest.
The world of gardening can be a mystifying place, with so many instructions to follow and often little explanation as to why. Dr. Stuart Farrimond casts his scientific eye over a typical year in the garden to answer all the horticultural questions you've ever wanted the answer to. From hands-on, practical advice, to an exploration of the mental health benefits of gardening, while also covering topics such as the positive impact gardening can have on the earth during a time of climate crisis in between, Science of Gardening debunks myths and reveals the latest science only taught at horticultural college.
What makes a garden good? For Chris McLaughlin, it's about growing the healthiest, most scrumptious fruits and veggies possible, but it's also about giving back. How can your little patch of Earth become a sanctuary for threatened wildlife, sequester carbon, and nurture native plants? McLaughlin gives you all the tricks and tips you need to grow the sustainable garden of your dreams.
Compost Science for Gardeners demystifies the full range of composting methods and helps readers determine or select the best technique for their situation. This comprehensive, plain-language, science-based book covers everything from the inputs required to the beneficial impacts on the environment and soil health. Available for download: eBook.
Take charge of your family's food security by learning how to grow your own fruits, vegetables, and herbs-and right along with them, you'll nurture your own inner strength, too. Food insecurity affects millions of people worldwide. Without access to well-stocked stores or nutritious, fresh foods, those living in "food deserts" face more hunger and health issues than communities where a diversity of food is plentiful. With the inspiration and knowledge found in How to Become a Gardener, self-reliance and food autonomy are within reach for anyone willing to get a little dirt under their nails and dig in. Available for download: eBook
Environmental Justice
In Birding for a Better World, Feminist Bird Club organizers Molly Adams and Sydney Golden Anderson expand on those ideas, discussing how the simple and timeless activity of birding is both deeply connected to issues of social and environmental justice and a meaningful way to experience joy.
In Planting an Idea, authors Jerry Apps and Natasha Kassulke explore how critical and creative thinking can be applied to today's most pressing environmental concerns. Beginning with an overview of the environmental movement, the authors then explore both critical and creative thinking and systematically apply these methods to a wide variety of critical environmental problems.
From MindBodyGreen's Senior Sustainability Editor and the co-author of The Spirit Almanac comes a four-color guide to reconnecting with the outdoors, with new research on how nature heals us as well as tools for becoming stewards of the earth that nurtures us.
A small rural Wisconsin community restores publicly-owned land that has become a dumping ground into a nature trail joining an elementary school and the public library and crossing three distinct ecosystems
Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization can shape organizing toward a world without the violence of surveillance, police, prisons, jails, or cages of any kind, in which we collectively have everything we need to survive and thrive. Drawing on decades of experience as an abolitionist organizer, policy advocate, and litigator in movements for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice and the principles articulated by adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Ritchie invites us to think beyond traditional legislative and policy change to create more possibilities for survival and resistance in the midst of the ongoing catastrophes of racial capitalism--and the cataclysms to come.
Wild Plant Culture covers the ecological restoration of native edible and medicinal plant communities with a focus on Eastern North America. Integrating restoration practices, foraging, herbalism, rewilding, and permaculture, it provides tools to engage with wild plant communities in mutually beneficial relationships.
Memoirs
A moving graphic memoir following Eddie Ahn, an environmental justice lawyer and activist striving to serve diverse communities in San Francisco amidst environmental catastrophes, an accelerating tide of racial and economic inequality, burnout, and his family's expectations.
Birder, environmentalist and activist Mya-Rose Craig is an international force. In her moving memoir, Birdgirl, she chronicles her mother's struggle with mental illness, and shares her passion for social justice and fierce dedication to preserving our planet. Meet Mya-Rose - otherwise known as "Birdgirl." Availabe to download: eAudio
In this restorative little book, best enjoyed in a single sitting under a tree, an adventurous young boy who traveled the world in his mind meets the old man he becomes, and together they build a new garden from a neglected plot behind his house on the edge of town. Alternate chapters follow author and professional gardener Marc Hamer as a child and his current life as a 65 year old. Hamer weaves practical gardening knowledge through these two memoir strands as he describes the planning and planting of his new small garden near Cardiff, Wales.
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food meets Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in this part memoir, part how-to guide by Tamar Haspel (author of the Washington Post column Unearthed) about the unexpected joys of what she calls "first-hand food"--meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us
In this affecting memoir, O'Kane (Guatemala in Focus), a natural sciences lecturer at the University of Vermont, elegantly weaves personal and natural history as she details how her fascination with birds compelled her to quit her journalism career, return to school at age 45 to get a PhD in environmental studies, and become an ardent conservationist. Available to download: eBook | eAudio
A hilarious trip into the mind of one of the Millennial generation’s funniest writers. Borrowing her Midwestern stepfather’s Prius, she heads west to the Loop of mega-popular parks, over to the ocean and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and, in a feat of spectacularly bad timing, through the southwestern desert in the middle of July. Along the way she meets new friends on their own personal quests, learns to cope with abstinence while missing the comforts of home, and comes to understand the limits—and possibilities—of going to nature to prove to yourself and your Instagram followers that you are, in fact, free.
From a climate activist who has grown up in the decades in which climate change has transformed from abstract threat to urgent crisis, an exploration of how young people live in the shadow of catastrophe Warmth is a new kind of book about climate change--not a prescription or a polemic, but an intensely personal examination of how it feels to imagine a future under its weight, written from inside the youth-led climate movement itself.