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My ASLE environmental booklist
Some of the books (and poets and websites) that have been mentioned in the sessions I’ve attended, or which I’ve acquired, or which I recommended to people….
Film/YouTube clips/Slides
A Farm for the Future (on YouTube, in 5 parts)
Being Caribou
Design for Disaster (SlideShare)
Flight Patterns (YouTube)
Upstream BattleJournals/Magazines/Publishers
Milkweed
OrionPoetry: Books
Kupinse, William – Fallow
Lang Day, Lucille – The Curvature of Blue
Munden, Paul, editor – Feeling the Pressure: Poetry & Science of Climate Change (anthology)
Oswald, Alice – Dart (book-length poem on the river Dart, in Devon)
Voros, Gyorgyi – Unwavering
Washington, Peter, editor – Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Poems About Food and Drink (anthology)Poetry: Individual Poems
Bishop, Elizabeth – The Map
Doty, Mark – Description
Frost, Robert – Aquainted with the Night
Hughes, Ted – September Salmon
Hughes, Ted – Wolfwatching
Jeffers, Robinson – Night
Merwin, WS – Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise
Neruda, Pablo – Ode to the fertility of the earth
Page, PK – Planet Earth
Scott, Duncan Campbell – Night Hymns on Lake NipigonPoetry: Poets
Loren Eiseley – poet and naturalist
Maggie O’Sullivan – recommended by Harriet Tarlo for her unusual engagement in the non-human world.Prose: Books
Armstrong, Luanne – Blue Valley: An Ecological Memoir
Benstein, Jeremy – Way Into Judaism and the Environment
Berry, Thomas – The Dream of the Earth
Berry, Thomas & Swimme, Brian – The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era–A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos
Berry, Wendell – The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
Bogard, Paul, editor – Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark
Coe, Sue – Dead Meat
Deakin, Roger – Waterlog
Franklin, Adrian – Animal Nation: The True Story of Animals and Australia
Galeano, Juan Carlos – Amazonie / Amazonia
Howard, Russell D., Forest, James J.F. & Moore, Joanne – Homeland Security and Terrorism: Readings and Interpretations
Hughes, Ted – Poetry in the Making
Irland, Basia – Water Library
Knechtel, John, editor – Food
Kohak, Erazim – The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Moral Sense of Nature
Laporte, Dominique – History of Shit
Lessing, Doris – The Grass is Singing
Menzel, Peter – Hungry Planet
Nabhan, Gary Paul – Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods
Pears, Pauline & Kruger, Anna – Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Pollan, Michael – Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Raymo, Chet – The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage
Smiley, Jane – A Thousand Acres
Vileisis, Ann – Kitchen Literacy: How we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back
White, Richard – The Organic Machine: The Making of the Columbia RiverProse: Individual Essays/Articles
Barcott, Bruce – Kill the Cat that Kills the Bird
Berry, Wendell – The Pleasures of Eating
Diamond, Jared – The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
Steinbeck, John – The Harvest Gypsies
Thoreau, Henry David – The Bean-FieldWebsites
International Dark-Sky Association: non-profit member organization that teaches others how to preserve the night sky through factsheets, law references, pictures, and web resources.
Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP): Information on how light pollution affects birds, and what steps must be taken to save the lives of birds by reducing lighting
The Organic Center – Peer-reviewed scientific studies on the benefits of organic farming. -
ASLE underway
I’ve been short a few iambs here at the Cafe lately, but this week should catch me up. The “Island Time”-themed 2009 edition of the ASLE biannual conference is underway in Victoria, running until Saturday. Much to say about much of interest, but as it’s late with an early start, I’ll just report that I enjoyed my reading this morning with three excellent south-of-the-border poets: William Kupinse, Lucille Lang Day (who’s also written a jell-o poem!) and Gyorgyi Voros. Our session was called Poems on Ecological Themes: Science, Technology, Food, and Ferment and we had a pretty good audience, particularly considering it was the first slot on the first day of the conference. We covered a lot of poetic ground between us, including science, sustainability and atom bombs, with gravy on top.
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Creepy crawlies
I am about to declare this the international year of creep. I have been spending hours standing on a ladder pulling tent caterpillars off my apple tree, wisteria, house etc., not to mention the scores of them I have trampled underfoot, and the slugs I have been drowning and the cutworms I have been stomping, Maybe, lacking vegetables to protect, I just never noticed many of these critters before. However, this is the first year my poor and well-pollinated apple tree has been tented and I am struggling to save what I can.
Not reassured to read this message about these guys, who are northern tent caterpillars:
It is important to realize that, no matter what steps are taken to control tent caterpillars on individual trees, that the overall populations will increase over several years and then drop to low levels naturally as diseases and predators catch up with the population.
This winter I will look out for the larvae, though, to see if I can slow them down next year (though I read they can stick around for up to 6 years!), or at least divert them away from my favourite tree.
The egg masses look like 1-2 cm long masses of hard brown foam, usually wrapped around branches less than 1 cm in diameter.
Oh well. Here’s a recipe for slug bait, in case you share my reluctance to feed them good beer (apparently they like fresh beer every day) (cheap grape juice is supposed to work too) :
1 cup water
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4-1/2 teaspoon yeast
(I have also heard you can add 2 tbsp flour as well)One site suggested leaving twigs in your containers to allow beetles to climb out. My slugs loved this home brew very much. Too much. (I will spare you photos of where greed gets a gastropod…)
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
