Subtitled What You Can Do to Protect Yourself and Your Family, this book is an uneasy mix of an academic text and a nonfiction thriller. Once you delve past clunky subtitles (“Particulate Matter,” “Malaria and Climate Change”), you discover an articulate, enlightening description of each topic. The book is full of points I hadn’t heard: a 15-21 foot rise in sea level is very possible; there is only enough high-grade uranium in the Earth’s crust to power nuclear plants for sixty to seventy years; fifty million barrels of oil are needed to produce the plastic bottles containing bottled water in the US; dengue fever could affect half the world’s population; reforesting a piece of land would reduce more carbon than growing plants for ethanol on the same site. The authors are not afraid to make suggestions: they suggest that it may make more sense to reforest while reducing petroleum use than to switch to alternative fuels.

The authors, a Johns Hopkins public health physician (Parker) and a Johns Hopkins psychologist (Shapiro), follow a family through a few days in the future: the couple’s kids have asthma, the wife’s siblings escape from the West (no water) and from the Southeast (hurricanes and encroaching sea levels), and want to move in with Sis. Everyone’s overheated, stressed out, struggling to survive. A final chapter paints a happier picture of the same family, in which readers of today took the steps the authors suggest at the end of each chapter. These action plans are divided into individual, community, and national and international solutions. Climate Chaos
turns our attention from fright or avoidance to solid resolutions; its value cannot be overstated. —Linnea Due

Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy
Bonnie J. Gisel, with images by Stephen J. Joseph
Heyday Books, 2008, $45

We tend to think of John Muir as a dynamic combination of 19th-century mountaineer and forward thinking environmentalist. This handsome Heyday Books offering reveals Muir as he saw himself—first and foremost a botanist—and in the process restores the worshipful study of plants to its rightful place at the center.

Muir began his investigation of plants during an age in which religion and science had not yet diverged. He could go “to the woods and fields to make acquaintance with God’s plant world,” and find flowers “revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God,” as he put it. His botanical observations, quoted extensively here, remain emotionally charged with the ecstasy of his communion with nature. After Muir’s time, as science came to view natural processes mechanistically, Muir’s words took on a quaint and irrelevant shine. Today, as scientific awareness of the complex intelligence of all life grows, Muir sounds fresh and understandable again. Good timing.

Preeminent Muir authority Bonnie Gisel writes with admirable clarity of Muir’s beginnings in botanical study, of the considered decisions and surprise turns of fate that led him through his lifetime of travels in wild places. The book’s lavish reproductions of Muir’s actual pressed plant specimens accompany the text as it follows Muir from his student days in Wisconsin and Indiana, on through his thousand-mile walk from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico, and then his extensive ramblings in California and Alaska. Pages from Muir’s journals are included, many with leprechaun-like figures of himself. For example, one drawing shows Muir attempting to climb a Georgia grass that, if his scale is correct, stands a good 25 feet tall. In every drawing his plant press is strapped to his back or carefully laid nearby.

The plant specimens—over 150 are included—are both awesome and underwhelming. On the one hand, just to know that John Muir picked this particular bird’s foot fern frond in Yosemite in 1869, dried it in his backpack press, and sent it off to the Missouri Botanical garden, makes us feel somehow like a fly on the brim of his hat, eerily intimate with his comings and goings. Stephen Joseph’s masterful digital cleanup and repair of the images leaves them so crisp and precise they could be real dried plants pressed between the pages of the book. Still, they remain flattened dried plants, most lacking the color and pictorial drama usually associated with lavish coffee-table volumes. On balance, even this monotony may aid the presentation, helping us slow down and
appreciate details, reminding us of plants’ ephemeral reality, and most of all making us want to go outside and
look at plants with the particular quality of attention John Muir modeled for us. —Gina Covina

The Recycling Movie

A kindergarten teacher in Shaker Heights, Ohio, made this movie with his 2008 class to encourage kids all over the country to recycle. Only six minutes long and set to a catchy tune, the movie manages to get the message across that recycling is key to preserving Earth’s resources. Teacher and filmmaker Craig Matis and Nancy Clark say that their school, Laurel Elementary, successfully integrates environmentalism into its preprimary and primary curriculum. Each classroom has receptacles for garbage and recycling material, and every year the preprimary class takes a trip to a recycling plant/landfill in Oberlin, fifty minutes away, to let children know where garbage ends up. This video is a great tool for teachers wanting to introduce students to recycling and disposal. The ideal audience ranges from preschool to second grade. Copies of The Recycling Movie can be ordered free. Send an email to Matis at cmatis@laurelschool.org or nclark@laurelschool.org —Scarlet Garcia

A Community Guide to Environmental Health extends three decades of work by Berkeley’s Hesperian Foundation, publisher of Where There Is No Doctor: a Village Healthcare Handbook. To call Where There Is No Doctor a classic is understating the case–according to the World Health Organization it is the most widely used health manual in the world, now in print in at least 75 languages (the most recent being Karakalpak, the language of Uzbekistan).

The new guide follows the same heavily illustrated and simply stated format, starting with an explanation of environmental health: “If our food, water, and air are contaminated, they can make us sick. If we are not careful about how we use the air, water, and land, we can make ourselves and the world around us sick. By protecting our environment, we protect our health.”

The guide gives equal attention to the big picture and to important details (headings include “Corporate control is bad for our health” as well as “Diarrhea diseases”). Topics range from water supplies and sanitation to watershed protection and tree planting, through community food security and sustainable farming practices (with cautionary chapters called “The False Promise of Genetically Engineered Foods” and “Pesticides are Poison”). Toxic chemicals, health impacts of the mining and oil industries, and clean energy sources are also covered. Each topic includes an instructive true story and directions for a group activity aimed at increasing community awareness and involvement with the issue at hand. While much of the emphasis is on rural village life, urban communities are included when they fit the topic–for example, the story of the People’s Grocery of Oakland illustrates efforts toward food security.

Beyond its intended use as a public health resource for the poorest ninety percent of the world’s population, A Community Guide to Environmental Health offers lessons for the privileged rest of us. First, this book will remind you how unspeakably wealthy we are. Second, environmental health is about the effects of how we live, and in wealthy countries we can make choices that matter to everyone. Third, by showing what is necessary for healthy communities and a healthy environment, this book lets us see clearly what is unsustainable in our own practices–see the chapter on toilets, for example–and provides a starting point for creative reinvention. Let’s do it. I want that compost. –Gina Covina

No matter how much you’ve already heard about peak oil, climate change, and the bankruptcy of our institutions, read this book. Sharon Astyk’s very personal perspective not only offers a fresh analysis of our situation but provides energetic encouragement for hundreds of things we can do now to build sustainable communities and improve our odds on survival. Depletion and Abundance is an antidote to the immobilizing panic or retreat into denial that often follows our glimpses of the stark dark truth.

The book weaves Astyk’s astute critique of the industrialization of almost everything with stories of her family’s adventurous attempt to reduce their energy footprint by ninety percent. Substantive quotes from many authors deepen the intellectual overview, while perky sidebars offer practical tips (“Put up a clothesline!”). After reading Astyk’s take on technological “solutions,” I regretfully concur: “We absolutely must get over the notion that the process of preparing for the long emergency is the process of purchasing a totally different infrastructure.”

So how do we prepare? “Much of my advice in this book can be summed up as ‘go home and stay there,’” Astyk says, adding that the average American moves every five years. Building cooperative communities, local economies, and especially localizing our food supplies figure large in Astyk’s priorities. “We cannot simultaneously call for an end to multinational monoliths and also pay them to do something as basic as feed us,” she says. Practical ideas abound for getting more involved with our food sources, whether we’re urban apartment dwellers or rural gardeners. Astyk makes growing and saving food sound noble and patriotic: “Food preservation and food production are keys to democracy.”

Astyk concludes by reminding us that “virtually all Americans command power and wealth unimaginable to most of the people in the world,” and that with power comes responsibility. She challenges us all to change our lives now. “Peak Oil and Climate Change are about justice, plain and simple. They are about fairness, morality, and integrity–we in the rich world have chosen to steal from the poor in our own country and other nations, and from our children and grandchildren, and we need to stop it right now.” It’s a rousing sermon from a Jewish mother who knows what’s good for us. And when the book is over, you know not only that’s she’s right, but that this new life before us holds the potential to be much more satisfying, even with its deprivations, than the old way ever could be. –Gina Covina

Public health and sociology professor Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and Safe Food, is at it again, this time telling the tale of the largest recall to date in her latest book, Pet Food Politics. In early 2007, dogs and cats were sickened from food and later died, prompting officials to strip shelves of pet foods, an action that soon kicked off a string of recalls for other items such as toys, toothpaste, and candy.

Nestle traces the tainted pet food back to its source: melamine, added in China to pet foods to raise the protein content (and to powdered and fresh milk for the same reason, resulting in the recent deaths and sickening of infants, which has resulted in another enormous recall). Why do European and North American companies source protein for their foods from China? Nestle unveils dirty tales of animal and human food production, suggesting we always ask where our food comes from.

Although the book at times reads like an extended newspaper article, complete with charts, lists, and graphs, this is investigative journalism at its best. Contaminated pet foods are the early sign of risks associated with the escalating globalization of our food supply. Multinational processed food systems are having impacts on human health, and it took the deaths of almost 3,000 pets and a $24 million class action suit to put the issue on our plates. There has never been a better time to eat local. –Mary Vance

Hit by a Farm author Catherine Friend explores meat-eating from many angles: how much meat Americans eat (outlandishly much, 200 pounds per year or around thirty animals, depending upon species), the environmental and health impacts of grass-fed vs. grain-fed, the short, bad life of the vast majority of animals raised for food, the horrifying amount of meat that is wasted, and the uselessness of conscience-stricken eating. Friend does not believe in guilt, and she wants to continue eating meat. Here she offers a program of clear choices and gives you the information you need to make them.

Likening the American consumer to baby birds being fed processed food by Big Bucks Factory Farm, she points out that your buying choices signal your inattention and acceptance. She explains how externality works: Big Bucks won’t pay for your resultant diabetes or cancers, and the animals born to the factory farming system are the ones who pay the biggest price for cheap meat. She does not overwhelm the reader with horror stories or grim lectures, using stats instead to make her points.

Subtitled How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat, Friend gives you the tools to do just that. You’ll appreciate her humor and on-the-ground knowledge as she relates incidents at her farm, where she and her partner provide grass-fed lamb to eager consumers. If you’ve avoided reading this century’s versions of The Jungle, fearing nightmares, this is the book for you. It will help you understand the importance of your food choices to humans and animals alike. —Linnea Due

Gifting Teens With Green

By Rachel Aronowitz

For the last five years, I’ve worked as a librarian specializing in teen literature. Sadly, the rate at which publishers are putting out books aimed at teen audiences about vampires and magical prep school antics vastly outpaces their production of books about global warming, environmental activism, endangered species, or ways to live a more sustainable lifestyle. However, I’ve come across a few gems that don’t hit you over the head with their environmental theme while maintaining a strong enough teen or tween appeal to keep the kids reading. Here are some that got me excited enough to accost the teens that wander into the San Francisco Public Library.

Fiction

Flush
Carl Hiassen
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2005, $8.99

Carl Hiassen always makes me laugh out loud. I admire his believable and strong-willed young characters and I can’t stop hearing lines out of a Jimmy Buffett song when I enter his Florida Keys literary world. Flush is about a brother and sister who must solve a mystery to save their father while stopping the owner of a floating casino from dumping polluted water. I also highly recommend Hoot by the same author.

Teen, Inc.
Stefan Petrucha
Walker Books for Young Readers, 2007, $16.95

Fourteen-year-old Jaiden is one of the wittiest narrators to come along in a while, and is the first teen character that has to deal with the odd problems that come with being adopted not by parents, but by a large corporation. He lives in a high-rise office building, eats in the company cafeteria, and parenting decisions are made at board meetings using Power Point presentations. In this serious but often hilarious read, Jaiden must fight against his parent—NECorp—when he realizes that the company is knowingly contaminating the local water supply with mercury, and the father of the girl he likes is leading the protest against it. Follow Jaiden in this fast-paced and very original action adventure.

Graphic Novel

Thoreau’s Walden
John Porcellino
Hyperion Books, 2008, $16.99

I first became aware of Porcellino’s work through his excellent King-Cat Comics series. He is in top form with his first full-length graphic novel. His simple drawings are a perfect match to the timeless wisdom expressed in Thoreau’s writing. This is a great introduction to Thoreau’s ideas about simple living, environmentalism, and vegetarianism for teenagers who are disgusted by the words “classic literature.”

Non-Fiction

Generation Green: The Ultimate Teen Guide to Living an Eco-Friendly Life
Linda and Tosh Sivertsen
Simon and Schuster, 2008, $10.99

This book occasionally tries too hard to be hip—and any teen can see right through an adult trying to be cool. However, it’s easy to look beyond this detriment because Generation Green gives a much needed overview of how easy it is for young people to widen their environmental consciousness. The mother and son writing team give concrete examples of how teenagers can save energy and think about their effect on the environment. Got a cell phone? Switch to a solar charger.

MySpace/OurPlanet: Change Is Possible
by the MySpace community with Jeca Taudte, foreword by Tom Anderson
HarperTeen, 2008, $12.99

MySpace is still a huge draw for the younger set and so is this new title with its hand-drawn cover and forward by everyone’s first Myspace “friend,” Tom. Tom reminds us that the environment is the biggest issue facing our generation so we should take it seriously, but that change is possible. Suggestions are culled from real Myspace users, which makes it read like something between a blog and a book, a combination that makes it fly off the shelf.

Landscape architect, child psychotherapist, and local treasure, Karl Linn had completed half of this retrospective survey of forty years of his literally groundbreaking work in community building when he died in 2005 at the age of 81. Like so many of his projects, this one continued without him, brought to fruition two years after his death by the publishing arm of an organization he co-founded in 1981 (Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility).

West Berkeley residents can hardly avoid familiarity with Linn’s projects—three community garden commons, the EcoHouse, and the Ohlone Greenway Natural and Cultural History Exhibit—all clustered between Northside and Peralta off Hopkins Street. Chapters on each provide colorful pictorial histories, while Linn’s straightforward narrative makes the often difficult and always complex development process seem like a breeze.

Linn, who trained as a psychoanalyst in Switzerland, always kept his eye on the prize, undistracted by obstacles and mindful that visions can take many years to fully manifest. This shows particularly in the account of the EcoHouse, begun by Linn in 2001 and taken over by the Ecology Center after his death. Though Linn oversaw the initial repairs, green renovations, and permaculture garden plantings, much of his original vision for the educational nature of the project remains a tantalizing potential.

Linn’s projects, carried out in his own neighborhood, could be seen as something of a retirement activity—if that term can possibly be used to describe the always-in-motion Linn and his constant networking with neighbors and nonprofits. At least the scale was smaller and more intimate than his earlier projects (Linn helped found a kibbutz, the national Neighborhood Renewal Corps, and the Urban Habitat Program, among many other activities). The book’s other chapters hint at Linn’s earlier life as a landscape architect/peace and justice activist/visionary social planner, though only by inference. The focus remains on projects—from the first inner-city neighborhood commons Linn orchestrated in Philadelphia in 1960, to temporary commons for events and conferences. The description of projects and attention to detail makes the book a practical resource as well as an inspiration.

Linn’s genius lay in engineering introductions of people and projects, in transmitting enthusiasm coupled with the urge to action, and in setting events in motion that took on lives of their own. This book, with a foreword by ecophilosopher Joanna Macy and an afterword by environmental justice leader Carl Anthony, continues that expansive legacy. There could be no more fitting memorial.

—Gina Covina

Best known for two works of nonfiction, The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, this is Kunstler’s tenth novel, the fictional cousin of Emergency.World Made by Hand takes place a couple decades in the future, in a USA without fossil fuels, electricity, or a functioning government. In a small town in upstate New York, survivors of recurrent waves of flu grow vegetables, scavenge through the landfill, fish the rivers, breed horses as fast as they can, and fill in the blanks of power. As the novel opens, a religious group buys the local high school and settles in, and much of the story concerns the longtime residents’ efforts to make peace with the outsiders. Well they should: their own lives are bounded on one side by a landlord who lives like a laird with serfs he houses and feeds, on the other by ne’er-do-wells who’ve taken over the landfill. Safety nets are nonexistent, and every group in town tries to recruit our hero, a quietly competent leader. Remaining free—and everyone in Union Grove realizes how lucky he or she is to be out of the war zone of most of the nation—proves harder as alliances and power shift. A try at magical realism goes nowhere, but the rest of this novel, replete with unforgettable scenes such as a fraught trip to Albany, is hard to resist. Take a look at the future—and plant your garden.

—Linnea Due

At first glance this may seem an obscure oddity—and okay, it is a practical resource for shamanic weather-working, by all standards an esoteric subject. But Moss (with Corbin) starts with the truth that weather affects us all, and the belief that creating a conscious relationship with the forces of weather is an essential part of restoring balance in the world. As she says in the introduction: “This book is not about how to control the weather; it is about changing ourselves&The greatest and most important change we can make is to begin to accept a broader worldview: one that is supportive of an intentional relationship with Nature, a partnership that fosters the reality of an alive and vital Earth.” Suddenly it’s a book for a general readership.

Moss presents her ideas as she and Corbin experienced them, allowing readers to move gradually with the authors from the materialist viewpoint that is our dominant cultural norm into the far more interesting realm of sentient weather spirits with whom we humans can communicate. Fascinating examples abound, full of awe, transformative power, and surprising gentleness and humor. A particular tornado, for instance, has this to say: “You humans work well together in crisis, well in chaos, so go and work well together—here is your crisis.”

I started reading Weather Shamanism thinking of the possibilities for moderating the extremes associated with global warming. There are plenty of stories included of rerouted hurricanes, rain during drought, and pockets of well-timed sunshine surrounded by storm. But as I read further, I came to appreciate the authors’ experience: “As we grew into our relationships with the forces and spirits of weather, David and I were surprised to experience a diminishing desire to try to change anything.” More often, Moss and Corbin realized the forces of weather acted to heal and balance the living earth, even in cases that seemed destructive. Their shamanic work became a matter of aligning with the weather forces, and then requesting adjustments—a rain shower here, a gentling of the wind there—to suit their communities’ needs while remaining true to the weather’s own intent. I came away from the book with a profoundly deepened trust in the weather, and that alone is plenty to recommend Weather Shamanism for these meteorologically challenging times.

—Gina Covina

If you want step-by-step suggestions for creating graywater systems, this is your guide. From two bathtubs in a backyard to Arcata Marsh, from aquaculture to art, Reusing the Resource covers the territory with photos and explanatory text. The book contains over forty examples of creative uses of recycling wastewater. The publisher, nonprofit Ecowaters, depends upon the sales of its books and plans to continue its global water-saving mission. As money comes in, the books are translated and distributed to communities around the globe. The process must have been rushed in the final go-round as typos and formatting glitches mar the text of this otherwise well designed and photographed book. That doesn’t overshadow its inspiring message; readers worldwide will say, “I can do this.” If enough of us follow these simple instructions, water won’t become the next oil—and if it does, you’ve just put a derrick in your backyard. —Linnea Due

Equal parts touching and horrifying, Farm Sanctuary is an inspiring and sometimes harrowing read. Gene Baur, president and cofounder of Farm Sanctuary, the nation’s first farm animal rescue, protection, and rehabilitation facility, delivers his story in a welcoming style that makes the occasionally gruesome account easier to bear.

These details from the frontlines need to be heard. Baur takes us through his organization’s beginnings: he and a few other activist renegades visited stockyards, factory farms, and feedlots, talking to workers about the deplorable conditions surrounding animals used for food, and performing guerrilla rescue operations. Their goal was to change the industrial farming model, to end the suffering—and, at times, torture—that animals are forced to endure on the road to slaughter.

Writers from Upton Sinclair to Eric Schlosser have aimed to educate via shock value, but Baur’s intent is to prevent cruelty and improve factory-farming conditions by encouraging activism—and responsible dining. Why would you want a diseased animal on your plate?

Tales of victory and justice in the form of new legislation and policies inspire hope, and the profiles Baur includes of rescued animals now happily grazing at one of Farm Sanctuary’s two locations are a delight. The book includes an appendix listing various advocacy organizations. Consider this book a helpmate as you campaign for the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act on the ballot this November. —Mary Vance

Leave it to Virginia farmer Joel Salatin to self-publish what amounts to 24 rants on subjects such as organic certification, conservation easements, farmers’ market managers, and most frequently and devastatingly, the USDA. Salatin portrays the federal agency as peopled by evil or misguided bureaucrats required to enforce absurdities. You will never eat another egg from factory farms—and it won’t be because you’re upset by the treatment of hens, though that’s reason enough. You may also change your mind about other regulations you’ve never considered deeply, and you’ll know on the deepest level just who our government serves—and it isn’t you. Salatin writes in an intimate, chatty way, as if you’re sitting across the table. Reading this Christian libertarian, you’ll find yourself cheering one moment and groaning the next. The best thing about Salatin is that his logic carries him to conclusions most of us prefer not to ponder, and whether we agree with his reasoning or not, the discussions are vital. Folks, Salatin would say, time to open our eyes; things have come to such a pass that we no longer have the luxury of remaining ignorant. —Linnea Due

Psychologist Bill Plotkin estimates that half the people in the US are stuck in egocentric forms of adolescence—and that contemporary culture encourages such pathology. Writes Plotkin; “The egocentric standard for a healthy, full-functioning `adult’ in Western society is a socially popular Conformist … who earns a lot and buys a lot, is religious (but not spiritual), is uncritically loyal to her country…” Such people are easy to control, and they contribute unsparingly to the GNP. Unfortunately, the soul and its seekings are cut adrift, branded “immature” or inconvenient—a midlife crisis or an adolescent rebellion. Life is lived apart from nature and its currents, allowing us to destroy the planet that sustains us.

Plotkin is convincing in his critique of Western society, and he is priceless in his discussions about how to combat its deadening influences. Parents owe it to their kids to read this eye-opener, but anyone can benefit, no matter how old your soul or body. Don’t fear a diatribe: Plotkin is a good example of how to merge critical analysis with respect for people’s individual experiences and stages.

It’s become common to hear that our culture is adolescent and self-numbing. This book provides a road map to a fulfilling adulthood and to a citizenry committed to living in concert with nature. It can’t happen fast enough.—Linnea Due

Following up on the popularity of raw food authority David Wolfe’s Sunfood Diet Success System, author John McCabe brings us Sunfood Living: Resource Guide for Global Health. This informative book educates readers about how to make environmentally sound choices for body and earth, with the entire second half an encyclopedic resource guide organized by topic from activist directories to yoga.

Sunfood Living presents a paradigm shift away from a processed, cooked, meat-based diet, advocating instead for raw foods veganism. McCabe argues that we derive the most molecularly useful nutrition by eating raw plant matter grown in natural sunlight. When we consume a raw diet, he says, we transfer solar energy into our system, recharging our electromagnetic field, which results in better cellular function. Heating food destroys enzymes, and cooked foods lack electrons needed for vibrant health and regeneration of body tissue. Especially harmful are meats that directly contribute to degenerative disease, not to mention the attendant costs of environmental devastation due to factory farming.

While I read this book with great interest——it contains a wealth of information about health, food, and sustainability, as well as a few interesting theories (McCabe suggests that due to cellular memory, ingesting diseased and murdered animals leads to an unhealthy and violent population)——I couldn’t help but think McCabe is preaching to the choir. A slightly sanctimonious tone might be intimidating or off-putting to a carnivore looking for ways to lighten his or her dietary carbon footprint. Also, the book’s flow is interrupted by the frequent and occasionally long quotes and passages intended to provide facts or references.

Still, most of McCabe’s ideas are on point. Following a plant-based diet provides the body with the raw materials needed for vibrant health, but there are also healthy ways to eat meat, such purchasing organic, pasture-raised meat from small, independent, family-owned farms. Shifting consciousness is best achieved by providing sustainable options for everyone. —Mary Vance

For anyone who missed Joanna Macy’s groundbreaking 1991 World as Lover, World as Self, here’s a fresh opportunity to connect with her clear-eyed courage. Macy streamlined and updated extensively for this edition, and added two new chapters based on her work of the past sixteen years, so it’s worth revisiting for those who caught the first round, too.

The book is organized into three sections—past, present, and future. The past section begins with a heavy dose of Buddhist philosophy, based on Macy’s early academic work, especially her Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory. It’s a worthwhile slog, lightened by personal anecdotes and later by the practical spiritual strategies of the present.

The future section elaborates on the Great Turning, the term Macy coined for the global transition from the industrial growth economy towards a life-sustaining society in which the interdependence of all life is recognized and honored. Macy has the rare gift of inspiring grand hope and courage to work for change while simultaneously keeping the terrible and precarious nature of our situation in full awareness. It’s the essential combination.—Gina Covina

Owls are all the rage: they’re making a comeback on greeting cards, jewelry, and chatchkes galore. California vintners and other growers put up owl boxes, realizing that the big birds bring big pest control benefits—bye-bye gophers. The city of Berkeley even named the barn owl as city bird recently, to honor its ghostly denizens. If you are an owl-ophile, Hans Peeters’ new book will only fuel your obsession.

Fortunately for Westerners, all of the nineteen North American owl species can be found in the West, and every county in California has at least two or three species of owls. Peeters starts with the basics of owl phylogeny (a few surprises here: owls are more closely related to nighthawks than to raptors), and moves through owl anatomy, senses, and vocalizations: owls not only hoot, they “scream, screech, moan, purr, chuckle, bleat, yowl, cackle, hiss, and tick like a grandfather clock.” Chapters on predators of owls contain more surprises: snakes, foxes, raccoons, coyotes, other owls and raptors, bobcats, and (sadly) the occasional human.

A chapter is devoted to human attitudes toward owls, both past and present. Despite the lasting “wise old owl” stereotype, humans have often been ambiguous or negative about these creatures of the night. The Greeks thought of owls as both evil omens and portents of victory while many Native Americans had elaborate superstitions and rituals involving owls. Owls are no longer persecuted as they once were; however, in some Mediterranean countries, they continue to be shot from the sky, as are raptors, and in China, owl soup is a delicacy.

Peeters is not only an engaging and captivating writer; he also is an artist, and the book includes color plates of each species, including a rather comical page of chubby owl nestlings. The book also has many gorgeous and unusual photos of owls perched, nesting, and flying, and of their habitats.

Importantly, Peeters includes a chapter on threats to owls—primarily human destruction of habitat and other human-caused problems like car strikes, secondary poisoning from rodenticides, fence entanglements, or (in the case of burrowing owls) nests being plowed under for parking lots. Even birders—who play owl call recordings to lure owls into range so they can see them—can cause great damage by harassing the owls, sometimes to the point where they fail to breed. Peeters describes the conservation status of each species of owl: six of the nineteen included in the book are endangered, threatened, or species of concern. Species accounts are given for each, detailing their ranges, distribution, and habitat and their daily activities and feeding patterns, along with tips on identification. In some urban areas, barn owls in particular are making a comeback, and when given even a tiny piece of open field, burrowing owls will try to make do (although it’s often not enough). But as Peeters describes, owls need all kinds of habitats, from forests to grasslands to oak woodlands. In a modest strip of oak riparian woodland along a tiny seasonal stream, he found eight barn owls, a pair of great horned owls, and a pair of western screech owls. If we want to keep hearing their nighttime hoots (or bloodcurdling screams), we need to leave them some space.

—Lisa Owens Viani

Every day, the media bombards us with news about health, food safety, emerging diseases, and cures in the offing. Since Merck’s Vioxx scandal in 2004, a clutch of drug safety problems has come to light; most recently, GlaxoSmithKline’s Aventis, for patients with Type II diabetes, has been found to increase risk of heart failure. Elsewhere we hear that alcohol, obesity, or even under-wire bras increase the risk of breast cancer, and we are asked to vote on euthanasia and genetically modified crops.

Should you go out of your way to feed your child genetically unmodified food? How can we predict the long-term effects of new technologies on the environment, and who is responsible for those predictions? For those who want to develop an educated opinion and a context in which to understand the increasing role of biochemistry in our lives, Greif and Merz’s book offers an excellent overview.

A collection of loosely related essays explores many topics, including boundaries of research, intellectual property, reproductive technologies, the role of the FDA in drug safety, forensic testing and the legal system, cosmetic surgery, the public health response to anthrax, media coverage of science, scientific misconduct, public misunderstandings, environmental toxins, organ transplants, and the right to die. The scare over silicone breast implants is discussed, the debate over genetically modified organisms is critiqued, and Terri Schiavo’s story is retold.

Although the book overlaps a class I took a class at UC Berkeley a few years ago, I learned something new in every chapter, such as legal precedents, historical background, and details I hadn’t gleaned from the news. Each section gives legal and biological background in easily accessible, functional language and includes references. If your interest is truly piqued by a debate, Greif and Merz provide an annotated list of reading suggestions.

—Vivian Choi

This hefty tome ought to become a new bible for aspiring landscape designers, botanists, and obsessive amateurs compelled to learn the identity of every tree they see in California whether native or introduced. Author Charles R. Hatch does an exuberantly thorough job of identification; he employs over a thousand of his own excellent photographs. Each tree listing includes a photograph of a medium- sized specimen (the size most likely to be encountered), close-ups of the tree’s bark and its foliage (flowers and fruit included when noticeable), and for deciduous trees, a photo of the bare tree. Descriptions are precise and technical. Hatch’s taxonomy chapter is the best explication of plant identification and terminology I’ve encountered, with one page of text and over thirty pages of illustrations (mostly leaf photographs).

A detailed chapter on trees in urban landscape design positions the book as a must-have textbook in the field, while the overview of California topography, geology, climate, and plant communities will make it useful for students of California ecosystems. Identification keys can be used by any reader strong enough to carry the book around outdoors (or smart enough to photocopy the relevant pages).

—Gina Covina

The flurry of media attention given this winter’s bee losses, now labeled “colony collapse disorder,” has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals—and just as far from the brutal truth of today’s corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.

Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar—sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees’ honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It’s not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder.

It’s a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson’s bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson’s Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson’s hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers.

Every commercial beekeeper has different arrange-ments, but each involves long-distance trucking and the California almond crop. Almonds are entirely dependent on the seasonal importation of honeybees. Growers can’t get crop insurance coverage unless they have at least two bee colonies per acre at almond blossom time; some growers use up to five colonies per acre for heavier yields. Over 800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond trees. As beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is “monoculture at its absolute worst—they don’t allow one species of weed to grow”: mile after mile of bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this wasted landscape to ease the honeybees’ burden, and nothing lives to sustain bees before or after the almond bloom.

Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation—it takes virtually all of this country’s commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California’s almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they’re fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: “When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it’s a pretty whacked-out agricultural system.”

Oliver’s 500 bee colonies—he was lucky, with losses under ten percent—follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes them from Central Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to Nevada alfalfa. He attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves, reliance on pasture forage for much of the year, and avoidance of artificial feeding. “Some of these guys move their bees a dozen times a year,” he says. Popular pollination routes include apples and blueberries, which rely on honeybees for 90 percent of their pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30 percent). Farmers won’t bother planting squash or melons if they can’t get beehives in place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on honeybee pollination.

It hasn’t been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could rely on a combination of native pollinating insects and local honeybees for most crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan Wilson’s area; now there are two. As farms grew more and more of fewer and fewer crops, using petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, vast tracts of land have gradually approached the reductionist goal of supporting no life at all except the target crop. It’s not just the almonds—every crop is grown this way. That’s why it’s called industrial agriculture, or factory farming.

Bee researchers have been calling bees “the canary in this coal mine,” a different version of the birds and the bees. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein has been popping up all over the Internet: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” Einstein never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says everything.

Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been in trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites—parasitic insects small enough to use bees as their hosts—jumped from other species to honeybees, another example of collateral damage from global transportation. First tracheal mites in the ’80s, then varroa mites in the ’90s—even before last winter, the world’s honeybee population had declined by half in 30 years.

UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper’s colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late ’80s, and now we’re at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, “If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this winter’s would not make the top five.” Last year’s losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding—in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination income. It’s not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers.

The difference with this winter’s losses is not having an identified cause, and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal mites, beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments—Alan Wilson successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and peppermint extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers started down the slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. “Until the mid-’90s nobody dreamed of using chemicals in beehives,” Oliver says. Once they did, the race was on, with insecticide-resistant varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck with the newest chemical treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the varroa mite longer, have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an Integrated Pest Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it labor- and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites). According to Oliver, “We’re just prolonging our agony as long as we continue to use chemical treatments.”

Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a heavy load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by chemicals used to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of the 25 different viruses carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus, nosema, that’s tolerated by healthy bees but a problem for already weakened hives. Then there’s the stress of long-distance truck travel, longer distances for more bees every year. The small hive beetle, an African native recently found in Florida hives, posed another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the beetle, but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive.

Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based on reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way home in the presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This particular theory must be called inconclusive at best, since the study was not designed with enough apicultural knowledge to produce reliable results.

No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the study, would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate primarily by landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their first few excursions are short orientation flights, not blind trips in a box to a release point.

Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most consistently debilitating. But there’s another weakening influence more obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma. It’s the stressor Mussen calls the most important of all—bee malnutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any more nutritious for bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007), and bees in transit and between pollination jobs often must subsist on nothing but these non-foods. Compounding the problem, we’re talking genetically modified corn and soy, every cell of which contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects? US studies have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to “significantly stronger decline in the number of bees” in hives already weakened by varroa mites.

We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in fiber and low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country’s best bee forage habitat, this year is being planted much more aggressively to GM corn as a source for ethanol—aggressive meaning planting marginal areas and edges usually left to the asters and goldenrods that are high-quality pollen sources in late summer when bees need to raise the generation that will overwinter. Even when bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO pollen, for much of the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured diet due to their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture—nothing but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They’re exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh—and one more influence to factor into the equation—very hot weather can damage the protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value for bees. Global warming is kicking our butts from more directions than we can comprehend.

Given these conditions, last winter’s losses can hardly be considered a surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up with one specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the kind of thinking that got us this far continues. According to Mussen, “the only hope is the USDA Tucson lab” which is working on a liquid feed that bees can eat all year. Randy Oliver calls this the “holy grail” of bee research. The USDA’s proprietary formula, if they come up with one that works, will be patented and licensed to a commercial producer, and the whole agricultural system may manage to lurch along for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled from Florida to California in time for the almond bloom.

How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of beekeepers’ discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of their colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn’t have happened without a change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from Australia. Bee businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending 100,000 packages of bees to the States. A package is a starter kit of about 10,000 worker bees and a queen, enclosed in a small screened box with a sugar water feeder. The receiving beekeeper shakes the package into a waiting hive, and given proper nectar and pollen resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be expanding the colony.

The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees (Apis cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off Australia. The Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could wreak havoc if it spreads to the European honeybee. Another factor in almond pollination this year was the rental price for a bee colony, which averaged $150, nearly twice what it was last year. This was the first year in which the income beekeepers realized from almond pollination surpassed the income received for the entire US honey crop. There’s talk of opening the Canadian border for next year’s almond season.

To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we’re prolonging our agony by continuing with this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms like “organic” and “biodiversity” shift from boutique buzzwords to elements of survival. This country has 4,500 species of native insects that are potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where farms are much smaller, more diverse, and broken up by uncultivated land, native insects account for up to 90 percent of crop pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops have shown that yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30 percent of their cropland wild. It’s all about pollination.

Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead areas. Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots—the particulars of restoration agriculture are easy and already known. It’s the big picture that’s harder to shift, from the extractive industrial petrochemical model to the biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have upped the ante, giving us all the motivation we need to change—do we want to continue to eat?

If, as predicted, the San Joaquin Valley’s population doubles to 7.9 million people by 2050, we need to start taking a hard—and much more thoughtful—look at how that growth could be accommodated while at the same time conserving what’s left of natural and agricultural areas. Our Valley makes it clear that now is the time to address these issues. Instead of allowing yet more piecemeal, ad hoc development, we must plan and develop in smarter ways. The book argues for a big-picture vision, for planning for a “great place”—a la Paris or Washington, D.C. That includes planning for a healthy environment, building strong neighborhoods and communities that work together, celebrating cultural and ethnic diversity, and providing incentives for developers to build better.

This compact, colorful book provides a schematic of how some of these things could be accomplished. Statistics—on immigration, jobs, air quality, traffic, and residents’ opinions about quality of life in the valley—are presented in easy-to-read graphics. But it is the photos that really tell the story. Satellite images reveal the incredible geological features that make up the valley while photographs from the late 1800s show the lush wetlands and vernal pools that once covered the landscape. Unfortunately, present-day images show much of that same land covered with ticky-tacky suburban developments.

A disturbing photo depicts a new housing development built right up against an almond ranch, where a sign warns that “spraying, harvesting, mowing, fertilizing, and flood irrigation” will take place. That one photo encapsulates the valley’s issues—land use conflicts, traffic and air quality problems, and an enormous and important agricultural economy. More photos present alternatives from around the state of sustainable, solar-powered, urban as opposed to suburban development—that easily could be implemented in the valley. Our Valley is an urgent call to action. What happens in the valley today will affect the future of California and beyond, and we can’t afford to fiddle while acres disappear under the ‘dozers.
—Lisa Owens Viani

Donna Schaper, senior minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City, is the author of 28 spiritual books, including this one. Put up with her free-association style and you’ll find wisdom in these essays, some original for this book, some reworked sermons. Between her own and her husband’s careers, Schaper moves frequently, leaving much-beloved gardens. Her essays on letting go are inspiring to those who spend time looking behind. In a piece on the slow food movement (“Imagine having to organize politically for the right to eat slowly and well”), she uses an example from her congregation to show how fast food equals bereft souls. Two essays, “Teaching My Daughter to Mulch” and “Three Women” should be read in every school. Both address privilege, longing, and spirit; Schaper is not afraid to call it as she sees it, but she’s no scold. She understands that each of us pines for what is missing. Read this slim volume for big-picture, non-polemic commentary on capitalism, activism, and our relationship to spirit and the earth. —Linnea Due

A Northern California gardener is more likely than ever to come home from a shopping expedition with native plants—more interest has resulted in greater availability. But what then when faced with the probably crowded slate of your own garden?

This beautiful and densely packed book picks up where other resources leave off. Authors Glenn Keator (native plant expert extraordinaire) and Alrie Middlebrook (native plant garden designer) present an approach that will not only make gardeners’ efforts more successful with particular plants but should result in beautiful sustainable habitats that support local fauna and truly feel like home.

The key is the book’s organization. Each varied California plant community has its own chapter: redwood forest, coastal sage scrub, desert, oak woodland, grassland, chaparral, mountain meadows, mixed evergreen forest, riparian woodland, bluffs and cliffs, wetlands, and the distinctive flora of the Channel Islands. Though the authors suggest paying close attention to the plants that are (or used to be) native at your exact location, their philosophy is not about purity but celebration. You’ll find ideas for incorporating several different plant communities into one site’s microclimates, as well as helpful suggestions for the inclusion of favorite non-natives.

Each chapter includes three outstanding features, in addition to a clear overview of the plant community. Middlebrook’s garden design examples are playful and detailed, with schematic illustrations that manage to be delightfully fanciful while imparting a lot of information. The listings of particular plants for each community are concise but thorough; included are propagation methods, pruning requirements, and notes about congenial companions. Each chapter concludes with an inspiring section on places to visit the plant community in question.
—Gina Covina

Crunchy Cons
Rod Dreher
Crown Publishing, 2006, $24

What if someone told you that a Dallas conservative would advocate shopping at the farmers market and strengthening laws against factory farming? Or that liberals and conservatives would quote the same man at length and with reverence?

These two books need to be read by anyone who eats and draws a breath. The essays that make up Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature are by turns stimulating, alarming, and inspiring. Too long have urban conservationists pitted the needs of agriculture and ranching against the sanctity of the wilderness while themselves benefiting from food prices lowered by plundering resources that nurture the planet and its wild denizens. Then again, who are these “wild” denizens? As Wendell Berry writes, “The world, we may say, is wild, and all the creatures are homemakers within it, practicing domesticity, raising young, seeking food and comfort.” Humans have hogged the lion’s share of resources available to the planet’s homemakers, snaring two-thirds of the earth’s fresh water supply, for instance, for agriculture.

Mono-cropping, the use of excessive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, and creating animal factories rather than pasturing livestock have reduced biodiversity and created dead zones all over the world. And with the current focus on viruses (exacerbated by animal confinement systems) and food security, universities are touting more separation from “the wild,” not less. Laura L. Jackson’s essay describes the conflict between Iowa State University and its Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a schism that finally led to the removal of the center’s director. Expect more violent conflicts between industry-financed research and those who favor an organic approach to life forms, wild and domestic.

Essayists range from the hopeful (Barbara Kingsolver, Rick Bass) to the practical (Scott McMillion on working with beavers, Baumgartner’s description of organic farming in concert with habitat restoration) to the downright scary (John Davis’ “Rebuilding After Collapse,” Richard Manning’s “The Oil We Eat”). In some cases, the authors contradict each other, which is not surprising, given the complexity of the issues. In each essay, you’ll read the truth, and it’s long past time we started telling it.

Which brings us to Crunchy Cons, and we aren’t talking over-crisped prisoners but Birkenstocked conservatives. When the National Review’s Rod Dreher discovered how good the produce was in his CSA boxes, he did some investigating in the face of his colleagues’ ribbing. His essay, which describes his dismay at factory farming and the assumptions of his work mates, provoked an avalanche of mail from fellow travelers. Turns out there are a lot of Republicans disgusted by giant corporate farming, irreverence for the natural world, war for Big Oil, and rampant materialism. Some might even vote Democratic, but they’re laboring under a misapprehension that Dems are in favor of spreading GMOs far and wide. (Which makes me wonder who is in favor of GMOs besides Monsanto and sold-our-souls-to-the-devil universities?) Read the crunchy con political agenda at the end of this book, and fall off that high horse. The tumble to the ground may not be fun, but wouldn’t you rather save the earth than have your prejudices proven right? By the way, that fellow quoted in both books is the above-mentioned Wendell Berry. Let’s install him as Secretary of the Interior. —Linnea Due

Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation, delivers bigger and better with his sophomore effort, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movement. The book is informative, educational, atypical, and diverse, taking the reader on an historic and educational jaunt through the grassroots food activism quietly taking place across America. Katz covers a broad range of issues, from farming to food safety and security; global agri-business and its effects on nutrition and health; and how-to foraging that ranges from backyard to bizarre, all the while eloquently illustrating the hypocrisy behind our food production systems and the urgent need to reconnect to the sources of our food and water. Chapters end with thoroughly researched action and information resources.

Katz, who lives in an intentional community in Tennessee, calls himself a fermentation fetishist and gives demonstrations and workshops across the country. His personal anecdotes add spice to an already engaging text. I found it impossible to read in sequence, often skipping around to find recipes Katz includes throughout the book. Reference manual, educational tool, history book, and cookbook all in one, it is a must-read. Revolution is a true gem, each chapter a little lagniappe of information. —Mary Vance

It’s spring and the birds are singing—and hooting, twittering, clicking, thumping, rattling, and drumming. Lang Elliott’s new book/CD combination guides the reader/listener through the sounds and lesser-known natural history of 50 species of native birds. With full color photos and sonograms of bird sounds and songs recorded in the field morning and night, the text is numbered to correspond with the CD, which means you can read about the bird, see its gorgeous photo, and hear its repertoire of sounds, some of which are surprising. The common American robin, for example, not only sings its traditional “cheerio, cheerio, cheeriup” (or variations thereon) but also emits a thin, high-pitched whistle that alerts other birds to the presence of a hawk. The “bloodcurdling screech” of an immature great horned owl is caught by Elliott, as is the “moaning snore” of the Atlantic puffin. Elliott distinguishes the calls of the red-tailed hawk—a “hissy screech” many people mistake for the cry of an eagle—from the “big fat songbird chirp” of a bald eagle. Another fascinating fact is that migrating songbirds call during flight, particularly during the cover of night. Elliott has captured some of these subtle avian voices on the CD, for instance describing and differentiating the calls of four native thrushes. Covering water birds to hawks, owls, migrating songbirds, and the more common species in our backyards, Elliott’s book/CD will educate your ears and perk up your interest in our fine feathered friends. —Lisa Owens Viani

Take a close look at one particular subject and you’ll likely gain a wide perspective. Here you’ll encounter everything from geology to architectural history to picnic destinations. The title refers to those elephant-to-house-sized boulders jutting from the Berkeley hills, some surrounded by public parks but many more on private property. Photographer Jonathan Chester took a photo of a friend’s backyard rock. Chester’s friend was Ten Speed Press publisher Phil Wood, who liked the photo enough to suggest a book. Twelve years later, with the participation of architectural writer Dave Weinstein, Berkeley Rocks is complete.

And I mean complete. The story starts with the creation of California as the Oceanic plate slid under the North American plate, scraping the ocean floor onto the edge of the continent as it went. The scraped-up material was mixed and shaped and added to by volcanic eruptions and the movements of the San Andreas fault, which carried rocks and magma north and south along the coast. Volcanic ryolite rocks in Berkeley come from widely separated sources—one has been identified from an eruption near Hollister. Other Berkeley boulders are greywacke, a sedimentary rock that shows individual grains of sand, or chert, made of single-celled marine animals compressed into flat layers, or blueschist, common here but so rare everywhere else it puts Berkeley on the must-see lists of geologists.

Many of the big rocks were prominent landmarks in hills covered only in grass or spreading oaks. Pinnacle Rock, now hidden by eucalyptus trees and houses, could be seen for miles. Many rocks served as community gathering spots, as evidenced by deep mortar holes for grinding acorns. One rock along Baxter Creek in El Cerrito shows evidence of use that dates back 5,000 to 8,000 years. All this fascinating detail underlies the book’s main subject—residential development around (and on top of) the rocks.

Development of the hills was a characteristically Berkeleyan affair, a marriage of high ideals, reverence for nature, and creative entrepreneurship. At the turn into the 20th century, the politically astute women of the Hillside Club campaigned for an aesthetic of curving narrow streets bordered by trees, unpainted wood-shingled houses, and a ban on “factory-made articles.” Bernard Maybeck’s designs set the tone of rustic grandeur, and Charles Keeler’s 1904 book The Simple Home filled in the details. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake, Berkeley became an overnight boomtown, and the club’s groundwork turned into marketing points for developers. Handsome photographs show homes built during this period still perched on their boulders, including the surprisingly con-temporary-looking studio built by Keeler in 1904.

In the hundred years since, the boom has never ended. Almost every hillside cranny has been stuffed with a house, in every fanciful style. Chester’s photographs reveal the mock-Tudor house with boulder-strewn yard, the Cape Cod Colonial with a lighthouse built on its rock, the 1950s ranch house growing out of a boulder. There’s something about these big rocks—and the skill of the photographs—that makes every house and rock combination look great. There’s a palpable sense, from the pictures and from residents quoted in the text, of how fiercely these rocks are cherished.

One chapter is devoted to the rocks that can be encountered in public parks, another to the art of rock climbing and the important role these rocks have played in advancing technical aspects of the sport. Locations are given for rocks on public land and for those visible in front yards along Berkeley’s hilly streets. At once a history and natural history, this book is a treat, while the rocks will be at once grander and more intimate whenever you encounter them. —Gina Covina

The producers/directors of the award-winning DVD Thirst have teamed up with Bay Area journalist Michael Fox on a book that covers much of the same territory as the film, with excellent results. Fox writes in an accessible, unshrill voice about the corporate march to own the water we need to live. “Whether we believe in a Creator or not, no one is making more water,” Fox writes. “&We drink the tears of Leonardo da Vinci and wash in the saliva of dinosaurs.” Often delivered by private companies early in the development of the US, this life-giving resource turned to public ownership. Now pipes are getting old; according to a 2005 survey, mayors of 200 US cities, large and small, would consider privatizing water to “save money” on system upgrades. The fact that few win in these schemes besides shareholders is ignored in the short-focus desire to balance budgets and gain votes. Thirst examines the goals of a corporation versus those of a progressive city: more rate payers produce more profit, so developments kept in check by a cautious public utility are hailed by private companies. Cities engaged in privatization attempts are profiled; Northern California readers will be fascinated by the blow-by-blow cases of Stockton and Felton. Fox gives his characters, from California to Kentucky, Michigan to Massachusetts, plenty of rope to hang themselves and his heroes a stage to shine. Access to water is the issue of the future. This book is a primer that everyone needs to read. —Linnea Due

Few Americans think much about their daily cheeseburgers and fries until their waistlines or clogged arteries remind them. In fact, most have no idea of the politics behind obesity and our food supply. Michele Simon sets out to expose the corporate food industry’s effects on our health in Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health & How to Fight Back.

Public health attorney Simon is founder and director of Oakland’s Center for Informed Food Choices, and her training comes across in hard-hitting “how to fight back” legalese. The book does an excellent job of detailing corporate control of our food supply while educating consumers about the politics behind the food industry’s scrambling attempts to cover its tracks in the race to reveal who’s really at fault for our obesity epidemic.

Appetite raises a poignant and perplexing dilemma: is it the consumer’s responsibility to make nutritious choices, or is it corporate responsibility to provide healthy fare by disentangling itself from its sugary products? The latter means sacrificing billions of dollars of profit, with publicly owned corporations under edict to increase shareholder value at the expense of other considerations. When government and corporations walk hand-in-hand, with billions of dollars of profit as an incentive, who is motivated to protect citizens? Simon makes it disturbingly clear how corporate goals conflict with public health. Read her book and learn how to fight back in your community. The appendices include valuable additional resources. —Mary Vance

I want to cheer when an undersung subject is finally given its due. Start the applause—this volume, the first of three location-based books planned by husband and wife team Ralph and Lisa Woo Shanks—thoroughly explores the basket weaving of central Californian Indians. Natives in this part of California, extending from Monterey and San Francisco bays up to Humboldt County and the Sierras, used baskets for everything from tools, cooking implements, hats, and cradles to ceremonial objects and storage containers. Some are watertight; some so large several men were needed to lift the filled basket. No matter their use, these baskets are some of the world’s finest art.

The book is its own deft combination of utility and beauty; technical details about methods of weaving and plant material preparation are juxtaposed with exquisite photographs by Lisa Woo Shanks and paintings by Grace Carpenter Hudson. The large-format volume is so packed with information and photographs that it could be called a coffee table book with content. The Shanks spent seven years interviewing tribal members, museum curators, and historians, and much is new to print. The book is arranged by tribe, including Pomo, Miwok, Maidu, Yokuts, Ohlone, and others, with cultural information and descriptions of the unique features of the tribe’s weaving and preparation methods. A few tribes are represented only by their surviving baskets: the Huchnom, near Dos Rios in Mendocino County, were nearly wiped out by whites.

An acknowledgement of the violence these people faced is a terrible undercurrent; even to gather plant materials, artists had to brave encounters with thuggish whites. Thankfully, basket weaving continues today, and the Shanks include a bibliography and contact information for the California Indian Basketweavers Association. This is art created from the land on which we all live. The book is a testament to the courage of weavers who continued their thousands-years’-old craft against all odds. —Linnea Due

In 1991, four men and four women entered a privately funded, hermetically sealed three-plus-acre biosphere in Arizona. The eight stayed inside for two years, during which a scientific oversight committee came to blows with management, fakery was alleged, thousands of jokes made on late-night TV, and the eight divided into warring camps and barely spoke to each other for more than a year. Poynter gives blow-by-blow descriptions of the controversies, the feud between Us and Them, and the hardships and successes of managing this astonishing experiment.

The loss of oxygen and build-up of carbon dioxide in Biosphere 2, which threatened to end the venture, is steadily being duplicated on Biosphere 1, or Planet Earth. Escape was possible through Biosphere 2′s airlock, but the eight struggled to maintain their atmosphere by manipulating a tiny ocean, forest, and savannah. The connection between agriculture, plants, forests, and oceans is strikingly detailed; critical information emerged from the experiment because on this small scale effects could be seen so quickly.

The impact of global warming was little known or discussed 15 years ago, so this book could not have come at a more opportune time. Biosphere 2 stands empty today, after having been taken over by Columbia University, only to dissolve into the same ego clashes that led to its being wrested from private ownership. The science is fascinating, emotions wrenching, and the miniaturization depicts so well that our future depends upon ending the squabbling. This is a must-read. —Linnea Due

This new addition to the California Natural History Guides is a must-peruse for California newcomers—and for those of us who’ve lived here so long we may think we know it all. The authors are professors with over 30 years’ experience teaching about the chaparral environment. Both decided to write a book on the subject without knowledge of the other’s efforts. When UC Press told them of their parallel manuscripts, they joined forces and produced a collaborative account that is lively and intriguing, making full use of Keeley’s botanical expertise and Quinn’s knowledge of chaparral animals.

The term chaparral is a broad blanket thrown across California’s shrubby Mediterranean foothill habitats. Though the main players differ—manzanita, ceanothus, and chamise are the most common—all are drought-tolerant, evergreen, fire-hardy, and form dense thickets that look soft and blue-gray in the distance but up close can prove to be virtually impenetrable. This guide provides a close look at details of plant and animal life in the chaparral as well as the sort of overview that leads to real appreciation, especially as to the natural role of fire in this habitat we all live in or near.

Many of us are familiar with the spectacular wildflower displays found only after fire years. What we may not have realized is that most of these plants can germinate only in the presence of fire. Their seeds may lie dormant for a century, waiting. Seeds of the chaparral shrubs also require fire, though many species employ the quicker option of resprouting from crown burls that can live through many fire cycles, for a thousand years or more.

There are also animals that depend on cyclical fires, like the fire beetles that fly to any fire within a 20-mile radius to mate and lay their eggs on still-smoldering branches. The sensitivity of these beetles to smoke is so acute that they can be drawn to false alarms. The authors relate that in the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of cigarette smoking, UC Berkeley football games “were regularly affected by a rain of fire beetles dropping from the sky in search of a suitable place to lay their eggs.” —Gina Covina

For this nature lover but non-birder, this beautiful little book is an inspiration in form; it’s an elegant method of journal-keeping for any journey. The illustrations are lovely, and there is an organized index of species seen at the end.

The Iraq war has been a life-ending experience for tens of thousands, but Trouern-Trend views it through his life’s list of birds. There is no doubt that our author is at risk; he writes of devastated landscapes, incredible heat, and bombs. Once, lying on his stomach in a defensive perimeter around his downed humvee, he watches two crested larks conduct a mating dance not ten feet away. We learn that he is a father who birds at home with his children. His way of being in the world is illuminating; he is continually focused on the natural world and attentive to detailed observation.

The suffering that is today’s Iraq is balanced by the joy of birding: watching behavior, counting numbers, identifying rare birds, and sharing his passion with other soldiers. This small book contains a major lesson in survival. —Rosa Venezia

Temple Grandin’s remarkable use of her autism as a teacher has already yielded the autobiographical Thinking in Pictures, which expanded readers’ understanding of autism, while her work as a consultant to the livestock industry resulted in major upgrades in humane treatment of animals at stockyards and slaughter facilities. Animals in Translation brings the threads together to reveal animals as beings of different but not lesser intelligence than humans and with particular forms of genius we can’t begin to guess. With great patience Grandin addresses every facet of our ingrained belief in the “inferior” intelligence and emotional capacity of animals, using only facts to shift us.

My favorite story is about the prairie dogs studied by Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University. By recording every detail of prairie dog colony life, analyzing vocalizations using sonograms and correlating vocalizations with videotaped events, Dr. Slobodchikoff was able to decipher a complex prairie dog language—or at least those parts of the language relating to intruders. The prairie dogs communicated not just the approach of a predator, but what species (hawk, coyote, dog), how fast it was moving and from what direction, and whether it was a stranger or a particular animal they knew—the coyote who sits patiently by a burrow entrance waiting for dinner, or the one who strolls through the colony ready to lunge for a prairie dog too far from an entrance. They told of the size of an approaching person, the color of their clothing, and whether or not they were carrying a gun. Counter to conjecture that this language is genetically programmed rather than passed on from one generation to the next, Slobodchikoff found that different prairie dog colonies in the Flagstaff area speak different dialects, and that the prairie dogs could come up with new combinations of words to describe objects they had never before seen.

Dan Dagget’s book, Gardeners of Eden, addresses the ways environmentalists act out the old paradigm. We save land by making it off-limits to any human activities that might change it. “We treat this land outside our exploitosphere as if it were a combination art exhibit, zoo, cathedral, and adventure park. There we limit ourselves to roles as sightseers, worshipers, caretakers, and joyriders.” Granted, any land will fare better as a nature preserve than as a strip mine or a strip mall, but for restoration of already damaged land, leaving it alone has one serious drawback—it doesn’t work all that well. As Daggett says, “We humans were once a part, in some cases a very important part, of the very ecosystems we’re trying to restore by removing ourselves from them.”

With eye-opening photos by Tom Bean on almost every page, Gardeners of Eden shows example after example of habitats improved by human activities. Controlled brush fires, little rock piles meant to slow water rather than dam it, and the sort of intensive rotational grazing that mimics wild hoofed animals kept close together for protection from stalking predators—all are demonstrated to good effect. Just as important are the stories of people paying attention to the details of particular places and adjusting their actions accordingly, listening to the earth rather than to preconceived abstractions. Though Daggett’s overblown confrontational style can be irritating, the message is vibrant and vital.

Paul Stamet’s Mycelium Running is to me the most broadly inspiring of these books, even though some might call it a technical handbook on an arcane subject. Stamet’s passion for fungi is contagious, his thirty years’ experience stacks up in the book’s pages, and his vision of the planetary role of mycelium is at once stunningly surprising and self-evident. Unlike Daggett, he expends no energy arguing against the old paradigm—he’s in the new one, and he sweeps us along with him.

Mushrooms are the reproductive apparatus of fungi, while mycelium is the usually unnoticed underground part, the cobwebby strands that convert woody debris into soil and make nutrients available to plants. Mycelial mats— “vast sentient cellular membranes,” in Stamets’ words—can cover thousands of acres while retaining awareness of the differing needs of individual plants within their network. Stamets cites an experiment in which researchers covered a fir tree to simulate deep shade and found that mycelium rerouted nutrients from other trees to make up for the fir’s inability to photosynthesize. There are species of fungi that can filter bacterial pathogens and chemical toxins from water (explored in the chapter on mycofiltration) as well as those that strengthen the health of forest ecosystems (mycofroestry).

A fascinating chapter on mycoremediation focuses on fungi capable of breaking down the complex toxic chemicals that make up petroleum products, explosives, chemical weapons, and industrial metals like lead, arsenic, mercury, and radioactive cesium. These topics and quite a few more are covered in great detail, aided by scientific studies and charts showing which fungi break down which chemicals and with practical guidelines for growing the various species. While the research is high-tech, the application can be DIY.

Even more appealing are chapters on growing medicinal fungi, and on species that can be grown in garden beds with the dual purpose of producing bigger, more nutritious vegetables while providing gourmet mushrooms. By the end of the book, you’ll not only know why its subtitle is “How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World”—you’ll be ready to jump in and do your part.