As in past articles, we are sharing with you what the tree book club has been reading, in case you are interested in reading any of the books on your own.
Over the summer, we read The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf. This was a dense read, packed with details, so it won’t be for everyone, but was a fascinating tale of a man who explored the Alps, the Andes, and Siberia around the turn of the 1800s, and was the first to develop the idea of ecological zones – how plants and animals in similar geographies are similar across different parts of the world. His explorations of South America in that time are gripping. Readers interested in the history of science will likely enjoy it.
This fall we read Barkskins by Annie Proulx. In some ways similar to Greenwood, it was a multigenerational tale of family members involved in logging, but in this case the story begins with the settlement of New France in the 1600s and ends in modern times. It is a long book, but ranges from stories of colonization and Indigenous life, to trading practices from Amsterdam to China, and the destruction of forests in North America and New Zealand. It is also about the differences in the lives of the loggers and those who build fortunes with logging companies, told through the interwoven lives of the descendants of the two initial characters brought to New France as indentured servants. It is often hard to keep track of who is who (there is a family tree at the end), but it’s a book that can teach you a lot about our history.
Our current read is Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests by Diana Beresford- Kroeger. This is a bit of an odd book, written by a woman raised in the nature-oriented spirituality of the Celts in Ireland who became a plant scientist, and she writes about plant evolution and trees, as well as our relationship with them, from both those perspectives. It is a quick read, compared to the previous two!
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