Destination: Books

Readings on Remediation

A  couple of years ago when visiting Berlin where my older daughter lives, she told me about community garden known as Prinzessinnengarten or Princess Garden.  In 2009,  a community garden was started in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, reclaimed from an industrial, wasteland area that had been unused and abused for half a century. To combat the problem of  the barren soil coupled with the possibility that the city could reclaim the land at any time all the plants were grown in mobile containers.  Not only has the city turned a brown space to green, but Prinzessinnengarten has become a center for community education about gardening and sustainability and a melting pot for Berlin's diverse population. This link has a short film (in English) that tells a more complete story.

I was unable to visit the original Prinzessinnengarten while I was there, but I did get a tour of its sister site that has recently been opened in an old church graveyard in the Neukölln borough. Navigating complicated civil and religious rules, the non-profit company Nomadic Green, which spearheads these reclamation efforts pulled up gravestones (nothing fresh) and the site is being turned into another community garden site as well. Again mobility is part of the design of the space.

Inspired,  I have begun to try to remediate an eroded, barren patch of rocky hillside that butts up to the development where I live.  Fortunately being here at Destination: Books  I have ready access to gardening and environmental books to consult. 

• Leah Penniman devotes a whole chapter to "Restoring Degraded Land" in her book Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. Pulling in techniques from throughout the globe, she writes about how soil contaminated with lead can be restored (sunflowers can pull out lead) and details on how terracing can stop soil erosion. 
• Other books can be useful too. In Lawns Into Meadows: Growing a Regenerative Landscape, Owen Wormers and illustrator Kristen Thompson dedicate an entire chapter to profile over 20 flowers and grasses that turn your ecological, havoc-wreaking lawn into an organic meadows. Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers appear to be likely candidates that might work on my project because they like sun and can handle poor soil. (I have a lot of that). Moreover, both flowers attract pollinators. 
• And for those who want to deep drive into soil regeneration Nigel Palmer's The Regenerative Grower's Guide to Garden Amendments provides detailed recipes for "greater soil biological activity  and mineral availability, and increase pest and disease resistance yields, and nutrient density."

All three books will be available for browsing/scrutinizing when Destination: Books returns to the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning, April 24, 2021.   In the meantime, as you can see from the photo below, I have plenty of work to do.  Because of  the threat of heavy rain, our next FFM gig has been  moved to May 1, 2021.

Tallamy at the Atlanta Botanical Garden

Few authors in the gardening/sustainability space have been as impactful as Douglas Tallamy. His two books Nature's Best Hope and Bringing Nature Home promote the idea that individuals can each do their part to restore habitats in small spaces by planting native plants which allow native insects to survive and provide food sources for birds and other wildlife. 

On a personal level, reading Nature's Best Hope inspired me to try to restore a dead, mostly eroded area between my housing development and the Decatur Cemetery. For the past several years, I cleaned out old remnants of building materials, added soil, amended it with alpaca manure and planted wildflowers and herbs to hold the soil. 

My neighbors have responded with their appreciation and the HOA paid for extending a water line and faucet that I can attach a hose for watering when the plants get too dry (though I try to grow plants that do not require a lot of watering). I started some plants from seed, (I learned how at the Wylde Center) but friends have given me others such as Joe-pye -weed, Rattlesnake-weed, Mountain mint, milkweed and Goldenrod, all which have thrived. Coneflowers and Black-eyed-Susans not so much.  

So not everything has worked and some weeds like mimosa want to take over, but the improvements have been noticeable. It all started with the Tallamy book, but I have still have a long way to go to match the Atlanta Botanical Garden (on the left).

Tallamy will be leading the discussion as part of the Fuqua Lecture series at the Atlanta Botanical Garden beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday, September 18th. If you cannot attend the lecture, it will be broadcast live. See the Garden's events page for details. If you're interested in either one of the books check out the online version of Destination: Books where both books are listed. 

 

A Gift Idea for Father

One of the indulgences of being a bookseller is that you can sell your own books. Ann Patchett does it (Parnassus books in Nashville) Destination: Books does it too. My offering is A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present which is a book I finished writing six months ago.

It’s a short book—like a thick chapbook—but it has relevance at this time of year. The book begins with your narrator at the threshold of retirement and asking myself what should I do next?  Well, retirement did give me the time to look at the hundreds of letters that my father wrote to his parents while he was a combat infantryman in Europe during the winter of 1944 and the letters he wrote to me while I was young man just out of college in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It’s a book about fathers—and the men who served in World War II—and how I gleaned insights into this stage of my life through these letters written decades ago.

Availability

The book is always available at the Destination: Books popup book sales. My next scheduled outing is at the Carter Center's  Freedom Farmer’s Market in Atlanta on Saturday morning, June 8th. (We may be at Pepper Place in Birmingham on Saturday morning, June 1st too in the Bonnybee Designs booth. She's my daughter. It's a a father-daughter thing.)

Also, Destination Books keeps a “permanent popup” booth of about 30 books at the Guild+ Journeyman Bike and Coffee shop on Claremont Avenue just north of the Old Courthouse in downtown Decatur (display shown below).

The book is also available online through Ingram’s Bookshop program or if you must Amazon.

Have You Read All These Books

At last Saturday's popup at the Wylde Center's Spring Garden Plant sale, a bright, book-loving 4th grader asked me, "Have you read all these books?" 

It is a fair question and one that I am occasionally asked. My answer is "Some of them, but not all of them."

Reference books on butterflies, bees, birds and gardening techniques, don't require page by page reading, but essay or long form type books on various related topics such as women in nature, climate policy and the current one I am reading Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World do require some vetting. In short, the Grabar book reminds me of Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do.

I am only about a third of the way through the book and I am pleasantly surprised. On the surface, the author has taken on a dull topic but he has made it relative, informative and deserving of some thought. And it has its lighter moments too including Jerry Seinfeld's joke about parking in Manhattan, "It's like musical chairs except everyone sat down in 1964."

On Saturday morning, April 20th we will be at Carter Center's Freedom Farmer's Market with our books and ready to field any questions. But in the words of a smart ass tour guide I once had in Europe, "Please don't ask me anything I cannot answer." Of course the guide was serious, but I am not.

NOTE: Last week we mentioned we were going to be at the Avondale Estates Earth Day  festivities on Sunday, April 21st, but the planners have canceled the event.

 

Latest Reads

While it is not possible to read every book sold at Destination: Books it doesn't keep me from trying. Here are two books of interest: 

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Although Kimmerer is best known for her Braiding Sweetgrass book, Gathering Moss (2003) was written earlier in her career. It is a short read and borrowing from the book jacket copy it is a "mix of science and personal reflection. In this series of linked personal essays, the author (Kimmerer) clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses and reflects on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us." 

Also, after reading this book, you'll never look at the moss the same way again. Nowadays when I walk around the neighborhood, I take special interest in bryology, (which includes the study of mosses and liverworts, but not lichens). Inspired, I have even successfully transplanted moss from a drainage area to a barren, but shady and wet hillside in an area I am trying to revitalize. Don't ask me to identify any of the 22,000 species of moss, but I did learn that not all moss is the same and it is much more environmentally responsible than grass.  

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie

Ritchie is an internationally renowned data wonk who focuses her research on world's largest problems, and is, in her own words " trying to correct public miscommunications of data" on climate related issues such as air pollution, deforestation, food, biodiversity, ocean plastics and overfishing.

Whereas many books about climate change are pessimistic this one—judging from the bright, colorful cover—is cautiously optimistic. The health of the planet is in trouble, but she uses bar graphs,  to show that historically on many fronts, the conditions have improved dramatically, and we are trending in the right direction. She is especially quick to point out the misleading catastrophic headlines that the media bombards us with. 

Although Ritchie's book is chocked full of numbers overall, it has an unassuming style. Her "we can do this" attitude makes the sobering numbers more palatable, but anything encouraging on climate change is appreciated.

Both books will be at my next popup scheduled for the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning, March 30th. But they can also be found at my online presence here at Bookshop.org (the Amazon alternative). 

 

Assessing Climate Books

The Heat Will Kill You First is a well-researched and well-written book, but with a title and a cover that isn't exactly encouraging to readers. (I wonder about the publisher's decision to market "a hell-on-earth" book jacket.)

Jeff Goodell begins the book with graphic details on the heat wave in the summer of 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, and its horrific effects on people, crops, salmon—you name it. (The opening is similar to the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.) Goodell explains the way heat affects human beings and animals both who are ill-equipped to handle rising temperatures.

Other topics include:

• How scientists can now prove which ecological events are caused by climate change and which are not. This matters as future generations can begin to legally hold current fossil fuel corporations responsible for the climate catastrophe (again it sounds like something right out of Kim Stanley Robinson). Interesting to note that heat waves, which much of the world experienced last summer, are considered direct consequences of climate change.
• Destruction of the ocean ecosystems most notably a phenomena known as the Blob, a heat dome the size of Texas that has disrupted the entire Pacific Ocean food chain.
• That you can’t rely on good air conditioning to remedy the problem. (If Phoenix lost power for a day or two in the summer it would result in heat-related deaths in the thousands). Air conditioning is only as good as your electric grid. 

As a remedy, Goodell writes:

"There are ways to limit the damage. The most obvious one, which I mentioned earlier: stop burning fossil fuels and move to clean energy alternatives. That may happen in some places faster than you think (at least for electricity generation)." A case in point, I recently returned to my boyhood home in East Central Illinois and Indiana for a visit and was amazed by the number of wind turbines.

Turbines on a hillside graveyard near Earl Park, Indiana

Also, Tatiana Schlossberg’s Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have is a valuable book as it explains all the factors that drive our carbon-intensive society (reviewed here). It’s not nearly as stark as the Goodell’s book and it’s good start to understand the ways to reduce fossil fuel consumption with our daily habits. 

And by the way, Robinson’s speculative novel Ministry for the Future (review here) has a taint of optimism as well.

The next Destination: Books pop-up will be at the Freedom Farmer’s Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning November 18th. In the meantime, both books are available at our online store at https://bookshop.org/lists/destination-favorites

https://bookshop.org/lists/destination-favorites

 

Books of Interest

 Some are new. Some feel new because I haven't revisited them in a while. They are:

Growing Perennial Foods: A Field Guide to Raising Resilient Herbs, Fruits and Vegetables by Acadia Tucker.

Basil Overflow

I would have had more success processing my basil, sage, thyme, and mint in a timely fashion if I had studied Tucker's book earlier in the season.  Tucker writes simple declarative instructions on planting, growing, managing potential pitfalls, and  harvesting for 34 common herbs, fruits and vegetables. The book includes a few recipes as well. 

Tucker's books give the home gardener some ideas of other foods to consider growing based on your sunlight availability, soil composition and the length of growing season. And in the title— don't confuse the word "perennial" with "year-round."

The Green Dumb Guide to Houseplants: 45 Unfussy Plants That Are Easy to Grow and Hard to Kill by Holly Theisen-Jones.

After reviewing the basics, Theisen-Jones categorizes houseplants in the order of difficulty as 1.) Practically Plastic Houseplants, 2.) Chill Houseplants, 3.) Fussy Houseplants and 4.) Master Gardener Houseplants, which has only one plant—the Monstera. 

What possibly could go wrong?

Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx. 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is known more for her fiction ( the novel The Shipping News, and the short story "Brokeback Mountain"), and judging from the works of hers that I have read, you can always count on her to write clearly and be evocative of time and place. This book is no different as Proulx, who started as small town journalist, explains how the historical shrinking of these fecund environments is a great loss to us and how it will play a major role in the climate catastrophe that lies ahead. She will take you to places too: the fens of England, the bogs in Ireland, and the swamps which include the Kankakee River in Northwestern Indiana near where I grew up.

At the very least by the end of this taut little book, you will know the difference between a fen, a bog, a swamp and a marsh.

Go here for more information of the kind of inventory Destination Books brings to its popups and where we will be for rest of the month.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Insect Garden

Every time I curse the insects that are eating holes in my budding eggplants and cucumbers,  I remember this saying that a garden with no insects indicates that you are tending to a “dead zone.”

Over the past few years, I have come to accept (not embrace) that understanding and identifying insects is part of my gardening regimen, right up there with watering, fertilizing, and harvesting.  I have devoted more time and resources to the subject. 

My little 80 square foot community veggie plot is my test bed. After the spring peas are gone, I am left with several cucumbers, three tomato plants and five oriental eggplants. With the help of Sally Morgan’s The Healthy Vegetable Garden: A Natural, Chemical Free Approach to Soil, Biodiversity and Managing Pets and Diseases. I have implemented several strategies:

Strategy 1 – Place sacrificial plants to attract the pests that would normally attack your favorites. In my case, I plant radishes for the sole purpose of protecting my  eggplants which are susceptible to bugs early in their life cycle. Nothing against radishes, but I much prefer eggplants.

Strategy 2 – Plant flowers that distract harmful insects away from your favorites, especially those vulnerable tomatoes. Last year I planted marigolds (they must be the Tagetes patula variety), to protect tomatoes. This year I added nasturtiums which have gone gangbusters in the plot (they failed miserable everywhere else.) According to Morgan, nasturtiums attract aphids, blackflies, flea beetles, cucumber beetles, and white butterflies.

Strategy 3 – Plant things that attract parasitic insects that attack and eat harmful insects. This year I lucked out because by coincidence I put some dill and cilantro in the veggie garden, which I later found out they attract parasitic wasps and lacewings.  These parasitic insects lay eggs into a harmful insect and then like a scene out of the movie Alien, the eggs hatch and they eat the host insect from the inside.

Strategy 4 – Beware what lies under the soil. Many of the insects or critters that harm your faves live underneath the soil.  Certain nematodes cause tomato wilt, but the root systems of the aforementioned marigold can help combat this. In his book, Epic Tomatoes Craig LeHoullier recommends wrapping a collar aluminum foil at the base of a tomato plant like a tomato to keep cutworms from eating through the stem at the soil line.  

Caveats. I have mentioned my sources, but don’t take my word entirely for it, but there is value in having a reference book or two in your gardening library. (This is the bookseller me talking.)  BTW, our next scheduled popup is at the Carter Center’s Freedom Farmers Market on Saturday morning May 20th.)

From Clockwise: Sacrificial radishes protecting eggplants; Keeping lettuce and basil on the deck instead of garden; Nasturtiums protecting tomatoes (in blue cage). The tennis ball marks the fence posts for my safety. Last year, predatory paper wasps set up home there.

Mushroom Induced Reading

As part of my off-season regime, I am hopelessly trying to catch up on books that I am scouting out for the 2023 version of Destination: Books. My anthropologist daughter Cynthia sent me one such book for consideration– The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

The book begins by centering on the matsutake mushroom as an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. What adds to its uniqueness is that it thrives in damaged landscapes in the northern hemisphere—most notably Japan, Oregon, and Finland. By damaged, I mean scrubby landscapes of usually pine trees leftover from commercial logging by the timber industry. It cannot be grown commercially and harvesting it relies on a diverse population of mushroom hunters* who vary in background, customs, and language. In Oregon, many of the hunters are Hmong (from Laos), lu Mien (Laos and Thailand), or Khmer (Cambodia) who migrated to the Northwest after families who were displaced by the War in Southeast Asia. Also, included in the book is a history of the Japanese forestry industry, which factors into today’s matsutake landscape as well.

Tsing describes in detail this unusual supply chain of matsutake commerce. Since the mushroom thrives in human-disturbed forests, it offers some resurgence in ravaged ecosystems. Quoting the book’s jacket: “In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?” By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents “an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.”

Mushroom hits the sweet spot of a Destination: Books offering—the intersection of sustainability, distant places to visit and good writing.  Tsing's book is wide in scope and can be challenging at times, but well worth the effort.

The book is available in the Fungi and Mushroom section of the Destination: Books online store (powered by Bookshop.org) next to Merlin Sheldrake’s classic Entangled Life. Purchases made there are shared with independent booksellers like Destination: Books.

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* The photograph of an immigrant Thai mushroom hunter at the top of the posting comes from a New York Times 2013 video series. Thomas Patterson took the photo. (The Mushroom book has many black and white hotos, but none that I could get ahold of.) 

Thinking Outside Our Skulls

There are two books that have been at the forefront of my thoughts lately. One is Ministry for The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and the other is Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.

Ministry for the Future

The recent high temperatures in the U.S. and Western Europe remind me of the opening chapters of Ministry for The Future, Robinsons speculative novel about the not-to-distant future of a planet coming to grips with global catastrophe. Robinson’s book begins with a cataclysmic heat event in India killing millions of people.

Depressing reading? Yes sorta, but as you read on, the Robinson book shows that the future doesn’t have to be so bleak if we combine technology and a willingness to make political change--even if it takes some real arm twisting.  The book shows us a way out and that is a cause for optimism.  For more about the book, visit a posting "Speculating on the Future" on my companion blog. There you will find more about the book and links to Ezra Klein's recent interview with Robinson.

In the interview Robinson remains guardedly optimistic. He thinks the planet has reached a sweet spot that climate change definitely has our attention (no small task) and it’s not too late to do something about it.  This makes sense. If things are too catastrophic then we are too overwhelmed to do anything, but if the negative impact is too mild then it is too easy to ignore. 

Alas, we have reached the sweet spot of misery.

Entangled Life

Like Ministry this book is supposed to change your life, which is always makes me skeptical, but you cannot read it and not be amazed about all the possibilities.  What I appreciated about Sheldrake’s short book is that he provides a readable overview of how fungi have played an unheralded pivotal role in the planet’s ecosystem.

He includes chapters on defining the fungi (e.g., truffles) and how they operate in labyrinths underneath our feet. There is a chapter on lichen (which are well suited for space travel BTW), the long history of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the possibilities of mushrooms being used to combat pollution and soil contamination.  There are some color photographs to illustrate Sheldrake’s book including this oyster mushroom growing out of jar of old cigarette butts. *

Both Ministry and Entangled books address these topics individually, but what contributes to their popularity is that they provide a vision of the possibilities if we just “think outside our skulls," as Sheldrake writes.

You can browse through both books at our next pop-up at the Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Saturday morning, July 30th.

*This photo of the Sheldrake book comes from Rob McCoy who has written a mushroom classic entitled Radical Mycology, where he has used a white rot fungus, the Pleurotus mycelium to grow oyster mushrooms from used cigarette butts.

Ammo for Eco-Poopers

As defined in the last posting an Eco-Pooper is a person that brings up the negative environmental ramifications of any product or activity being considered or discussed (like Jason in the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary). If you are that person, or want to be that person, or you would prefer just being better informed, Tatiana Schlossberg’s Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have merits some of your attention. (An updated paperback version is available in March at the Destination: Books online store via Bookshop.org.)

Schlossberg, the climate beat reporter for The New York Times has compiled a comprehensive list of what we buy, the way we buy it and how we live impacts the environment. She connects the dots from all over -- Mongolia, Columbia, and Iowa to our front porch.

She divides the topic into sections on Technology and the Internet, Food, Fashion, and Fuel and then parses them into shorter chapters. For example, Fashion is divided into “Thirsty for Denim”, “Athleisure Forever!”, “Fast Fashion, but Going Nowhere”, “It’s Not Wood, It’s Rayon" and “The Yarn That Makes the Desert.” In the latter piece Schlossberg shows how the consumer lust for inexpensive cashmere had caused climate chaos in Mongolia that has resulted in the expansion of the Gobi Desert and rising ozone levels in California.

Similarly, in "The Great Big Cargo Route in the Sky" Schlossberg uses roses grown in the South American country of Columbia to illustrate the impact of air freight on the environment. She writes:

"In 2017, 4 billion flowers (roses and others) weighing 200,000 tons total (about one-tenth of pound per flower) were flown from Columbia to the United States… Carrying all of those flowers (and just the flowers, not including their packaging) used 114 million liters of fuel and released 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to an estimate from the International Council on Clean Transportation."

Two takeaways from this excerpt: 1.) Schlossberg includes her statistics and references throughout the book (mostly in the footnotes) and 2.) If you don’t want to buy your sweetheart roses this Valentine’s Day you have a readymade excuse (even though they have probably have already landed stateside).

And roses are nothing compared to coal ash, the highly toxic by-product of burning coal in power plants that is primarily stored in water near lakes and streams, until it is not. (The disaster at the Kingston, Tennessee Fossil Plant in 2008).

And then there is most unfavorite revelation in the “The Greediest Crop” piece which is about environmental problems surrounding corn. (I grew up in the town known as the Buckle on the Corn Belt and I love corn-on-the-cob). Too much corn is being grown partially for use as the gasoline supplement ethanol and for the feeding of livestock. Moreover, how the corn is grown exacerbates the problem.  Besides the fossil fuel burned to grow the corn/ethanol, corn is being grown as a monoculture crop requiring larger amounts for fertilizer and it is more susceptible to disease and insects (more pesticides needed). She explains how the endless acres of corn creates droughts and floods as well. News reports of violent flooding with thunderstorms that destroy crops and livelihoods in the Midwest are serving as constant reminders.

If there is a bright spot in Schlossberg’s book is that it does not have an overly bitter or condemning tone and she has lighter moments to keep it in perspective. She quips, “My love for disappointing facts as perhaps you have come learn is endless.”

Inconspicuous Consumption is simply a one stop shop, summarizing the role each consumer plays in harming and perhaps changing some habits to save the planet.