A complex and informative all-in-one manual on social forestry.
Vaarde delivers a guide to forging reciprocal, regenerative relationships between nature and communities.
The author has been advising farms, stewarding forests, and teaching environmental sciences for more than 50 years since earning degrees in forestry and systematic botany from Syracuse University and SUNY College of Forestry. Vaarde’s book is a collection of data, prose, poems, photographs, drawings, and posters that explain the philosophies of social forestry and land ethics. Forests and bodies of water are often considered as essential only in relation to their benefits to human beings; the author challenges that idea by connecting nature to communities and emphasizing nature’s ; forestry work and ecology; cultures of place (shared values, belief systems, or ways of life within a specific geographical region); and visioning (picturing what one wants to happen and how a story might unfold). Vaarde recognizes that reading does not replace action when comes to environmentalism: “This book is not merely a recipe collection, where the reader can pick and choose their indulgences; rather, we want to suggest that all skills and opportunities are embedded in cultural contexts that shape action and involvement in complex ways that a book cannot fully enfold.” The author encourages conservation efforts, forest management, local food production, and the promotion of environmental resiliency, among other practices, and includes myths, anecdotes, and lessons from many North American Indigenous communities’ customs and traditions. The book is brimming with well-researched information on every aspect of social forestry—readers should be warned that a surfeit of data and academic jargon can make it read like a textbook. Despite that, Vaarde does their due diligence to honor the traditional wisdom of communities and help human beings live in harmony with their surroundings. The book is a must-read for anyone curious to learn more about ethical land practices.
A complex and informative all-in-one manual on social forestry.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781957869063
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Synergetic Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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