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May 9, 2014Hi All,
This month’s book is Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World by Amy Seidl. I’m 20 or so pages in, and I really like it despite being a bit on the bleak side.
Thanks to Posman Books in New York City for making the recommendation.
Check back here at the end of the month for my wrap-up.
Happy reading!
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The end of the May has come and gone. I tore through this book, so now I have to think back to my favorite parts to talk about with you.
As I mentioned, there is a bleak feeling one gets when reading this. To see someone experience global warming on the local scale in realtime is terrifying. There’s something magical, though, about Seidl showing her children the natural world around them that restores hope of future stewards who might be able to save our ailing green planet.
Seidl talks about bees early on in the book, and I realized all over again what I’ve been fighting for and trying to inspire people to fight for with me… without the bees we’re really in trouble. I loved the description of the mason bees coming out in spring. I had no idea they were such wonderful pollinators, more so than the honeybee.
The explanation of Bt is equally descriptive, the destruction of the targets graphic even, and the warning sirens that sound from Seidl’s explanation are loud. Are we really allowing these genes to be spliced into our food? Or even if not, sprayed all over it? We may not have the digestive system of a bug, but still it sounds like a bad idea when heard in the context of exploding guts.
There are lots of meaningful examples of how the world around is changing, how it IS affected (not going to be) by climate change. These aren’t examples of polar ice melt, which are certainly meaningful, but are instead examples like I mention above of local-level, down home changes we can see with our eyes, no scientific equipment required. If this book doesn’t get someone to rethink their carbon footprint, I don’t know what will.
This is a wonderful book for followers of Chinese medicine philosophy because it shows living in harmony with the seasons to its fullest. Seidl and her family’s life is so closely tied with the ebb and flow of the sun and the turning of the wheel of the year. This is the kind of closeness Chinese medicine strives for.
This book is definitely worth reading. Check it out.
