April 22 marked Earth Day, and the library has a whole second floor display of titles covering a gamut of environmental topics to raise your eco-consciousness. To love something is to want to protect it; we’ll get to the protect part, but let’s start with many titles that call us to delight in nature.
Is your heart, for example, set aflutter by lovely plumage and the tweeted (no, I’m not talking about 280 characters . . . ) songs of spring? Perhaps you’re an amateur ornithologist just itching to burst out of your shell! Consider Ted Floyd’s How to Know the Birds (598.072 Flo). Published by National Geographic, this delightful book of essays and illustrations helps your bird watching soar to new heights.
Speaking personally, getting out the door is half the battle, and that’s with Shades and Turkey Run and the Sugar Creek Trail just a stone’s throw down the lane. But when you need to get away, what about making some trails a part of the journey? Lonely Planet’s beautiful book Epic Hikes of the World (796.51 Epi) tantalizes in full color with some of the most spectacular hikes that the world has to offer. Since I try to keep my carbon footprint low, I confess I’ve just enjoyed sitting in a comfy chair with the book marveling at the photos.
In a series of moving and sometimes haunting essays, Kathleen Dean Moore’s Earth’s Wild Music (576.84 Moo) celebrates the sounds of the natural world: the call of the loons, the howl of the wolf, the bellow of whales, and many other instances of nature’s aural oeuvre. In this vein, though it’s not directly related to the library, allow me to commend to you an episode from the public radio program On Being entitled “Silence and the Presence of Everything” wherein Krista Tippet interviews the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. You’ll never listen to nature the same way again.
Last on the delighting front is the visual feast par excellence: Planet Earth (DVD 507 Pla) and Planet Earth 2 (DVD 591 Pla). What to say–the videography is nothing less than spectacular. The sumptuous seas and majestic mountains and all the ecosystems in between may leave you close to tears. Hans Zimmer composed the music, and it’s narrated by the inimitable Sir David Attenbourough who sounds as though he was born to guide the viewer on just such a journey.
Duly awed, let’s consider the protection part that I mentioned at the outset.
Climate change is such a huge issue that it’s going to take bold action on a massive scale. Consider Jeremy Rifkin’s The Green New Deal (333.79 Rif) wherein the author details why we need to transition away from fossil fuels as soon as possible and the political plans that will make that possible.
Don’t let the scale stop you from looking closely at the ways in which you can do your part. Full confession, I get irate when I take my recyclables to Walden’s and see the number of non-recyclable things people toss into the containers. Check out Jennie Romer’s Can I Recycle This? (363.72) to answer that question definitely and keep the recycling stream clean!
Last but not least, like charity, conservation starts in the home–or at least one’s back yard. So claims Douglas W. Tallamy in his beautiful new book Nature’s Best Hope (635.9 Tal) which teaches homeowners how to turn their properties into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats.
I’ve only scratched the surface. There are many more titles in our Earth Day display and dozens upon dozens of other offerings in the library to help you cultivate your wild heart, green your home, and spur action to keep our world healthy for now and for generations to come.
Paul Utterback is a Library Assistant in the Reference and Local History Department at CDPL.
