Each year on April 22nd, Earth Day serves as a global call to action for environmental awareness and sustainability. It is an opportunity to reflect on our impact on the planet and explore ways to foster a more sustainable future. One of the most powerful tools for change is knowledge- and the MSMU Libraries offers a wealth of resources to deepen your understanding of environmental issues. Check out our Earth Day display at Coe Library (Chalon Campus) and explore insightful titles such as Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, and Soil by Camille T. Dungy. This Earth Day take the opportunity to learn, engage, and contribute to a more sustainable world—one book at a time!!
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible--food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation... The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it--the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
0 Comments.