Summary: (Amazon) WHO LEARNS WILL LOVE anecdotally and pictorially recounts the tale of a determined, creative woman who establishes a Bucks County, PA nature center. Her enthusiasm ignites a love of nature in all who are around her. The early history, environmental education programs, wildlife, and children’s interactions with nature are included in this engaging chronicle of Peace Valley Nature Center. Carolyn with Corey Peace Valley Nature Center Website: https://www.peacevalleynaturecenter.org/ Videos of PVNC: 1. Great Blue Heron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7uWu ..read more

  Summary (Milkweed Editions): “Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that sh ..read more

(Amazon) Summary (Good Reads): “If you pay attention to the land where you live, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you, and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve,” write Susan Hand Shetterly. In this collection of elegant, spare, and often passionate essays, Shetterly explores what it is to live in a Down East coastal town, and to pay attention, over time, to what it offers of land, water, wildlife, and community. She takes her cue from Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, who advocate for the virtues of staying in one place, believing t ..read more

  Summary (Amazon): From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx—whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth—comes a riveting, revelatory history of our wetlands, their ecological role, and what their systematic destruction means for the planet. A lifelong environmentalist, Annie Proulx brings her wide-ranging research and scholarship to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important yet little understood role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estu ..read more

  Summary (Good Reads): Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work ..read more

  Summary: (Amazon) A devastating examination of how collapsing insect populations worldwide threaten everything from wild birds to the food on our plate. From ants scurrying under leaf litter to bees able to fly higher than Mount Kilimanjaro, insects are everywhere. Three out of every four of our planet’s known animal species are insects. In The Insect Crisis, acclaimed journalist Oliver Milman dives into the torrent of recent evidence that suggests this kaleidoscopic group of creatures is suffering the greatest existential crisis in its remarkable 400-million-year history. What ..read more

  (Amazon) Summary (Amazon): These prayers were first published, in French, in 1947 by a private press. Rumer Godden discovered a volume of them and translated them into English. The poem-prayers are at once reverent, humorous, realistic and concise. Information about author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Bernos_de_Gasztold Reviews: https://rachelhackenberg.com/prayers-from-the-ark-book-review/ http://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2017/05/prayers-from-ark.html Music The Poems set to music:https://www.gwynethwalker.com/pdf/pfta.pdf The Prayer of the Mouse by Grace Immaculata:  ..read more

Summary (Amazon):  A heartwarming account of the trials and triumphs a Hollywood hummingbird rehabber encounters while caring for her tiny, fragile patients. Before he collided with a limousine, Gabriel, an Anna’s hummingbird with a head and throat cloaked in iridescent magenta feathers, could spiral 130 feet in the air, dive 60 miles per hour in a courtship display, hover, and fly backward. When he arrived in rehab caked in road grime, he was so badly injured that he could barely perch. But Terry Masear, one of the busiest hummingbird rehabbers in the country, was determined to save ..read more

  Summary (Island Press):  Much of what you’ve heard about plastic pollution may be wrong. Instead of a great island of trash, the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of manmade debris spread over hundreds of miles of sea—more like a soup than a floating garbage dump. Recycling is more complicated than we were taught: less than nine percent of the plastic we create is reused, and the majority ends up in the ocean. And plastic pollution isn’t confined to the open ocean: it’s in much of the air we breathe and the food we eat. In Thicker Than Water ..read more

  Summary (Amazon): Some believe that culture is strictly a human phenomenon. But this book reveals cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too come to understand yourself as an individual within a particular community that does things in specific ways, that has traditions. Alongside genes, culture is a second form of inheritance, passed through generations as pools of learned knowledge. As situations change, social learning―culture―allows behaviors to adjust much ..read more