Dandelions are the misunderstood underdogs of the flower
world, and boy, do they ever need some advocacy! Thatās exactly what this book
does, and I love it!
Most people and organizations are more concerned about
having perfectly green lawns than avoiding the dangers of pesticides like
Roundup or harvesting edible goodies like dandelions. Grass cannot be digested
by humans, but every part of a dandelion can be used to make something useful,
like wines, teas, vitamin tinctures, meals, and more!
Dandelions are also one of
the earliest blooming springtime flowers, which makes them very important for
feeding bees. This book contains dozens of stunning photographs and recipes for
all things Dandelion.
It makes me see beauty where I least expect it - and itās
been fun trying the recipes! This is one conspiracy theory I can get behind!Ā
The Dandelion Conspiracy is our third book on wild edible plants and like the previous two books, it too contains interesting information, beautiful photographs and one hundred and twenty-five delicious dandelion recipes. Dandelions have a long history. They have been used as both a source of food and a source of herbal therapy. Up to the early 1970ās, many people with bags in hand combed their neighborsā lawns and local parks for an ample supply of dandelions. The Dandelion is not a native of North America. Historians believe that the first dandelion seeds arrived in the personal possessions of theā¦
For as far back as I can remember Iāve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, Iāve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.Ā
Poisoning is a complicated business. Your character needs to know what poisons are available, along with their toxicity, method of administration, reaction time, symptoms, and treatment.
This book offers all that information and more in language that you donāt need a chemistry degree to understand. From classic poisons to common household substances, natural venoms to street drugs, and pesticides to medical compounds, this book offers detailed information on all facets of the art of chemical assassination.Ā Ā
Booksābroadly defined as any kind of written or printed documentāare the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, āBooks last forever.ā The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
Before it launched the modern environmental movement, Silent SpringĀ (1962) had to run a formidable publication gantlet. Rachel Carson challenged the prevailing scientific consensus about pesticides, a subject most magazines wouldn't touch for fear of losing ads.Ā The chemical industry threatened legal action and mounted a PR campaign against Carson. But she had several strong cards to play.
She was already a best-selling author. She was firmly backed by her editor, Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin, then an independent family firm with a tradition of publishing nature writers. The book was serialized in the New Yorker, and President Kennedy plugged it at a press conference. On CBS, Eric Sevareid gave Carson equal time with an industry spokesman, though some corporations pulled their commercials.Ā As Brooks predicted, "A future social historian will be writing his Ph.D. thesis on the career of Silent Springājust you wait!"
In 1962 the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sparked widespread public debate on the issue of pesticide abuse and environmental degradation. The discussion permeated the entire print and electronic media system of mid-twentieth-century America. Although Carson's text was serialized in the New Yorker, it made a significant difference that it was also published as a book. With clarity and precision, Priscilla Coit Murphy explores the importance of the book form for the author, her editors and publishers, her detractors, the media, and the public at large. Murphy reviews the publishing history of the Houghton Mifflin edition and the priorā¦
Writing my first book, I found out how dependent my thinking about the world beyond my doorstep was on language made up by engineers (āPlease donāt block the drivewayā). Engineering language defined how I saw the street. It was a shock to realize how severely this had limited my thinking about public space but also a liberation to become aware of this: now I could perceive streets in completely new and different ways. The books I recommend all have made me perceive the world differently. I hope they do the same for you. Also, see the recommendations by my co-author, Marco te Brƶmmelstroet.
Until this book, I didnāt realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.
Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We donāt seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.
Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the endingāof a factoryās life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.
Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We're converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We're on a treadmill to disaster.
To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we needā¦
I adore non-fiction books that read like novels. After ten years of working in research labs, my masterās degree in biology led me to a new career in science writing. I recently dove into the worlds of narrative non-fiction and history when I wrote Radiant, the Dancer, The Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light. Immersing myself in Belle Ćpoque Paris to research and intertwine the stories of Marie Curie and the inventor/dancer Loie Fuller helped me discover a passion for telling the stories of important figures forgotten by history.
While I knew that Rachel Carson was involved in starting the environmental movement with her revolutionary book Silent Spring, I had no idea that she was also a best-selling popular science author who wrote lyrical books about the ocean. It was fascinating to learn about her life and the challenges that she faced in while standing up to big chemical companies, whose profits were threatened by her writing.
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the environmental movement
She loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries, including the international bestseller The Sea Around Us. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world.
Rachel Carson began work on Silent Spring in the late 1950s, when a dizzying array of synthetic pesticides had come into use. Leading this chemical onslaught was the insecticide DDT, whose inventor had won a Nobelā¦
I have been fascinated by managing insect pest populations since childhood when I assisted my mother in her vegetable garden by hand removing Colorado potato beetles from potato plants. I have also been interested, since childhood, in seeing the world beyond Nebraska when I laid on my back in the pasture on grandmaās farm, watching planes flying to exotic destinations. These two interests led me to obtain advanced degrees in entomology which provided the opportunity to conduct rice entomology research in those exotic places dreamed of in my grandmaās pasture. I read the five books recommended to develop my rice entomology research program and as reference material for scientific publications.
I loved this book because it provides the worldās best example of a minor pest that became a major pest because of the change in cultural practices that accompanied the advent of the Green Revolution in rice. It is also the best example of pest resurgence, which occurs when pests previously controlled by pesticides recur but in higher numbers than they did before due to the destruction of the pestās natural enemies by pesticides.
This book consists of 22 chapters presented by world-renowned authors at a 1979 symposium on the economic impact of the pest, biology and ecology, taxonomy, forecasting, migration, and the development of integrated pest management practices to control the brown planthopper. As such, I found this classic book as a guide for developing a holistic research program for managing the brown planthopper targeted to resource-poor rice farmers in Asia.
Like Rachel Carson inSilent
Spring,1962, Goulson warns of the catastrophic declines in
insects and the resulting threat to all life on Earth. He quotes biologist E O Wilson: "If insects were to
vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."
Even if we're
incapable of valuing wild creatures for themselves and not merely for how they
serve us as pollinators or ecosystem managers, we're taking huge risks with our
careless approach to herbicides and pesticides; our drive for endless crops and
increased meat production leads to devastation for the natural world.
Yes, it's
grim, but Goulson, an engaging writer, intersperses the text with descriptions
of particularly unusual and endearing insects to lighten the tone - and he also
outlines how we can do better. An important and timely book.
'Read this book, then look and wonder' Sunday Times
*A TLS Book of the Year*
We have to learn to live as part of nature, not apart from it. And the first step is to start looking after the insects, the little creatures that make our shared world go round.
Insects are essential for life as we know it - without them, our world would look vastly different. Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research and a lifetime's study, Dave Goulson reveals the long decline of insect populations that has taken place in recent decades and itsā¦
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmersā market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables Iāve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. Iāve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
In my next pick, Romero draws on previously unexplored archives to tell stories of pesticides never told before, most notably how industrial waste was utilized to make chemicals that could kill all that got in agricultureās way.
I love how he renders ironic the closed-looped systems so championed by environmentalistsāor the use of warfare chemicals on fields that grow our foods. It is indeed strange that we use chemicals designed to kill the food that we eat to live.
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technologyā¦
I am a writer, an anthropologist, and a mother. I spent five years researching ancient human survival skills and learning from modern wilderness survival experts about how to live the original Homo sapiens lifestyle. I became deeply invested in the importance of these skills amidst climate change and digital transformation because they connect us to our evolutionary heritage and safeguard our speciesā survival into the future if and when our civilization collapses (as all past civilizations have done!) I find hope in being prepared for the possible demise of our industrial system, embracing the opportunities that arise instead of trying to preserve it at all costs.
Foraging is my favorite survival skill. Discovering food in the wild provides the perfect dopamine rush, and itās exactly what we evolved to do as humans.
Nicoleās comprehensive guide covers so many edible plants and also gives fun, inventive recipes, so that even if itās not the apocalypse, you might want to experiment with things like pickled magnolia leaves or elderberry pancakes.
When I find wild plants I intend to eat, I always like to double check with another field guide or the online citizen science database iNaturalist to make sure I did the ID correctly ā nobody wants to end up like Into the Wildās Christopher McCandless in that bus in the Alaska wilderness!
319 color pages, 400 wild foods, plant localization maps for each plant (400 maps), paperback, great print quality, superior plant identification guidelines, recipes for each plant, full page photos of the plants, at least 3 pictures for each plant, medicinal uses.
The Foragerās Guide to Wild Foods is probably the most important thing you want to have by your side when you go out foraging. Maybe there are times when you're still not sure about a certain plant and you need to consult the book, despite your vast experience. Or maybe you donāt have experience at all and just wantā¦
I have loved animals since I was a child, and when I was in college, someone introduced me to the work of Cleveland Amory, who was a prominent arts critic for much of his life. But Amory also became one of this nationās first full-time animal activists and, as I learned later, someone who abandoned a lucrative and high-profile writing career to focus on his work for animal rights and anti-cruelty causes. I wrote a biography of Amory and began to read about the passion, mindset, and single-minded determination of activists of all stripes and how many made great sacrifices to join movements that have changed our lives and mindsets.
This is the story of someone who was willing to take an unorthodox and brave stand even though she knew she would be widely ridiculed and demeaned. Rachel Carson can be considered one of the first environmentalists in this country. She was one of the first to take on an entire industry when she pointed out the widespread dangers of pesticides and other commonly used chemicals considered at the time to be safe. Carson was a woman of great determination and vision and someone who has been lost to history to some degree.
I felt that in addition to taking on a major corporation and questioning prevailing ways of thinking, Rachel Carson attempted to transform the way we view the natural world and human beingsā effect on it. She was vilified for her efforts and for the very fact that she was a woman scientistāher gender intensified negative feelings againstā¦
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, did more than any other single publication to alert the world to the hazards of environmental poisoning and to inspire a powerful social movement that would alter the course of American history. This definitive, sweeping biography shows the origins of Carson's fierce dedication to natural science--and tells the dramatic story of how Carson, already a famous nature writer, became a brillant if reluctant reformer. Drawing on unprecendented access to sources and interviews, Lear masterfully explores the roots of Carson's powerful connection to the natural world, crafting a " fine portrait of the environmentalistā¦
