At Home In Nature

"Gould's attention to the ironies and ambivalences that abound in the practice of homesteading provides fresh and insightful perspective."—Beth Blissman, Oberlin College "This luminously written ethnography of the worlds that homesteaders make significantly broadens our understanding of modern American religion. In richly textured descriptions of the everyday lives and work of the homesteaders with whom she lived, Gould helps us understand how the tasks of clearing land, making bread, and building a garden wall were ways of taking on the most urgent issues of meaning and ethics."—Robert A. Orsi, Harvard University "This is a fascinating, authoritative, and accessible look at one of America's most important subcultures. If you ever get around to building that cabin in the woods, or especially if you don't, you'll want this volume on the bookshelf."—Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape "Rebecca Gould's compelling book on American homesteading brings the study of the religion-nature connection in the U.S. to a new place."—Catherine L. Albanese, author of Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age "Gould provides brand new data and sheds new interpretive light on familiar figures and movements. At Home in Nature is a model of how to seamlessly blend ethnography and history."—Bron Taylor, University of Florida, editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature

“With the twinned calamities of climate change and mass extinction weighing heavier and heavier on my nature-besotted soul, here were concrete, affordable actions that I could take, that anyone could take, to help our wild neighbors thrive in the built human environment. And it all starts with nothing more than a seed. Bringing Nature Home is a miracle: a book that summons butterflies." —Margaret Renkl, The Washington Post As development and habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. In his groundbreaking book Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy reveals the unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife—native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. Luckily, there is an important and simple step we can all take to help reverse this alarming trend: everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity by simply choosing native plants. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical and achievable recommendations, we can all make a difference.

Access to technology has created a generation of children who are more plugged in than ever before—often with negative consequences. Unrestricted outdoor play reduces stress, improves health, and enhances creativity, learning, and attention span. In Nature Play at Home, Nancy Striniste gives caregivers the tools they need to make outdoor adventures possible in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. With hundreds of inspiring ideas and 12 illustrated, step-by-step projects, this hardworking book details how to create playspaces that use natural materials—like logs, boulders, sand, water, and plants of all kinds. Projects include hillside slides, seating circles, sand pits, and more. Accessible, research-based, and timely, Nature Play atHome is a must-have for modern parents and caregivers.

ÒAs long as humans have been around, weÕve had to move in order to survive.Ó So arises that most universal and elemental human longing for home, and so begins Greta GaardÕs exploration of just precisely what it means to be at home in the world. Gaard journeys through the deserts of southern California, through the High Sierras, the Wind River Mountains, and the Northern Cascades, through the wildlands and waterways of Washington and Minnesota, through snow season, rain season, mud season, and lilac season, yet her essays transcend mere description of natural beauty to investigate the interplay between place and identity. Gaard examines the earliest environments of childhood and the relocations of adulthood, expanding the feminist insight that identity is formed through relationships to include relationships to place. ÒHomeÓ becomes not a static noun, but an active verb: the process of cultivating the connections with place and people that shape who we become. Striving to create a sense of home, Gaard involves herself socially, culturally, and ecologically within her communities, discovering that as she works to change her environment, her environment changes her. As Gaard investigates environmental concerns such as water quality, oil spills, or logging, she touches on their parallels to community issues such as racism, classism, and sexism, uncovering the dynamic interaction by which Òhumans, like other life on earth, both shape and are shaped by our environments.Ó While maintaining an understanding of the complex systems and structures that govern communities and environments, GaardÕs writing delves deeper to reveal the experiences and realities we displace through euphemisms or stereotypes, presenting issues such as homelessness or hunger with compelling honesty and sensitivity. GaardÕs essays form a quest narrative, expressing the process of letting go that is an inherent part of an impermanent life. And when a person is broken, in the aftermath of that letting go, it is a place that holds the pieces together. As long as we are forced to moveÑby economics, by war, by colonialismÑthe strategies we possess to make and redefine home are imperative to our survival, and vital in the shaping of our very identities.

For Lisa Knopp, homesickness is a literal sickness. During a lengthy sojourn away from the Nebraska prairie, she fell ill, and only when she decided to return home didøshe recover. Homesickness is the triggering event for this collection of essays concerned with nothing less than what it means to feel at home. Knopp writes masterfully about ecology, place, and the values and beliefs that sustain the individual within an impersonal world. She is passionate about her subject whether it be an endangered beetle in the salt marshes near Lincoln, Nebraska, a forgotten Nebraska inventor, a museum muralist, a paleontologist, or Arbor Day as the misguided attempt of Eastern settlers to ?correct? a perceived deficiency in the Great Plains landscape. Here is a writer who has read widely and judiciously and for whom everything resonates within the intricately structured definition of home.

Nicely illustrated guide for beginning naturalists, youthful or adult. Looks at spiders, fungi, earthworms, galls, wildflowers, vines, lichens, maples, starlings, squirrels, and other common but interesting "finds." Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The first chronological presentation of U.S. nature writing by key women authors of the last two centuries.