May in Montana can have all kinds of weather. May in Montana also brings lots of outdoor activity--the return of Farmer's Market to downtown, busy bike trails, and outside dining. After the pandemic residents and visitors are happy to welcome sunshine, to see many shades of green, to watch late evening sunsets and to celebrate proms and graduations. New books that feature the outdoors and mindful ways to look at the past and toward the future include:
The average American spends ninety percent of their time indoors, and children are no exception. Today, kids can spend up to seven hours per day looking at screens, a phenomenon that has real consequences for their physical and mental health. A lifetime spent indoors can diminish our children's ability to understand and engage with anything beyond the built environment. It can also have impacts on a global scale. We can talk about environmental stewardship, but until more people make meaningful contact with nature, the welfare of our planet is in jeopardy. Thankfully, with the right mindset, families can find beauty, meaning, and connection in a life lived outdoors. Now, outdoorsman Steven Rinella shares the parenting wisdom he has garnered as a father whose family has lived amid the biggest cities and wildest corners of America. Throughout, he offers practical advice for getting your kids radically engaged with nature in a muddy, thrilling, hands-on way—with the ultimate goal of helping them see their own place within the natural world.
No matter their location—rural, suburban, or urban—caregivers and kids will bond over activities such as: camping, growing a vegetable garden, foraging for wild berries, nuts, and mushrooms, fishing, cooking together with naturally sourced ingredients, and hunting for sustainably managed wild game to face the realities of life, death, and what it really takes to obtain our food.
Living an outdoor lifestyle fosters in kids an insatiable curiosity about the world around them, a sense of confidence and self-sufficiency, and, most important, a lifelong sense of stewardship of the natural world. This book helps families connect with nature—and each other—as a joyful part of everyday life.
The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over, but even as governments around the world strive to put it behind us, they’re also starting to talk about what happens next. How can we prevent a new pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy? Can we even hope to accomplish this?
Bill Gates believes the answer is yes, and in this book he lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should have learned from COVID-19 and what all of us can do to ward off another disaster like it. Relying on the shared knowledge of the world’s foremost experts and on his own experience of combating fatal diseases through the Gates Foundation, he first helps us understand the science of infectious diseases. Then he shows us how the nations of the world, working in conjunction with one another and with the private sector, can not only ward off another COVID-like catastrophe but also eliminate all respiratory diseases, including the flu.
In The History of the World in 100 Animals, award-winning author Simon Barnes selects the one hundred animals who have had the greatest impact on humanity and on whom humanity has had the greatest effect. He shows how we have domesticated animals for food and for transport, and how animals powered agriculture, making civilization possible. A species of flea came close to destroying human civilization in Europe, while the slaughter of a species of bovines was used to create one civilization and destroy another. He explains how pigeons made possible the biggest single breakthrough in the history of human thought. In short, he charts the close relationship between humans and animals, finding examples from around the planet that bring the story of life on earth vividly to life, with great insight and understanding.
This book, beautifully illustrated throughout, helps us to understand our place in the world better, so that we might do a better job of looking after it. That might save the polar bears, the modern emblem of impending loss and destruction. It might even save ourselves.
From award-winning author Merilyn Simonds, a remarkable biography of an extraordinary woman — a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds.
Referred to as a Canadian Rachel Carson, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence lived and worked in an isolated log cabin near North Bay. After her husband was murdered by Bolsheviks, she refused her Swedish privilege and joined the Canadian Red Cross, visiting her northern Ontario patients by dogsled. When Elzire Dionne gave birth to five babies, Louise became nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets. Repulsed by the media circus, she retreated to her wilderness cabin, where she devoted herself to studying the birds that nested in her forest. Author of six books and scores of magazine stories, de Kiriline Lawrence and her “loghouse nest” became a Mecca for international ornithologists.
Lawrence was an old woman when Merilyn Simonds moved into the woods not far away. Their paths crossed, sparking Simonds’s lifelong interest. A dedicated birder, Simonds brings her own songbird experiences from Canadian nesting grounds and Mexican wintering grounds to this deeply researched, engaging portrait of a uniquely fascinating woman.
This collection represents part of the enduring legacy of Barry Lopez, hailed as "a national treasure" (Outside) and "one of our finest writers" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) when he died in December 2020. An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture in all its forms, Lopez lost much of the Oregon property where he had lived for over fifty years when it was consumed by wildfire, likely caused by climate change. Fortunately, some of his papers survived, including five never-before published pieces that are gathered here, along with essays written in the final years of his life; these essays appear now for the first time in book form.
Written in his signature observant and vivid prose, these essays offer an autobiography in pieces that a reader can assemble while journeying with Lopez along his many roads. They unspool memories at once personal and political, including tender, sometimes painful stories from Lopez’s childhood in New York City and California; reports from the field as he accompanies scientists on expeditions to study animals; travels to Antarctica and some of the most remote places on earth; and to life in his own backyard, adjacent to a wild, racing river. He reflects on those who taught him: the Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world--an eye that, as the reader comes to see, missed nothing. And with striking poignancy and searing candor, he confronts the challenges of his last years as he contends with the knowledge of his mortality, as well as with the dangers the Earth—and all of its people--are facing.
This deeply moving final work of nonfiction from an icon whose writing, fieldwork and mentorship inspired generations of writers and activists, opens our minds and souls to the urgency of being wholly present for, and preserving, the beauty of life all around us.
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