Tag: environment

nonfiction

Book Review: Give a Sh*t: Do Good. Live Better. Save the Planet. by Ashlee Piper

Stephanie1 Comment

Who doesn’t love a good hard kick in the pants?

Uh, probably lots of people, and I’m probably weird for loving them as much as I do, but I’m the kind of person who NEEDS reminders of why I do the things I do from time to time. That’s how Give a Sh*t: Do Good. Live Better. Save the Planet. by Ashlee Piper (Running Press Adult, 2018). I need someone to constantly tell me that what I do has value, that all that extra work I put in helps someone or something, and that it’s worth it. Because of the pandemic, this book sat on my TBR a little longer than I wanted it to, but that’s okay. I interlibrary-loaned it, and it’s all good!

Decent people like to think of themselves as people who care (the not-decent ones are proud of NOT giving a sh*t, so I’m not talking about that gross crowd), and there are so many reasons we need to give a sh*t these days. Toxic rainwater. Much hotter summers. Warmer winters. Pandemic after pandemic because we’re toasting the planet at an unacceptable rate. And those are just a few of the horrifying reasons why we need to care. Ashlee Piper has written a book that will not only explain to you why you should care, but she’ll give you ways to care. And she’ll make you laugh your hindquarters off while doing it.

Eat fewer animals. Switch out the products you use around your house and on your body. Drive less. Chill more. There are so many ways we can do better, all of us. We don’t have to do it all, Ms. Piper says; even a little helps…though once you get going on giving a shi*t, it gets addicting. Little by little, we can clean up our lives and maybe clean up our corners of the planet. It doesn’t hurt to try, and it makes us feel pretty badass.

This is a lovely little book. If you don’t like swearing, it’s probably not the book for you, but if you’re chill about it, this book is funny. I laughed out loud quite a few times. Ashlee Piper destroys the stereotype of the uptight, humorless vegan (I hate that stereotype. I’m not a vegan, but I’m not a fan of stereotypes in general. They’re stupid). She makes caring about the planet fun and exciting. You don’t have to fill your life with doom, gloom, and drudgery in order to make things better; trying new recipes, adopting a pet, going for a bike ride, hanging some clothes out on the line in the fresh air, and using up all your beauty products and then shopping for cruelty-free and sustainable products are all enjoyable ways to show you care about the condition of the planet.

If you’re old school and already living a sustainable life, there’s probably not a ton new in this book, but if you’re just realizing we’re in bad shape and maybe you need to clean up your act a little (and you want to do it in a fun way!), Give a Shi*t is a great place to start!

Visit Ashlee Piper’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Idiot’s Guide: Foraging by Mark Vorderbruggen

Stephanie1 Comment

Okay, I’m going to admit right here and now, I’m probably never going to be a master forager. I would love to; I so wish I could be the kind of person who traipses into the woods on random Saturdays throughout the year with a large basket, and who comes out with that basket full of plants and roots and berries that I easily identified as safe to eat. But I simply don’t have that much confidence in myself (yet, anyway); with my luck, I’d take a bite of the first thing I had just learned about and immediately drop dead (and wind up the subject of a true crime podcast). But that’s why I love books on foraging: I obviously have SO much to learn, and I’m not giving up! Idiot’s Guides: Foraging by Mark Vorderbruggen (Alpha, 2016) had been on my TBR since about 2019; I finally received a copy through interlibrary loan a week or so ago, and I found this book absolutely delightful.

Let this book fall open and you’ll find that each plant covered gets a two-page spread complete with multiple full-color photographs, a map of where said plant grows, what to look for, edible or poisonous look-alikes, and various bits of knowledge about the plant (uses, how to prepare it, how NOT to prepare it, and things to look out for). The photographs alone are phenomenal; should you be just starting out on your foraging journey and want to get serious about it, I feel like this book would be an excellent tool just for identification. (Fun story: I had just started this book when, later on that night, I caught a reel by Black Forager on Instagram and immediately recognized the linden/basswood tree she was talking about, before she identified it, because I’d read about it in this book! How cool is that?!!???)

This was definitely worth the read. I’ve been able to identify a few more plants and trees because of it, and while I’ll likely never be the kind of person that can disappear into the woods and survive for months solely on the plants I’ve recognized there, Idiot’s Guide: Foraging has definitely pushed me a little closer to that ideal. : )

Visit Mark Vorderbruggen’s website here.

nonfiction · parenting

Book Review: Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature by Steven Rinella

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It was on a random trip to the library so my daughter could pick up more books that I discovered Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature by Steven Rinella (Random House, 2022). I didn’t need more books; I already had a stack of approximately 347823473982432 books at home that I needed to get through, but as a parent who has been trying to get my kiddo to spend more time outside and enjoying all that nature has to offer, how could I pass this book up? I decided to bring it home and read one chapter per day before I read my regular book. And this was a great strategy!

Kids spend way too much time indoors these days. Part of it is the ongoing pandemic, sure, but a large part of it is because that’s how life is structured these days. The lure of technology, combined with overscheduling, along with parents’ unrelenting work schedules, have created a natureless monster as far as outdoor time is concerned. And kids are missing out, argues Steven Rinella. Nature is important for their development, and we all benefit when we’re more engaged with the nature around us.

Using examples from his own family’s experiences with nature, Mr. Rinella tackles topics such as foraging, hunting, gardening, fishing, exploring, and all the other activities that families can do outside. The possibilities are nearly endless, and you don’t need to co-own a cabin on the Alaskan coast or live in the middle of the forest, surrounded by woods, to make nature a daily part of your life. Examine the plants in the cracks of the sidewalk in front of your house; go on nature scavenger hunts around town; learn about the stars and constellations; camp in your backyard; turn rocks over in the creek in the middle of town; learn to identify plants and weeds in the local park; get a bird guide and set up a bird feeder on your balcony, and grow some herbs in a pot. Nature is all around us, and the more of it we incorporate into our lives, Mr. Rinella tells us, the better off kids and parents will be.

This is truly a lovely book that will inspire you to get out there, get your kids out there, and start investigating all the wonders around us. I re-downloaded a plant-and-animal identifying app and have been using it like crazy lately; I have another foraging book from interlibrary loan that I’m excited to delve into. And when my sister-in-law called to ask if I wanted to bring my daughter to walk in the woods and get gross in the creek, I was all in:

We all know that nature is important in some aspect, though we all have different experiences and levels of tolerance for nature. Mr. Rinella argues that being uncomfortable and learning to deal with that discomfort (wet shoes, bug bites, fluctuating temperatures, etc) is part of the learning process and will turn our kids into heartier adults. I had varying experiences with nature as a kid: while I wasn’t super into being outdoors as a teenager, there were times when I was neck-deep in creeks as a child, and I was deeply interested in learning to identify all the plants and weeds in my yard (which wasn’t all that possible to do back then. Yay for the internet for making this dream come true for me! I can now identify a LOT of the stuff growing on my property, and around the paths nearby). I’m working hard to make sure my daughter develops a similar love and respect (very important there!) for nature, and this book really helped me cement the importance of this goal.

If you know you need to get your kids off their tablets and playing outside more, this book is definitely the kick in the pants you need to get started.

(Quick note: I found that Mr. Rinella is very respectful of boundaries that don’t necessarily mirror his own; he’s quick to point out that while hunting is his family’s thing, he gets that it’s not for everyone, and this tracks for the book in its entirety. I deeply appreciate his understanding of how different families may engage with nature differently, and how what’s right for one family may not be an acceptable activity for another.)

Visit Steven Rinella’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Dude Making a Difference: Bamboo Bikes, Dumpster Dives and Other Extreme Adventures Across America by Rob Greenfield

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Earlier this year, my daughter and I read a book for her homeschooling about making a difference for the planet. Recycling, refusing things that you don’t need, reusing the things you have in creative ways, being smart about how you use energy and water, biking and walking to get to places when you can, it was all pretty fun and inspirational. The author was a man named Rob Greenfield, and the book told a little bit of his story and about the wacky things he does to call attention to the need to live a sustainable life. I did a little research and found he’d written a book for adults as well, so I checked, and sure enough, it was living its best life on my library’s shelf! So on one of my next trips, I grabbed Dude Making a Difference: Bamboo Bikes, Dumpster Dives and Other Extreme Adventures Across America by Rob Greenfield (New Society Publishers, 2015) and brought it home.

Rob Greenfield, known for wearing all his trash in a suit on his body for a month at a time, decided to go bigger to get his message across. He was going to bike across the US, with a list of rules for guidance. He could only eat local (to where he was) organic food, nothing packaged, unless it was food that was going to go to waste otherwise. He couldn’t use any electricity that wasn’t generated by his solar panels (with a few exceptions), and this even included walking in electric doors (he would have to wait until someone else went in and go behind them). Water had to come from natural sources (he had a purifier), and at times, he could only drink water that would have gone to waste. These were the rules that would follow him biking over 4,000 miles across the country.

And he did it! There were a few foibles along the way – flat tires, outrunning tornados, no bank branches in an entire state – but the over-one-hundred-day-journey taught Rob a lot of things along the way, both while he was on the road and when he stopped at various organic farms along the way. This is a wild and crazy journey that will definitely get you considering what you use, and how you can do more to be earth-friendly.

Wow.  First off, I love these kinds of adventure/experiment books, where people live out certain ideals or go on long adventures that take large amounts of time. Although I felt like sometimes Rob took things to the extreme (in no way shape or form would I drink unpurified water from a stream, nor would I EVER drink a half-empty bottle of water I found at the side of the road *gag noises*), I deeply admire his commitment to living out his ideals. He’s young; I feel like he recognized a lot of room for growth in himself and how he treated the friend who accompanied him for most of the journey, so hopefully that’ll be something he works on in the future. I do really like that he’s calling attention to food waste by dumpster diving a large portion of the food he ate while biking cross-country; he’s even mentioned in his TED talks about this experiment that he gained ten pounds while biking 20-50+ miles per day for over a hundred days. That’s pretty wild!

The book is written in journal format, so there are times it gets a little repetitive and navel-gazey, and his youth and immaturity show through, along with his lack of knowledge on certain subjects (there was a bit in there about race that made me cringe), but overall, this is an enjoyable read about something I’d love to be able to do but can’t. I do wish he would have spoken to the privilege that allows him to make fantastic journeys like this. He’s young, physically fit, and healthy (my garbage back alone disqualifies me from a trip like this); he’s male (the dangers a woman would face making a trip like this? Not something I’d want to risk) and straight (ditto) and white (he had a few interactions with the cops where he was very much given the benefit of the doubt in a way most Black and brown men would not have been offered). I’d definitely like to hear him speak on these topics a little more in the future (and maybe he has and I haven’t read it or listened to it yet; I have enjoyed several of his TED talks, however!).

Overall, this was a fun read, and definitely inspiring.

Visit Rob Greenfield’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir by Dee Williams

Stephanie1 Comment

I’ve been on a kick lately, reading about tiny homes. I’ve watched documentaries about them in the past and enjoyed them, but I think I’ve just reached that part of middle age and that stage of the pandemic that a small house all to myself seems like the ultimate fantasy. Combine that with all the environmentalism stuff my daughter and I have been reading for her schoolwork, and having a smaller carbon footprint in a house mostly run on solar and built out of used materials sounds amazing. I dug through my library’s catalog and one of the selections they had was a book called The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir by Dee Williams (Blue Rider Press, 2014). Yes, please! Into my bag it went on my next library trip.

Dee Williams lived a normal-to-hippyish life in the Pacific Northwest. She owned her own home (which was constantly breaking down in various ways) and had been building her DIY skill set since she was young (which came in really handy when her house needed repairs!). When a health problem surfaced that couldn’t be ignored, Dee began to take a hard look at her life and what mattered. What did she want? What would truly make her happy?

Almost overnight, she purchased a trailer and began to build an eighty-four square foot house on it. She had help; friends, neighbors, random passersby, the men giving free advice at the hardware store, they all pitched in to help her dream become a reality. And suddenly…it was built, and eighty-four square feet became home.

Dee Wiliams has written a charming memoir of the ups and downs of building your own home, of learning the skills you need to create a place you can live in, of figuring out what’s important and what can be discarded, and how to build not just a dwelling place, but a community. There are definite downs: her health scares are stressful, and she writes about an incident involving falling off a ladder that resulted in multiple unable-to-be-casted-or-splinted bones that made my whole body cringe (because I’ve also broken one of those bones, and it’s awful); pulling her house behind her down the highway is my actual nightmare (I’ll stick with my smaller vehicle and continue fantasizing about tiny homes that don’t need to be moved anywhere); not having a shower or washer in my tiny house is a no-go for me, but she manages just fine. But the ups outweigh it all. The community she builds around her, the friends who rally and cheer her on when she’s building and afterwards, the family she builds when the house is finished, it’s all so lovely and cozy-feeling.

You might not be ready to give all your possessions away and move into a house smaller than most bedrooms, but it’s still fascinating to read about someone who was, and did. I enjoyed the time I spent living vicariously through Dee Williams’s tiny house-building journey. What a fun and thoughtful book.

Visit Dee Williams’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes

Stephanie1 Comment

I realize I read about a lot of niche subjects, but garbage might just be the nichiest (what? It’s a word if I want it to be a word). Reading about the trash we create, the mess we’ve made of the world, and the people devoting their lives to cleaning it all up serves as a reminder to me of the work I need to be doing in order to make things better. If you’re beginning to realize that ‘there’s no such thing as away,’ that things don’t just disappear when you toss them in the trash, that everything you buy has consequences for the planet, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes (Avery, 2012) might need to go from your TBR to your brain.

What happens when we throw things away? What exactly goes on in a landfill? (Sometimes it’s not much. People have unearthed 50-year-old hot dogs and heads of lettuce, looking pretty much fresh.) What exactly is all of this doing to the planet, and how much longer can this continue? Edward Humes has thrown the switch on the floodlights that illuminate the mess we’ve made, the dangerous situations we’ve created, and the people working to both take care of them and to make them better.

Because there are better ways, and Mr. Humes shows not only people who have chosen careers dedicated to improving how we deal with trash, but showcases people who have restructured their lives so that they create much, much less of it. While the book occasionally wanders into the technical, Garbology is a wake-up call and an inspirational manifesto for all.

This was a bit of a slow read for me, simply because I was trying to take it all in. We’ve really made a mess of things, when the ocean can be described as ‘plastic chowder’ by scientists who study this sort of thing. It’s all super depressing, but…it could be better. We could do better, and this book points that out over and over again. Garbology isn’t Pollyanna-ish in nature, but knowledge really is power, and it provides the reader with the important knowledge we need about the what, how, and why of our garbage, and how we can clean things up.

There’s a lot to think about here, and I guarantee that, if you read this, you’ll be thinking about and looking at your trash differently. I refused a plastic bag this week after finishing this book, and I’m going to try to keep that habit up (I got distracted in another line and didn’t think about saying I didn’t need bags until it was too late). I’m thinking more about how I can reuse other parts of my trash (recycling is good, but it really should be more of a last resort; there’s a reason why reduce and reuse come first!), and I’ve located some TerraCycle drop-off locations in my area so I can collect the harder-to-recycle items, like toothpaste tubes, for them.

Garbology might change you – and that’s a good thing. Our planet desperately needs that.

Visit Edward Humes’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Attainable Sustainable: The Lost Art of Self-Reliant Living by Kris Bordessa

Stephanie1 Comment

When you know better, you do better, and who doesn’t want to do better when it comes to the way we care for ourselves and the planet? I’m always trying to improve the way we live our lives, to lessen our carbon footprint and green things up, so that’s how Attainable Sustainable: The Lost Art of Self-Reliant Living by Kris Bordessa (National Geographic Society, 2020) ended up on my TBR. Kris Bordessa runs the popular website and blog Attainable Sustainable, so I was curious to see what her book offered.

Packed between these colorful covers is a primer on the why and how-to of homesteading-up your life. Whether it’s getting the chemicals out of your products, greening up your daily actions, farming up your yard, or simply moving towards a slower, more DIY-style of living, Kris Bordessa offers lessons on it all. Keeping chickens and goats, making soap, getting your macramé on, or baking bread: you can do it all with the help of this gorgeously-photographed book.

If you’re looking for the inspiration you need to make your life a little better, you really can’t go wrong with this book. First off, it’s absolutely beautiful! The photographs on every page are utterly stunning and will have you wanting to rearrange your life so it looks as though it comes straight out of this book. Second, the projects in here all feel doable (okay, maybe not keeping goats if you live in a high-rise Manhattan apartment; check with your landlord before bringing home farm animals, friends). There’s everything from the small, like sourdough, to the large, like tapping maple trees to make your own syrup. Choose the level that’s right for you, and fantasize about the rest (even if you know you’d make a horrifically anxious chicken farmer, you can still look at the pictures *waves*).

The world is a pretty scary place right now, and this book offers a little bit of control back in your life. Why not expand your DIY skills and feast your eyes on some much-needed beauty with Attainable Sustainable?

Visit Kris Bordessa’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

Stephanie7 Comments

I was too young to remember anything about Chernobyl, only being five at the time of the accident, and information was slow to leak out in the days after the explosion (and news didn’t move as fast back then, anyway). But it’s become something that fascinates me as an adult. I read Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich in 2019, but I realized I really didn’t know much of the specifics of what happened, and in order to more fully understand, I would need to read on. A friend mentioned Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higganbotham (Simon & Schuster, 2019) after I’d read Voices, and so onto my list it went. I held back from reading it for a while, intimidated by the 538 pages, but fear not; a lot of that is footnotes, and the text in my ebook copy ended at around 50%. It’s not actually *that* huge of a book.

Adam Higginbotham has created a masterpiece here, weaving a story of incompetence, shame, national pride, and suffering that takes the reader back to the early days of Soviet nuclear innovation, where anything was possible and the USSR was large and in charge (if only in its own propaganda). The desperation of the Soviet Union to appear as a major force in nuclear power on the world stage required its architects, builders, and engineers to cut corners at every turn in order to keep up with the pace demanded by its leaders. What happened at Chernobyl was inevitable, caused by a major design flaw; if it hadn’t happened there, it would have eventually happened at another Soviet nuclear plant.

At every turn, Mr. Higginbotham shows how the wrong decision was made that cost lives and increased human suffering and environmental damage to the extreme. The truth was hidden for ages as unsuspecting citizens were exposed to massive amounts of radiation. Those in charge were loath to admit that mistakes had been made (by themselves or anyone else); what mattered more was how the Soviet Union appeared in the eyes of the rest of the world. The dangers of nationalism and pride are illustrated on every page of this remarkable book about a disaster that opened the public’s eyes to the dangers of nuclear power plants.

This book is a LOT. A lot of history with which I wasn’t familiar (I was born in 1980; I vaguely remember learning bits and pieces about the USSR when I was growing up, but I very much remember having a class discussion after the USSR fell and what that meant), a lot of explanation about the science behind nuclear power that I will admit flew right over my head, a lot of Russian names I struggled to keep straight (part of this is due to the fact that I read it as an ebook; I have a harder time reading nonfiction on my kindle. There IS a handy guide to who’s who in the front of the book, and I would really have liked to have been able to flip back to that!), a lot of anxiety-inducing scenes where the radiation levels were off the charts, and days upon days where leaders failed to evacuate anyone and instead let them marinate in radiation in order to save their own stupid pride. While I couldn’t explain anything about nuclear physics or engineering, I definitely have a better sense of the story of Chernobyl: what happened, what was covered up and lied about, and why.

This has all left me with a massive disdain for nuclear power, although Mr. Higginbotham is clear that things have gotten safer since then, with better design and different sources of power that are much less likely to melt down. But that’s still not zero danger, as Fukushima has shown us, and I’m not sure I’ll ever feel totally relaxed when it comes to the subject of nuclear power plants at all. I’m definitely glad I read this, though, because I absolutely feel better informed about the disaster and tragedy that was Chernobyl.

Visit Adam Higginbotham’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet by Sandra Goldmark

Stephanie3 Comments

I’m a big fan of frugality, and also a big fan of taking care of the environment, whether that means consuming less, consuming better and/or smarter, or taking care of what you already have. So it’s no surprise that Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet by Sandra Goldmark (Island Press, 2020) ended up on my TBR. Even when you’re fully committed to something, it helps to have a reminder every so often of why you became committed to that ideal in the first place, and this book certainly served as the kick in the pants that I needed.

Sandra Goldmark has a background in theater, and in the design and creation of many theater sets and costumes, she’s learned many skills in the repair of various items that have brought her shows to life with minimal budgets and objects that have been used, reused, and reimagined in many ways. Those skills helped fuel the repair pop-ups she and her husband and a work crew ran around New York City, taking in broken items (everything from toys to furniture to appliances and clothing, and likely far more) and doing their best to repair them. And along the way, Ms. Goldmark learned a few things.

A lot of what we own is poorly made, with plastic parts that break easily and aren’t easily repairable. Spare parts for quick repairs are often entirely unavailable, and thus whole items, for want of a tiny, tiny part, become complete trash. Often, items are legally unrepairable by the consumer; even when they are able to be fixed, it’s often cheaper (but not a better use of our resources) to throw the whole item out and buy a new one. How many broken items do you have sitting around your house, waiting for the day when you finally decide to try to fix them? Our throwaway culture is a massive problem, affecting the climate and the environment in ways we’re only beginning to pay for, and while darning our sweaters and replacing our worn bike gears isn’t going to solve the problem that is climate change, when we pay attention to even the little problems, the big problems begin to fall in line, or at least make more sense. Repairing our broken items, taking better care of what we own, buying used (and better!) when we can, and ensuring that the items we no longer need get into the hands of people who do need them are all things we can do that make a difference when done on a large scale.

This is a quick read, but it’s also a swift kick in the pants if you’re looking for some motivation. My repair skills are limited, but I’m continually learning and I use the skills I do have when necessary. That said, things back up and I put them off, but this week, I stitched holes in a pillow, a blanket, a pair of pants, and a shirt, and I crocheted a rip in a seam of a store-bought blanket, all because of this book. Ms. Goldmark is right that we need to take better care of the things we own, that creating new things is great, but that there’s a limit to what we need, and that repairing the things we own needs to be a bigger focus than creation.

She has a lot of great ideas of what companies can do in order to become leaders in this movement- what would it be like if Ikea dispatched on-the-go furniture repair people to come fix your table or bookcase, or if they had places in their stores where you could bring in your lamp or duvet cover for a quick fix? Some companies such as Patagonia or REI are already working to close the loop, as she puts it; more need to follow in their footsteps, but we can help by supporting the companies who are already participating in these more sustainable business practices.

I liked this a lot. It got me thinking about the things I can do to better care for what I own, and the skills I need to learn to better repair. My husband is pretty awesome at this and has learned to fix a LOT of broken items around our house (he repaired a backpack strap this week- the plastic part had broken and he mended that, saving the entire backpack. I was impressed); I’m more in charge of things like basic sewing repairs, but I definitely have room for improvement- I’m wanting to learn how to darn socks, because that’s such a useful skill. That’s on my agenda soon, and I’m looking forward to it.

Follow Sandra Goldmark on Twitter.

nonfiction

Book Review: Browsing Nature’s Aisles: A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs by Eric and Wendy Brown

Stephanie1 Comment

Finally! Finally, it’s warm out when I’m reading a book about foraging! Normally, it’s freezing and there are twenty feet of snow on the ground, a fact that never ceases to amuse me. Perhaps I’m just looking for a taste of warmer weather when that happens. This was more coincidence; Browsing Nature’s Aisles: A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs by Eric and Wendy Brown (New Society Publishers, 2013) had been on my TBR for quite some time and it was time to move it off of there. Thanks, interlibrary loan!

Eric and Wendy Brown, who live in suburban Maine, realized they wanted a more local, more sustainable way of life. They began to garden, they bought some chickens, they started to frequent their local farmer’s market. But they realized that this wasn’t enough, and that to supplement their diet, they needed to check out what nature was providing all around them for free. Starting with their own yard and branching out to the wide-open spaces around them, they began to learn the local plants that most people regarded as weeds or nuisances. Taking classes with urban foraging experts and instructors and learning from mycologists, they built up their confidence in identifying edible plants, fruits, roots, and mushrooms, and began to supplement their diet with items they foraged themselves.

This isn’t an instructional book. There are no, “Here are the plants that are safe to eat, here’s how you identify them and what you do with them once you’ve got them in your kitchen.” It’s the recounting of one couple’s adventures during a year of foraging in Maine. They talk about why they got started foraging (this part is a little doomsday-style depressing; it’s not necessarily inaccurate, just something to watch out for if you’re in a poor mood at the time) and their successes and failures, and all the reasons why urban foraging is a good idea. It’s not a bad story, but to be fully honest, I didn’t necessarily find anything new or inspiring in it, either.

I’m always impressed and a little bit baffled by people who live in the suburbs but who manage to find all sorts of wild-growing food. We have things like chickweed and common plantain and dandelions growing in our yard, of course, but there aren’t really stands of wild berries or apple trees growing nearby that are free for the taking. There are no empty fields where we can forage. All the forest preserves around us have signs all over explicitly stating that removing any kind of nature from the preserve is strictly forbidden. I’m very honestly unsure of where on earth we would find the kinds of things these authors are constantly stumbling across. There’s just not a lot of nature around us that we’re allowed to take things from, at least, not that I’m aware of. Maybe I’m just missing out. Our local community college did offer an evening prairie walk, pre-pandemic, where an instructor would walk with the participants and point out edible plants. I had planned on signing up for that, but, well, you know. I’m sure that’ll come back in 273489374923 years, when this is all over…

So this book was just okay for me. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, and I didn’t find the writing to be terribly interesting. It wasn’t bad, by any means, but it was no Stalking the Wild Asparagus, either.