Reading for fun, threads over the years of scifi, history, social movements and justice, farming, philosophy. I actively work to balance out the white male default in what I read, but have a long way to go.
He/they for the praxis.
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A primer on intersectional environmentalism aimed at educating the next generation of activists on how …
Clear brief explanations of intersectionality, identity, privilege, history of environmental liberation, racial impacts of environmental injustice, sharing space with short quotes from many underrepresented global voices and angles on environmental issues.
Terry Pratchett, other than lending his name to this book, wasn't a part of it. …
Mostly entertaining characters in a thoroughly begun-to-be-explored world laid next to our own, I'm both drawn in and worried by how many more books they wrote in this series.
This carried on directly from Vita Nostra in a tighter crescendo but also felt much narrower.
Confront the spectre of failure, the wraith of social media, and other supernatural enemies of …
Quite enjoyable comic panel collection, on reading and writing and lockdown.
Berry on economics, internal colonialism and extraction, the love and work of restoring a place to be home. Several essays from post-2008 ("by destabilizing the relation of money to goods, a financial system usurps an economy") combined with earlier linked ideas ("the thing that troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend.")
Feels dated in that 60s way of clearly writing to a certain class of young men with shared values, but. Creativity and openness, learning balanced between innovation and continuity. Avoid the obligations of accumulation, renewal is a system property of individual social interactions to reject organizational tyranny, vested interests, and the conforming filtering of ideas and information in hierarchies.
"A leading figure in the emerging field of extinction studies, Thom van Dooren puts philosophy …
From the perspective of birds experience of extinction, these five case studies prompt deep questions about the more-than-human basis of caring, story telling and sense of place, mourning; about the intricacies of our entanglement with species around the world; in conversation with Haraway, how to live in discomfort with our best choices' complications.
An indirect travelogue of places in conflict, places divided, places holy and touristy, around a central theme of whether paradise is over there, in here, quiet and individual, or bustling and cosmopolitan.
Gathering Moss is a series of personal essays introducing the reader to the life cycle, …
Essays of humor and humility and care, a sense of observation that stretches from the microscope to scientific inquiry to social obligation, and in a dozen different ways asks us to consider perspectives of place, belonging, and generosity from other being's vast or tiny differences. It's been a while since I read Braiding Sweetgrass, but I think this collection is no lesser for nominally having more of a narrow entryway through her world of moss.
"From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to …
Journalistic stark account of precarious migrant labor of would-be retirees, especially post-2008 but many stories and paths to being unable to afford housing and able to scrape by with some sense of independence as long as your body holds up to exhausting physical labor of cleaning outhouses, amusement parks, warehouse fulfillment, or beet harvesting.
Oddly satisfying, surveys of outdoor living and gardening space in poor rural south in 1990, detailed planting census and interviews covering aesthetics, materials, goals. Historical analysis of influences of colonizing and slavery and sharecropping and land ownership - throughout, emphasizes the ephemeral nature of gardening as a built environment, always on the cusp of changes in function or technology - indoor plumbing, lawn mowers, big box stores.
Gathering Moss is a series of personal essays introducing the reader to the life cycle, …
An unintended Earth Day pick, straight through with the audiobook read by the author though I will get the physical book as it is implied there are aesthetically setting illustrations. It's been a while since I read Braiding Sweetgrass so comparisons are sketchy, but this was incredibly good too.
Highlighted as inspiration by ceramicist Syd Carpenter in the PBS "Craft in America: Home" episode, and geographically and culturally close to our home.
In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the …
A very Holmes-ian mystery to me, set in rural Japan with a declining aristocratic family, the retelling pieced together tidily from a number of accounts and viewpoints.
A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to …
Elite capture conscripts non-elite into propagating the structures of the elite. Riffing on "regulatory capture", colonial capitalism's constant simplification of rich relationships to consumptive signalling, and weaving in accounts of Guinea-Bissau's liberation from Portugese rule, this emphasizes the need to return "identity politics" to "alliance across difference" and not accept the shape of the rooms we're given that are more "did this or that brand post a #BLM tweet quick enough?" than "what would societal structural changes look like to hear the marginalized?"