Summer Reading List

Environmental Defense has a list of things to entertain us this summer. Well, perhaps "entertain" is not exactly the word for all the items on the list, which includes the film An Inconvenient Truth, as well as eight book titles, one of which is also An Inconvenient Truth. If that one doesn't furnish you with enough information on global climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert's series of articles on the subject in the New Yorker last year is the basis for her new book: Field Notes for a Catastrophe.

...Elizabeth Kolbert’s book on climate change brings the science to life. In lucid prose, she describes how global warming threatens the traditional way of life in a small Alaskan village, forcing its residents to relocate.

She vividly distills the stories of scientists who have unraveled the meaning of ice core samples, the evolving timing of mosquito larvae hatching and the shifting ranges of butterflies in England. Drawing disturbing analogies between today’s crisis and the fall of ancient Babylon, Kolbert challenges us with the enormity of what will be required to avert global warming’s most dangerous consequences.

A book I've posted about twice (here, and here), is also on the list: Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Those two were already on my to-be-ordered list as soon as I obtain my Albuquerque library card, but this one is new to me, and sounds like a wonderful antidote to the climate change gloom I'm living in: David Rothenberg's Why Birds Sing, complete with accompanying CD.

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