What Are You Reading?

I'll start. I'm reading Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel. Chapter one was hit and miss but Rural Aspirations did an interesting review on it so I hung on for chapter two. And it kept me from napping on the bus today. I'm optimistic.

What are you reading this week? It's fun to find someone reading the same book or one not previously considered.

Even more importantly though, what do you think about what you're reading or have you posted a new review? Let us know and we'll link over to it.

And don't get tossed away if a book has already been reviewed. Different perspectives are good for the diversity of the mind.

Top Five Green Reads

I didn't start reading green reads until a couple of years ago. And even then it was an accident. I had no idea what I was getting into.

It's easy to pick the top five. They’re the ones I want to read again. That I won't give away. These five books have woken me up and pushed the bed out the window so I can't go back to sleep. Which is a good thing because there are so many more books to read.

Here are the five in no particular order.

Uncertain Peril – Genetic Engineering And The Future Of Seeds
Claire Hope Cummings

My stomach turns when I remember this book. Not at the book but at the villainous world of GMO seeds and the way they are sold around the world. The stories aren't all bad guys though. Seeds savers, the people in white, get equal time and these are the stories the author seeks to save. Yeah, one seed at a time.
Rated: Hands down 5 out of 5 stars
Recommended: Everyone that has had their bed pushed out the window.


Bottomfeeder – How To Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood
Taras Grescoe

I was the first person to read this book from the library. And then I went and bought my own copy. I would carry this book with me to and from the bus with the title facing out as a subliminal message to everyone I passed. Read this book, I wanted to say. Read this book.
Rated: 5 out of 5 stars
Recommended: For everyone who eats food, period.


An Unreasonable Woman – A True Story of Shrimpers Politicos Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas
Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson is crazy. There’s no other way to explain her story. She took a stand against a billion dollar chemical industry. And she would not back down. Until they stopped polluting, which they did. Diane is brilliantly unreasonable and puts words on the page in the same straight forward way she conducts her life of activism. I could not put this book down.
Rated: 5 out of 5 stars
Recommended: For people who like a good story and fire in their belly.


Omnivore's Dilemma - A Natural History Of Four Meals
Michael Pollan

My timing was off with this book. I read it before I knew anyone who had even heard of Michael Pollan let alone read the book. Now I feel cliche adding it to my list of top five. But here it is. The accidental book that pushed my bed out the window.
Rated: 5 out of 5 stars
Recommended: For anyone still asleep about the world of industrial food.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

This book feels cliche on the list too but the story of BK’s family eating local for a year provided the narrative I needed to make the switch to local at my own table. And for that I have great gratitude.
Rated: 4 out of 5 stars
Recommended: Kingsolver and memoir enthusiasts as well as anyone considering eating seasonally.

What are your favorite one or five green reads?

Seductions of Rice

I read a bio of Loung Ung, the author of, First They Killed My Father, in which she said, she felt at home anywhere a pot of rice was on the stove. And although I've never known hunger as she had, I recognized the feeling. The contented smell of simmering rice, almost sweet, grounds me like nothing else. I'm rarely without a pot of it on the stove.

And according to Seductions of Rice neither are large parts of the world where rice is also an everyday staple. I picked up this book years ago from a chain store sale shelf and brought it home. I'm still wondering why it was on sale. The book is a testament to basic, slow and local foods around the globe that compliment, begin or end with rice.

Sometimes I simply look at the pictures, other times I read ingredients for recipes I'll never make but taste each one as if I already had. And when I feel armchair adventurous I read the stories that go with the rich photography, dishes and history. And I'm there.

Seductions Of Rice is a book as nourishing as the bowls of rice eaten day after day from Cambodia to California.

Do you have a favorite book that you pick up over the years that continues to offer up new surprises or takes you somewhere else but comforts you exactly where you are? A book with pictures for those times that words get to be too many?

Book Review: Lost Mountain

To keep things interesting, The Blogging Bookworm will, from time to time, highlight reviews from fellow bookworms. This review is from berrybird at Lake Loop. I chose the review because one, it reached out and grabbed me and two, I know nothing about coal but had heard in the distance the echoes of strip mining and it's devastation. This book is that voice, no longer an echo. Check it out and enjoy the review.The subtitle pretty much says it all: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness; Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia. This is a terrible and wonderful book, simultaneously fascinating and horribly guilt inducing, one of the most depressing books I have ever read. It is well written and fast paced, a nightmare of outrageous proportions. Everyone should read this book.

In September 2003, Erik Reece hiked the ironically named Lost Mountain, shortly after the state of Kentucky issued a permit for its destruction, but before the miners showed up. He documented the natural beauty: the sassafras, the warblers, the liverworts. For the next year, he returned to Lost Mountain repeatedly, trespassing at no small personal risk, to document the unnatural horrors of strip mining, and the changes wrought upon the lands and waters. The meat of the book is organized in monthly sections, where the author chronicles his ongoing observations. The frontispiece to each section is the same, a photograph taken before Lost Mountain was mined, showing misty mountain wilderness. When you turn the page to begin each new section, you are confronted with an image taken that month, showing the changes. Before, after; before, after; each successive "after" is more and more horrifying.

Interspersed amongst the observations of natural destruction, Erik Reece documents the human side of this tragedy, the social ramifications Big Coal has on rural communities. He attends public meetings, and visits local educators, clergy, and families. A local activist takes him on a disturbing tour of her town, pointing out home after home where, "everyone in that house died of cancer."

He also speaks with state regulators and representatives from the coal industry, and sheds some light on the politics of coal. It is a dirty, bloody business. Corruption and cronyism seem to rule Kentucky. There might be environmental protection laws on the books, but there is no enforcement. Regulators who try to do their jobs are forced out of office, or worse. In December 2003, on the same day the author sneaks past the iron gates on Lost Mountain for one of many documentary hikes, a state surface mine inspector died after being found beaten and unconscious in his own home, his body mutilated by human bite marks. Big Coal does not take kindly to resistance.

This may not be a pleasant book, but it is necessary. We need to educate ourselves about where our energy comes from, so we can demand better. As I suspected, "clean coal" is not the answer. Not that coal mining can't be done in a more responsible, more ethical way; it can, and the author documents that as well, describing the methods and practices that don't poison the water, where native plants will grow again. It can be done, but it is not.

This leads me to my only small quibble with the book. There is a conclusion section at the end, which contain some great information and tries to provide hope--this is where the author describes reclamation done right. In my opinion, it is still the weakest chapter in the book. To be perfectly honest, I don't like the conclusion chapter because Erik Reece uses it to take what I see as a cheap shot at science. It's that same old, tired humanities vs. science argument, "Science without compassion, science without ethics, has given us the modern war machine, the industrial farm, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the strip mine." Dude... oversimplify much? It's not science that gave us those things, it is greed, it is the market, it is simple ignorance.

I accept my share of the blame: I am ignorant and I am complicit. Due to an abundance of hydropower and nuclear power, only 18% of the electricity in my state comes from coal. But I use electricity, and my utility buys coal. In reading this book, I became a little less ignorant, and a lot more motivated.

Back at our old apartment, we paid a little extra for green power, a mix of wind energy and small hydro. When we bought this house, it was one of the details that got lost in the shuffle of moving, and we ended up with the default conventional power. Reading Lost Mountain inspired me to pull out the utility bill hanging file, and re-enroll in green power. It will cost a few extra pennies per kilowatt, but it will ease my conscious, make me feel less complicit. I no longer support Big Coal.

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

READERS: Recommended for all greens in the spectrum and everyone in the entire color wheel

Book Review: Bottomfeeder - Eating Ethically In A World Of Vanishing Seafood

Last month I saw the author of Bottomfeeder, Taras Grescoe, speak at Book Passages in the Ferry Building. Me and seven other people. Three were his friends. It was admittedly an unseasonably warm evening but I expected a higher turn out.

Taras is a young man, almost shy, to the point I didn't buy the book. His hesitation became my own. He was solid in the content of the book but a salesperson he's not. Which is too bad because his book is a winner. After reading it from the library, I'm sold.

Bottomfeeder is to seafood what Omnivore's Dilemma is to corn, what Uncertain Peril is to the seed. This book is a top of the list read for anyone with an appetite for fish and half a conscious to eat responsibly.

Part travelogue, part food memoir, part wake up call to the state of global fish stocks, Taras begins his journey of seafood in NYC exploring fish on the menus of four star restaurants. He travels to the fish markets of Japan for an investigation of blue fin tuna, to Marseilles for bouillabaisse and with many stops in between ends in Nova Scotia at a factory for fishsticks. In each place he eats the local catch, explores the history, traditions and present day wild stocks of seafood. And he interacts with salty characters on every shore.

Following him down to the waterfront, I watched him strip to his trunks, don flippers and a snorkel mask, and swim a few yards out to his racks of oysters..... Emerging from the water, he bade me follow him into a stone toolshed, where he responded to all my questions while standing unselfconsciously naked. (He explained that it is healthier to let the breeze dry one off after swimming.)

Each chapter puts a face to the men and women fishing, farming or working the fisheries. The people that experience or deny first hand the affects of overfishing, of destructive methods of aquaculture, invasive species, dead zones and unsustainable fishing methods.

As I was shown more sores and patches of dry skin on slender arms and legs, the old woman with the thick glasses took my notepad and wrote in it, in a schoolgirlish hand: "Dysentery. Ulcer. Womitting. Itching. Breathing problem." All of them, Selapan explained, were maladies that afflicted the people of Riverbank Street since the shrimp farms arrived.

Each destination brings to the surface new challenges to maintaining species of fish native to our varied cultural diets. But Grescoe doesn't let the book drown in despair. He is a constant fish eater with no plans to give it up. He chooses his fish wisely and hopes we will too.

Surprisingly McDonald's has chosen wisely. Their Filet-O-Fish sandwich uses Alaskan pollock whose stocks are still abundant. The Alaskan pollock, live in the middle of the water column, which mean destructive bottom-trawls do not have to be used in their capture.

Several times reading this book I day dreamed taking up post at the local fish counter with a patent leather purse on the crook of my arm. And swinging it at people that ordered fish from the list to avoid. Tara's takes a smarter approach. ... knowledge is power, he writes.

My fierceness would be more effective copying and distributing the appendix from Bottomfeeder that includes tools for choosing seafood with informational web sites, principles to follow, questions to ask. He succinctly explains and categorizes the good, bad and the ugly of fishing methods. And he gives his opinion of seafood to never, sometimes or absolutely indulge in.

While the contents of the entire book are relevant and important beyond the fish we find or don't find on our plates there are two chapters that stand out. The first deconstructs shrimp farming in India and the second focuses on salmon farming in British Columbia. Reading them you may find yourself considering a patent leather purse as I did.

If that's the case, remember knowledge is power when buying fish. Let the appendix of this book be your guide.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

READERS: Recommended for all green and blue readers

My Fav Five

Green books proliferate on library shelves, in book stores, online, on our sidebar. There are so many great green reads out there that it is hard to know where to start, what to pick up next. By amassing book reviews from all you bookworms, we hope to make that decision a bit easier. If you are just beginning to explore ecologically relevant books, though, even that list can be a bit daunting. So here's a list of my favorite five to hopefully kick start things.

1) The Omnivore's Dilemma: Omnivore's Dilemma explores eating in the industrial food chain (think McDonalds), eating big organic (think Whole Foods), eating small organic (think farmers' market) and eating food you've hunted and gathered (think hunt and gather). I will warn you that the book is dense. It is a slow read because you need to stop every other page to overcome your outrage but you'll never reach for another factory farmed burger without thinking twice. The truth behind "big organic" will also surprise you and the earnestness with which smaller farmers approach your dinner plate will awe you. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars; Readers: recommend for light to medium green readers.

2) Animal Vegetable Miracle: Ms. Kingsolver chronicles her family's attempt to eat locally (mostly from their own yard) for an entire year. The journey is a beautifully written, lyrical romp through seasonal eating and is chock full of the most memorable, meaningful quotes I've encountered. This book was a favorite among my Green Book Club members - many of whom identified with Ms. Kingsolver as a parent. This book will motivate you to grow an edible garden, possibly raise heirloom turkeys and to fight for your local farmer. Some have found AVM to be a bit idyllic but, as I love the idyllic, this is probably my all time favorite green book. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars; Readers: recommend for light to medium green readers.

3) Little House on the Praire Series: Admit it. This one surprises you. Not all "green" books need to be written by Nobel Prize winners and require a PhD in economics to understand. Last year, I wormed my way through Laura Ingalls Wilder's entire series, enjoying every adventure, absorbing every detail and appreciating the beauty of a truly "simple" life. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars; Readers: recommend for light, medium and dark green readers.

4) Last Child in the Woods: The book has spawned a movement to get our children back in touch with nature in an effort to save them from obesity, consumerism, boredom and a myriad of "disorders" as well as to instill in them a love for and need to protect the natural environment. If you are a parent, you must read this book. You will be saddened by the disconnect between this generation and anything without a plug. You will be motivated to help your children reconnect and armed with tools for doing just that. The book is, however, a tough read. It took me a couple months to complete, but, as DramaMama pointed out, "the chapters are set up as shorter essays that can be read as stand alone pieces." You can work your way through the book bit by bit. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (wish it was a bit easier to read); Readers: recommend for light and medium green readers and ALL parents.

5) Break Through: I struggled with this last "favorite". Part of me was inclined to go with Common Wealth, because - although it is a difficult read and there are bits (GMO seeds) that are tough to swallow - I think the book is hugely important to the global green movement. I recently reviewed Break Through and, even though I did not love the book, I feel that anyone serious about moving the green movement forward, gathering a political force to effect real environmental change or wondering what to do beyond individual changes must read this book. It changed the way I think about "the environmental movement" and motivated me to get off my . . . chair and do something about it. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Readers: recommend for medium and dark green readers.

There you have it. My fav five. Please, share yours. I too am looking for my next green read.

Book Review: Rubbish

To keep things interesting, The Blogging Bookworm will, from time to time, have a special post from fellow bookworms. Our first guest post is from the cutest non-consumer this side of the Mississippi. She's over-ambitious. She's challengilicious. She's Arduous.

Finally a book I can whole-heartedly recommend! Yes, that is right. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy has the Arduous™ seal of approval, so you can head out immediately to check it out of your local library! I will issue one warning, however. Rubbish will make you want to give up your life and head to Arizona to become a garbologist, or at the very least it will make you want to paw through your neighbor’s trash and check out your local landfill. Neither I nor the Blogging Bookworm is in any way liable for any marital strife, discord with friends, or neglect of paying work that may ensue. And now that I’ve gotten that bit of legaleze out of the way, onwards with the book review!

First things first, Rubbish will challenge any and all assumptions you may currently have about garbage. For example, the idea that contemporary society is the most wasteful society to ever walk the Earth? Yeah, not so much. In fact, our per capita garbage disposal is not that different from some of our ancestors. Murphy and Rathje write:

Those who condemn our own era for its conspicuous consumption and conspicuous
waste should at least bear in mind that throwing away perfectly good objects
seems to be one of those inexplicable things, like ignoring history, that human
beings have always done. David Pendergast, an archaeologist who is curator at
the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, spent seven yeas studying a Classic Maya
site─ Altun Ha, in Belize, which was occupied from around 800 B.C. to A.D. 1000─
and after examining the contents of various tombs he concluded: "These people
would have traded in a Cadillac when the ashtray was full."

So contrary to the common belief that humans have never been so wasteful as we are today, it turns out that wanting the shiniest, new thing is a trait we share with our ancestors, and not simply a product of constant advertising. While Americans are producing more waste than we did a hundred years ago, the reason we’re producing more waste is largely because there are more of us now.

If wanting new, pretty things is a human trait, what do we do? While I would love to see people consume less in general. Realistically, I believe that we also need to move towards larger-scale recycling and reusing. Rathje and Murphy state that landfills are 40% composed of paper. Now, Rubbish was written in 1992, so I hope that this number has improved since then. But clearly, if we want to reduce the size of our landfills, we need to step up recycling programs, and ALSO create more of a market for recycled paper products. At the time this book was written, aluminum was the only product for which there was a considerable demand. (I believe this is still true today.) By contrast, the demand for recycled paper products was relatively low, causing tons and tons of used American paper to be shipped to Europe and Asia. Not so awesome. For recycling programs to be truly successful, we must not only recycle, but also buy recycled. And hey, the bright side is, for those of you struggling with giving up your beloved toilet paper or paper towels, there’s a simple solution. Buy recycled products, and instead of feeling guilty, you can feel good that you are helping to create a demand for recycled paper.

I could go on and on about the things I learned from reading Rubbish: that the American reliance on packaged food means that we produce less waste than a household in Mexico City (because packaged food usually results in less food waste), that food shortages tend to produce more waste rather than less waste, and that disposable diapers aren’t the problem. Suffice it to say, this book forced me to re-think my pre-conceived notions about waste. And if that’s not the hallmark of a great read, I don’t know what is!

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

READERS: Recommended for newly green, medium and dark green readers.