Green Reads: There’s A Hair In My Dirt! July 16, 2008

One of my best friends gave me Gary Larson’s ‘There’s A Hair In My Dirt!  A Worm’s Story’ as a gift years ago, and I was at first disappointed because it wasn’t a collection of Far Side cartoons.  Far Side cartoons are like crack for dorky scientists, you just have to have more more more and whenever you have a difficult moment you are reminded of a Far Side cartoon and want to just lock yourself in a room and savor some for a while. 

Once I moved beyond that disappointment, though, I realized that for young and old this is a wonderful communication of biology and ecology.  It teaches about the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, and how humans change the ecology around them in little ways as well as big ways.  For those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about the big environmental issues, this is a beautiful, funny, sometimes slightly snide reminder that our everyday actions affect the world around us.  Buy or borrow it, read it, and then share it.

 

Note:  I could give you a link to Amazon, and if you want to purchase this there, fine.  But I’m not going to give you a link because I am a big fan of local booksellers, so try to make your purchases there.  At least every once in a while.

Green Reads: Fast Food Nation July 12, 2008

Great general non-fiction and even fiction are an easy way to learn about the environment and science while being entertained.  Not all of us have the patience to read text-books or even sit through educational TV.  In my first recommendation for a green read, I’m recommending Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. 

This book might not strike you right off as environmentally educational, but I recommend it first because it is quite readable, and because it shows how business, health, environment, and daily life is so intertwined.  The simple choices we make in daily life, such as choosing McDonald’s french fries instead of cooking a locally grown, organic potato into the oven at home, add up.  Plus, this is one of the first mainstream books of the decade to broach the topic of how our food gets to us–there are a lot of great books out there like that now, but this was one of the first.