The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder Review

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The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder ReviewNow having read an advanced copy of Louv's new book The Nature Principle, I am moved by his case for bringing nature into our urban centers. Louv is correct that adults need nature too...we need it to weave our affinity for nature together with our day-to-day surroundings. This book is the best overall summary of many different works, and does exceptionally well at revealing the growing body of research around the influence of nature on human health. His findings suggest that a lack of `nature nearby' may be associated with an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, asthma, behavior disorders, depression and a diminished sense of place and community. However, as Louv conveys in his book, he is optimistic the trend can be reversed if we bring nature back into our backyards, neighborhoods, and schools. This book is not simply to be read in passing, but incorporated into our daily experience of life.The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder Overview

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EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want Review

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EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want ReviewEcoMind is not an "environmental" book. It is a book about power. It addresses how and why we have lost our own sense of agency and some ways to realize the power we need individually and as a society to create the world we want. Here is what BookList says about EcoMind:
In her eighteenth book, the paradigm-altering Lappe asks why we've failed to effectively address environmental problems. Delving into neuroscience, anthropology, and history, and sharing her own extensive field experiences, she argues that perception is key. She surgically disassembles "seven thought traps," or discouraging environmentalist messages that arouse guilt, fear, and despair instead of a sense of mission. On the positive side, she presents fascinating interpretations of "six human traits we can count on," including cooperation, empathy, fairness, creativity, and the fact that we are "doers." Brimming with useful information and analysis pertaining to developing renewable energy and eradicating waste, Lappe's lucid extrapolation of the core lesson of ecology, that everything is connected, also offers galvanizing dissections of the intensifying influence of corporations on government and the derailment of democracy. Equally compelling are her insights into how accelerating wealth inequality contributes to environmental degradation as well as poverty and why struggling people support "policies that hurt them." Lappe's recalibrated guide to becoming ecominded affirms our "capacity to rethink our world" and provides many urgent reasons to do so.
EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want OverviewIn EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé-a giant of the environmental movement-confronts accepted wisdom of environmentalism. Drawing on the latest research from anthropology to neuroscience and her own field experience, she argues that the biggest challenge to human survival isn't our fossil fuel dependency, melting glaciers, or other calamities. Rather, it's our faulty way of thinking about these environmental crises that robs us of power. Lappé dismantles seven common "thought traps"-from limits to growth to the failings of democracy- that belie what we now know about nature, including our own, and offers contrasting "thought leaps" that reveal our hidden power.
Like her Diet for a Small Planet classic, EcoMind is challenging, controversial and empowering.

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Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City Review

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Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City ReviewThis is a heavy and substantial tome (inevitably printed in China - where else?) which details the author's amazing work in reconstructing the stunningly-beautiful natural environment of Manhattan Island in 1609, when the Dutch explorer Henry Hudson and his crew first laid eyes on it.
This much I already knew before purchasing the book, but frankly, I was disappointed when I actually got it. In part this is because the book seems to struggle to decide what it wants to be. A major portion does indeed deal with Manhattan Island in 1609. There are a number of amazing images put together with the latest computer-generated image technology after painstaking field research and with the 18th century British headquarters map. They depict a Manhattan so beautiful it brings tears to the eyes, particularly when you consider how totally the natural environment of the island has been destroyed. Still, I was left only half-satisfied, and would love to have seen something other than simulated aerial views, i.e. some neighborhood by neighborhood ground-level close-ups with descriptions (maybe they exist somewhere, but the link to the [...] website printed on the book's jacket didn't work; perhaps it's not up yet). But apart from reprints of historical paintings and drawings, there is less detail than I would have expected. Nor is there much discussion (apart from references to the laying-out of the grid street-plan and the grading involved) of the Manhattan archeological record, or of the massive and traumatic process of changing the primitive woodland paradise of 1609 into an unrecognizable agricultural and then urban environment. Since the earliest Dutch prints of New Amsterdam in the book already show a treeless tip of southern Manhattan, the colonists clearly wasted no time in proceeding with an aggressive program of land-clearing and filling. Perhaps few records exist, but it would have been interesting to learn more about how this happened, and how the deforestation progressed over the decades. For that matter, the calculated rapaciousness with which the natural environment of Manhattan was destroyed over 3 centuries also gets short shrift; to anyone acquainted with the degraded environment of NY City today & the meager environmental consciousness of its citizenry, Sanderson is oddly optimistic as he compares the 'natural biosphere' of the virgin landscape of 1609 to the 'human biosphere' of Times Square in 2009, and talks enthusiastically about a green NY which sounds more like Portland, Oregon.
Dr. Sanderson also digresses with lengthy chapters best described as philosophical ruminations on the nature of environmental research, the composition of biospheres, and the super-green Manhattan of 2409 (a wildly-optimistic scenario which combines elements of agriculture and a Disney 'city of tomorrow') only indirectly related to recreating Manhattan's lush original environment. The chapter on Manhattan's original inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape indians is fascinating, but only emphasizes how utterly the historical record of these people, who dwelt on Manhattan for hundreds of generations, has been erased.
Fully the last quarter of the book is a series of appendices, some of which are fascinating (catalog of the brooks, streams, and ponds of Manhattan), though one wonders whether so many lists were really needed.
Dr. Sanderson's enthusiasm for his topic comes through loud and clear. I just wish a bit more of it had been translated into the concrete and included in this book.Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City OverviewOn September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson first set eyes on the land that would become Manhattan. It's difficult for us to imagine what he saw, but for more than a decade, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson has been working to do just that. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts, reconstructing, in words and images, the wild island that millions of New Yorkers now call home.

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