BIRDS AND BEES, BOOKS AND TREES

Q: In your column a number weeks ago, I appreciated the suggestion to read ‘Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World’ by Katharine Hayhoe. Do you have any other ideas for getting new perspectives on the environment and nature?

A: There is so much to learn about the natural world, the climate crisis, biodiversity, and our future, about our relationship to nature and to animals, our fears, and the possibilities for renewal. Getting lost in a good book or even a film or poem can be an exciting and pleasurable way to discover new facts, experience beauty in the world, or feel a re-connection with what you already know. Books can bring hope and it can be nice to hear about the work and wisdom of others.

There are of course some classics: Henry David Thoreau’s ‘ Walden, Or, Life in the Woods’, chronicling his time spent in a New England forest, and Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking ‘ Silent Spring’, on the harms done to the environment by pesticides. More recently, some important books are being written much closer to home.

I checked in with Fermoy Books on Patrick Street, and they had some excellent suggestions for current reads. Flying off the shelf there is Eoghan Daltun’s ‘An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding’, an environmental vision and memoir about how he bought a farm on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork and, by mostly leaving it alone, created a rain forest.

Also quite popular at the shop is Suzanne Simard’s ‘Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest’. A scientist in Canada, the book is Simard’s memoir, weaving together scientific discoveries and personal stories, all about the interconnection of trees in a forest, how they communicate with each other, and the importance of, for example, fungi and biodiversity. ‘To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest’, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger, combines science and Celtic spiritualism, a memoir exploring how she grew up under the Brehon laws in her village where everyone would teach her something about trees and plants. As with Simard’s book, Beresford-Kroeger explores the interconnection between trees and her encounters with mother trees.

One just out is Anja Murray’s ‘ Wild Embrace: Connecting to the Wonder of Ireland’s Natural World’, a “celebration of all the elements of wild nature in Ireland,” a book calling for us to notice the details of the natural world all around us, the butterflies and the bats, the hedges and the meadows and rivers. Murray invites us to cultivate a curiosity and love for nature’s bounty, which you’ll find right in front of you.

The store in Fermoy is out of stock on this one, but they can order broadcaster and biologist Éanna Ní Lamhna’s ‘Wild and Wonderful’, her explorations into wildlife around the world, which might even be a good one for children.

EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE

If you’re interested in any aspect of nature, on the shelves of many bookstores you’ll find the “secret life of…” or “the inner life of…” everything from cows to animals, seashells, birds, the fox, the hare, and elephants, all a chance for you to take a deep dive into lives of the earth’s varied, wondrous creatures. There’s even a short documentary on Netflix at the moment called ‘Elephant Whisperers’, about a family that takes in an orphaned baby elephant. Films, from ‘Avatar’ to ‘Don’t Look Up’, can also bring to our consciousness some of what’s at stake in conversations about the environment.

Our relationship with nature can also be an emotional experience of the beauty, interconnectedness, and fragility of the world around us. This can be well expressed in poetry, and one suggestion is the poems of Michael Longley. Of the generation of Seamus Heaney, Longley started out writing more political, historical poems, about his father in the great war. Originally from Belfast, he bought a house in Carrigskeewaun, County Mayo, and writes about his own surprise at how nature affects him, the otherness of nature finding its way into the little house he bought. He sometimes writes of his neighbours, and how many of them also recognise the fullness, diversity, and beauty of the place they are living in.

I happen to be a big fiction reader and plan on diving into a book by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson: ‘New York 2041’, an imagined future where the Big Apple is under water. Robinson’s novels, like ‘The Ministry for the Future’ and ‘Red Moon’, are often set in a world living with the consequences of our environmental crisis.

I hope you’ll enjoy the vision, wisdom, and voice of some of these writers. There’s nothing like getting lost in a good book.