CPAWS Northern Alberta 2021 Summer Reading List
Published [post_published]
Amanda Girgis
We are so excited to reveal our 2021 summer reading list. There is a book for all reading tastes: Non-fiction, memoir, fiction, guide books, and even a few picks for youngsters!
As conservationists, advocacy is ongoing. We hope that these reads inspire and delight you – after all, we chose the path of conservation because we have an awe and appreciation for nature.
Handpicked by both our volunteers and staff, we are sure you will find something funny, something inspirational, or learn something new.
Happy Summer Reading!
– CPAWS Northern Alberta
Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
The book covers a broad range of topics, comprising Sagan’s reflections on anthropological, cosmological, biological, historical, and astronomical matters from antiquity to contemporary times. Sagan reiterates his position on extraterrestrial life—that the magnitude of the universe permits the existence of thousands of alien civilizations, but no credible evidence exists to demonstrate that such life has ever visited earth.
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson, Linda Lear (Introduction), Edward O. Wilson (Afterword)
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. It is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century.
Original Highways: Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada
Expanding on his landmark Globe and Mail series in which he documented his travels down 16 of Canada’s great rivers, Roy MacGregor tells the story of our country through the stories of its original highways, and how they sustain our spirit, identity and economy–past, present and future.
The Tree in Me
Through poetic text and exquisite illustrations of children reveling in nature, this picture book explores the various ways we as human beings are strong, creative, and connected to others. Each of us is like a tree, with roots and fruit, and an enduring link to everything else in nature. The tree in me is strong. It bends in the wind, and has roots that go deep . . . to where other roots reach up toward their own trunk-branch-crown and sky.
We Are Water Protectors
by Carole Lindstrom, Illustrated by Michaela Goade
Inspired by the many Indigenous-led movements across North America, We Are Water Protectors issues an urgent rallying cry to safeguard the Earth’s water from harm and corruption—a bold and lyrical picture book written by Carole Lindstrom and vibrantly illustrated by Michaela Goade.
May We Have Enough to Share
Award-winning author Richard Van Camp wrote this book to express his gratitude for all that surrounds him and his family. The strength of their connections, the nature that provides for them, the love that is endless. Complemented by photos from photographers who celebrate their own gratefulness on the collective blog Tea & Bannock, the simple verse in May We Have Enough to Share is the perfect way to start or end your little one’s days in gratitude.
Wild Horses, Wild Wolves: Legends at Risk at the Foot of the Canadian Rockies
by Maureen Enns
Using a stunning combination of drawn and painted images, conventional and remote photography (using hidden cameras activated by heat or motion) and traditional stories told by Peigan and Stoney Nakoda people, Enns invites the reader to join her as she untangles old myths regarding Alberta’s heritage and reveals some uncomfortable realities facing the province in the 21st century.The wild horses, wolves, moose, deer and bear profiled in this book have had little contact with humankind. As communities, developers and governments struggle to understand the impacts of conservation, recreation and development in sacred places, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep the “wild” in wild animals. This project is passionate plea for understanding, conservation and action.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
The Beaver Manifesto
by Glynnis Hood
Beavers are the great comeback story—a keystone species that survived ice ages, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization, and near extinction. Their ability to create and maintain aquatic habitats has endeared them to conservationists, but puts the beavers at odds with urban and industrial expansion. These conflicts reflect a dichotomy within our national identity. We place environment and our concept of wilderness as a key touchstone for promotion and celebration, while devoting significant financial and personal resources to combating “the beaver problem.”
Wolf Spirit: A Story of Healing, Wolves and Wonder
Through an intensely personal and emotional, yet rigorously scientific connection with the wolves she studies and the glorious landscape that surrounded her during this remarkable journey, Gudrun Pflüger tells an absorbing story of the transformative and healing power of nature, motherhood and one woman’s goal to save the wolves she admires and bring her own threatened body and mind back to health.
The Homeward Wolf
Kevin Van Tighem’s first RMB Manifesto explores the history of wolf eradication in western North America and the species’ recent return to the places where humans live and play. Rich with personal anecdotes and the stories of individual wolves whose fates reflect the complexity of our relationship with these animals, The Homeward Wolf neither romanticizes nor demonizes this wide-ranging carnivore with whom we once again share our Western spaces. Instead, it argues that wolves are coming back to stay, that conflicts will continue to arise and that we will need to find new ways to manage our relationship with this formidable predator in our ever-changing world.
The Grizzly Manifesto: In Defence of the Great Bear
by Jeff Gailus
Despite their relatively successful recovery in Yellowstone National Park, the bears’ decline continues largely unchecked. And the front line in this centuries-old battle for survival has shifted to western Alberta and southern BC, where outdated mythologies, rapacious industry and disingenuous governments continue to push the Great Bear into the mountains and toward a future that may not have room for them at all.
Living in the Shed: Alberta’s North Saskatchewan River Watershed
A glimpse of land use over time in the 12 subwatersheds of the North Saskatchewan River watershed in Alberta. How we used the land in the past has created both challenges and opportunities for us today.
Wild Roses Are Worth It: Reimagining the Alberta Advantage
The rich imagery in these writings is drawn from the author’s intimate relationship with the streams, forests, grasslands, and mountains of the Canadian West. There may be no sacred cows in Van Tighem’s prose, but even the most unblinkingly critical of his writings resonate with a love of place and an abiding respect for the people whose lives he shares. He reminds us that Alberta’s stories were always meant to be about much more than oil. At a time when social, economic, and environmental changes confront and confound what is still one of Canada’s greatest provinces, we need better ways of remembering our past, knowing our present, and imagining our future. That’s what this inspiring body of work offers — just in time for tomorrow.
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night’s work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.
The Marrow Thieves
In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America’s Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the “recruiters” who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing “factories.”
Don’t Waste Your Time- the Canadian Rockies: The Opinionated Hiking Guide
by Kathy Copeland, Craig Copeland
Now you can be certain you’re choosing a rewarding hike for your weekend or vacation. This uniquely helpful, visually captivating guidebook covers Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, Yoho and Waterton Lakes national parks, plus Mt. Robson and Mt. Assiniboine provincial parks. It rates each trail Premier, Outstanding, Worthwhile, or Don’t Do, explains why, and provides comprehensive route descriptions. 138 dayhikes and backpack trips, each with a map.
Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest
by Trina Moyles
A page-turning memoir about a young woman’s grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north.
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it. This is the remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality–not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own.
Taking a Break from Saving the World: A Conservation Activist’s Journey from Burnout to Balance
Just as with teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, paramedics, steelworkers, students, and airline pilots, burnout is a growing concern in many social-change circles. Taking a Break from Saving the World takes a look at the impacts of eco-anxiety, over-work, and the associated stress surrounding the present and future state of the environment and offers practical and insightful suggestions on how to deal with it.
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women
by Elena Favilli, Francesca Cavallo
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is a children’s book packed with 100 bedtime stories about the life of 100 extraordinary women from the past and the present, illustrated by 60 female artists from all over the world. This book inspires girls with the stories of great women, from Elizabeth I to Serena Williams.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
The Overstory
The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America
by Matt Kracht
A humorous look at 50 common North American dumb birds: For those who have a disdain for birds or bird lovers with a sense of humor, this snarky, illustrated handbook is equal parts profane, funny, and—let’s face it—true. Matt Kracht identifies all the idiots in your backyard and details exactly why they suck with humorous, yet angry, ink drawings. WithThe Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, you won’t need to wonder what all that racket is anymore!
The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.
Nature’s Allies
by Larry A. Nielsen
It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of big environmental challenges—but we need inspiration more than ever. With political leaders who deny climate change, species that are fighting for their very survival, and the planet’s last places of wilderness growing smaller and smaller, what can a single person do? In Nature’s Allies, Larry Nielsen uses the stories of conservation pioneers to show that through passion and perseverance, we can each be a positive force for change.
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