I loved learning that coffee played an instrumental role in the Enlightenment. All those men switching from beer to coffee! No wonder they had a lot to talk about. Nowadays, the coffee trade is staggering and fraught with political and environmental issues. Many conscientious coffee drinkers seek out Fair Trade and Shade-Grown coffee, but, according…
Read MoreThe book that has been waiting for me in the wings – ecologists and philosophers could have told me – is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than Human World. It’s been a classic of the environmental movement for over twenty years but is new to me. Abrams speaks…
Read MoreI recently had the pleasure of interviewing Doug Tallamy for the forthcoming In the Weeds podcast (stay tuned!). His book, Bringing Nature Home, packs a powerful message – that to help insure the survival of the many species on our planet – and, yes, that includes us – we need to rethink our way of…
Read MoreI love the Christmas tree, its unmistakable smell, the kindled magic it brings to the dark days of winter. And yet, this year, I faced a moral quandary: having just written about trees as persons, could I justify bringing a cut tree into my home? To answer this question, I decided to research the history…
Read More