Since the online publication Crosscut apprehensively announced they were switching to a non-profit something has changed for the better: Their site is more frequently updated, with an abundance of top-notch environmental stories. One item that caught our eye: A list of book suggestions from 2008 on the environment, featuring some of DTE’s favorite authors and topics, chosen by Christian Martin.

There’s just too many good ones to pick. Nature's Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy, and the 600-page monster The Encylopedia or Earth: A Complete Visual Guide are impressive.

 

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, edited by Bill McKibben with a foreword by Al Gore. The always dependable McKibben has compiled a remarkable list of authors for this unique collection. Some are celebrated environmentalists---Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Robinson Jeffers, Barbara Kingsolver---and some less so. We’re fascinated to read what John Steinbeck, Philip K. Dick , Robert Crumb, Alice Walker and many more brilliant and unexpected choices have to say.

But we’re stoked about these two selections.

The Selected Letters of Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, edited by Bill Morgan. The Beats definitely were a formative experience for DTE, an outlandish rite of passage. So it would be fun to go back and read the correspondence of these two influential poets. The journey starts around “Howl” at the Gallery Six reading, and spans four decades as these friends inspiringly correspond on philosophy, hiking, and travels. In other words… the meaning.

Martin has his own thoughts on what this collection says: “In a time when inter-personal communication has devolved into texting, Twitters and emoticons, reading the well-crafted, thoughtful letters of Stegner, Snyder, and Ginsberg feels like a bulwark against transitory chattiness and flibbertigibbets.”

And while we had to look up flibbertigibbets, though not on a cell phone, we say amen to that brother.

 

 

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