Banner photo of eagle by LDS Earth Stewardship member Ralph Johnson taken near the Susquehanna River.
BOOKS
Join other earth stewards online to discuss books with the LDS Earth Stewardship book group. We’ve read more than 30 books together and lists of these and other book ideas are found at goodreads.com. Hope you’ll join us — meetings are held bi-monthly online so it doesn’t matter where you live.
Email peter@ldsearthstewardship.org to join the book group. Below is a sample of some of the books we’ve read together in the past.
Earth Stewardship Guided by a Good Book
Joe Richardson shared Drawdown with us during our tour of Bar-T. Joe has used the ideas of this book to guide his stewardship. We enjoyed seeing some of the amazing things he has accomplished when we toured with him on July 10, 2020. This book was discussed in the LDSES book group.
Now is a good time to pick up a good book on earth stewardship and begin a journey like Joe.
You may have missed the book group discussion but don’t miss the book. As we talked of this book about the future, we also shared thoughts on ways to cope with feelings of depression and anxiety associated with understanding the challenges humans have created to a healthy, functioning, nurturing earth.
Applying the perspectives of environmental history to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members, this collection provides a scholarly introduction to the role of nature in the Church in the past. These essays explore how nature has influenced beliefs and how these beliefs inform our encounters with nature.
ABOUT THE BOOK GROUP HOST:
Shelly Parkin grew up on a potato farm in Southeastern Idaho. She has lived in Salt Lake since 1987, where she is a Registered Nurse for Intermountain Healthcare.
A vibrant history of the modern conservation movement.
Peter Ashcroft reviewed this acclaimed history from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.
The Secret Knowledge of Water
The "essence of the American desert," as the subtitle of Craig Childs's book has it, is water. A desert, by definition, lacks it, but when water does come, it comes in torrential, sometimes devastating abundance. Childs, a thirtysomething desert rat with a vast knowledge of the Southwest's remote corners, knows this fact well. "Most rain falling anywhere but the desert comes slow enough that it is swallowed by the soil without comment," he observes. "Desert rains, powerful and sporadic, tend to hit the ground, gather into floods, and are gone before the water can sink five inches into the ground."
Braiding Sweetgrass: Weaving Wisdom with Science by Robin Wall Kimmerer. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer 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.
Ladauto Si’: On Care for Our Common Home by Pope Francis reviewed by Merikay Smith Check out the condensed version of this letter to the world that is available on this website. March 6, 2021.
The Hope of Nature - George Handley. Wednesday, January 6, 2021. Discussion leader: Laurel Carroll.
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson. Wednesday, November 4, 2020. Discussion leader: Ann Gardner.
The Hour of Land - Terry Tempest Williams. Wednesday, September 2, 2020. Discussion leader: Peter Ashcroft.
Why can’t we just all get along?
David Ryser will lead us in a discussion of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. The book’s topic is timely since for almost 50 years environmental issues have become unnecessarily divisive and partisan. June 10, 2020.
David Ryser has a life-long love for science and the natural world and recently retired after 29 years as medical director of neurologic rehabilitation for the two flagship hospitals of Intermountain Healthcare.
"And [they] shall run and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint."
We often associate verse 20 of the Word of Wisdom (see Doctrine & Covenants Section 89) as a promise of the Lord’s law of health. But what if these verses about active mobility — walking and running — are as much a part of this law as avoiding tobacco and alcohol, and consuming fresh fruits, vegetables and grains?
Our increasingly auto-oriented society in the U.S. is a root cause for a growing number of public health crises — auto-related fatalities, air quality, mental illness, depression and anxiety, obesity, heart and lung diseases, and others. Author Jeff Speck wrote “Walkable City Rules: 101 steps to making better places” as a doers guide to positive changes in cities. Creating communities that are oriented toward people, compatible with walking, and with greatly expanded mobility choices takes a coordinated, sustained and holistic approach, as presented in this book. These ideas, when implemented, will have a profound benefit to the physical, mental, and spiritual health of individuals, and help heal our environment and societies.
“Walkable City Rule” will be discussed by host Søren Simonsen, a founder of LDS Earth Stewardship, and currently Executive Director of the Jordan River Commission. He is an urban designer and planner, architect, educator, community-builder and social entrepreneur.
From the Dust Jacket:
"In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here--some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth's warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being--giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world."
Our moderator poses the following questions to consider as you are reading:
What do you think of Hawken's proposals?
Are they practical? Promising?
What obstacles have prevented implementation before now?
Which are most appealing to you, personally?
My First Summer in the Sierra, by John Muir, captures the joy and reverence with which he first encountered the Range of Light. Almost 150 years later, Muir's keen and eloquent observations remind us of the beauty of the earth, and our responsibility to be wise stewards.
First published in 1949, this is a classic among nature books. Written by Aldo Leopold who was not only a wield-life ecologist, conservationist, graduate of Yale School of Forestry and professor at the University of Wisconsin but also a gifted writer. Leopold's close observations of nature (and human nature) inform and inspire. That this book was published nearly 70 years ago adds a dimension to the current reader who compares our world with that of Leopold.
I have read an additional wonderful book by Jane Goodall which covers this same topic (and more), Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, 2013. You’ll never feel the same about plants and specifically trees and their interrelationships after learning about the ways trees communicate. — Merikay
Florence Williams spoke to the LDS Earth Stewardship group and others on Dec. 7, 2017. This was the inaugural book for the LDSES book group.
Suggested reading from ESE members:
Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
Book suggested by ESE member Kate Cummings.
Stewardship and the Creation
LDS Perspectives on the Environment
Edited by George B. Handley, Terry B. Ball and Steven L. Peck
This book is a collection of essays from a BYU symposium on “Our Stewardship: Perspectives on Caring for Creation” held in 2004 yet still very current. The following comes from the book's introduction:
These essays demonstrate that [LDS]Church scriptures and teachings provide a consistent picture of human beings as stewards accountable before God for the use and care of His creations. They reaffirm and develop further what previous examinations of Latter-day Saint theology and history have repeatedly demonstrated: our religion offers a unique and important perspective on the notion of environmental stewardship and a foundation for a strong environmental ethic....
We hope it is not recklessly naive to look forward to a time when a commonly accepted sense of obligation to the well-being of the physical world and to future human generations overrides political and religious differences. It is perhaps one of the more shameful aspects of our current age that things as patently universal as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat have become partisan footballs tossed about in an effort to gain our political loyalty. Environmental stewardship is not an issue that has to be a battle between liberals and conservatives; it entails the best impulses of liberal generosity and conservative restraint. The profound contributions of various Christian ecotheologians over the past decades have provided an example of how to tap into the rich doctrines of the Bible to articulate an ethic with regard to the environment and without regard to partisan infighting. These authors have taught that environmental stewardship is neither something we can afford to compartmentalize in our lives nor something we should allow to become politicized.”
Book recommended by Chris Mathews, ESE member. This book is available for free online https://rsc.byu.edu/%5Bfield_status-raw%5D/stewardship-and-creation-lds-perspectives-environment
The forest Unseen: A Year's Watch In Nature
David George Haskill
Biologist David Haskell uses a one-square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature’s path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life. Each of this book’s short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands—sometimes millions—of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home.
Book suggested by Kate Cummings.
Bringing Nature Home: How Native plants sustain wildlife in our gardens
Douglas W. Tallamy
As development and subsequent habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. But there is an important and simple step toward reversing this alarming trend: Everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity.
I’ve heard Dr. Tallamy speak several times and read his books. If you wonder why I spend so much time creating habitat through gardening and encouraging others to do the same—you’ll find the answer in these books
The Living Landscape, published in 2014, has more color photographs and specific garden design ideas while Bringing Nature Home emphasizes the scope of the problem of habitat loss and how we can create wildlife preserves through our home gardens. Even a small garden can be a place of refuge.
Books suggested by Merikay Smith.