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Books on the Environment
On World Environment Day and always, All Lit Up has this roundup of green reads, many of which highlight just how precious and essential our natural resources are in protecting against environmental degradation and the threat of climate change. Some envision a world of positive change, while others imagine dystopias where the worst has already come to pass.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 40 results
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18 Miles
$21.95WINNER, American Meteorological Society’s Louis J. Battan Authors’ Award
WINNER, 2019 Science Writers & Communicators of Canada Book Award
WINNER, 2018 Lane Anderson Award
“With wit and a humbling sense of wonder, this is a book that can be shared and appreciated by a wide audience who now religiously check their phones for daily forecasts.” — Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“This terrific, accessible, and exciting read helps us to better understand the aspects of weather and the atmosphere all around us.” —Library Journal Starred Review
We live at the bottom of an ocean of air — 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth’s atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer — 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet, within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm — at once gorgeous, terrifying, capricious, and elusive. With his keen eye for identifying and uniting seemingly unrelated events, Chris Dewdney reveals to us the invisible rivers in the sky that affect how our weather works and the structure of clouds and storms and seasons, the rollercoaster of climate. Dewdney details the history of weather forecasting and introduces us to the eccentric and determined pioneers of science and observation whose efforts gave us the understanding of weather we have today.
18 Miles is a kaleidoscopic and fact-filled journey that uncovers our obsession with the atmosphere and weather — as both evocative metaphor and physical reality. From the roaring winds of Katrina to the frozen oceans of Snowball Earth, Dewdney entertains as he gives readers a long overdue look at the very air we breathe.
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A History of the Theories of Rain
$16.95A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of “man-made” and “natural.” How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment?
Stephen Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. Instead, he probes our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. Asking what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take, A History of the Theories of Rain explores the links between climate’s “tipping points” and the borders constraining the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology.
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A Natural History of Unnatural Things
$20.00A microscopic and intense view of the sometimes invisible and ignored parts of the world we inhabit. Peering into cities and our place within them, the poet searches for meaning after the death of his father, and observes the flora and fauna, which provide beauty and nourish us. This book delights the senses and poses the question, are we contributing to, or ultimately destroying our planet?
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A Sure Connection
$19.95In A Sure Connection the author contemplates the connections that matter, and that confirm we matter–connections with others and with our real or re-imagined selves. Through portraits of faith, family, nature, mortality and ordinary life, the work affirms resilience and resolve with clear, rich language seasoned with a wry twist, ensuring an engaging read. With many pieces set in British Columbia–from the sub-boreal plateau to the coastal rainforest–A Sure Connection evokes a sense of attachment to place that is as personal as it is universal.
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All the Names Between
$20.00Poems that form an eloquent, searching contemplation of “the warp and weft of being and nonbeing.”
All the Names Between is Nova Scotia poet Julia McCarthy’s meditative and crackling-with-dark-energy third collection. From her observation of “long-horned beetles… rearranging the landscape” to an apperception of “part of me /…seeded by dust / of meteors and asteroids,” McCarthy makes palpable, in richly layered imagery and with attentiveness that unfolds stillness, the “Singing Emptiness” that informs and quickens the crow’s flight, the stones’ weight, and our own being as we move in “the defined world both elegant / and maimed.” Concerned with both the inadequacy and the necessity of word to convey world, the poems move through a shifting landscape of seasons and creatures, of the remembered dead, and of scattered stones reading the Akashic field.
Grounded in the experience of presence, where the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where “a language without a name / remembers us” and the poem is a votive act, All the Names Between reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn’t, the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered where
every elegy has an ode at its centre
every ode has an elegy around its edges.
(from “Ode with an Elegy around its Edges”)Praise for All the Names Between:
“It is Julia McCarthy’s incomparable eloquence as a poet to, as an experienced photographer might, wield darkness as an ever more powerful lens to reveal the intricate beauty of the world as she finds it. And it is with this extraordinary vision, that McCarthy ushers us into her newest collection, All the Names Between, ‘where the dead gather like trees in their white coats’ and bats hover overhead, ‘lucifugal as ashes from invisible fires.’ These are poems scintillate with vision and stunningly intimate–showing us page after page the full, and exquisite measure of ‘night’s worth.’” –Clarise Foster, Editor, Contemporary Verse 2
“Here is a book of meditations for even those immune to poetry, a poetry with no comfort zones. McCarthy takes readers to a world where the marriage between solitude and nature gives birth to memorable, haunting lines, where the mystery of poetry lies just between the words. I have no doubt readers will embrace this book as their own.” –Goran Simić, author of Immigrant Blues and From Sarajevo, with Sorrow
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Bittersweet Sands
$19.95In Bittersweet Sands, Rick Ranson recounts a twenty-four-day shift at an oilsands operation undergoing a shutdown, giving us a glimpse at a world most of us only know from the evening news. Along the way, he encounters a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband-and-wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails secretary that keeps them all in line.
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Chorus of Mushrooms
$19.95Since its publication in 1994, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms has been recognized as a true classic of Canadian literature. One of the initial entries in NeWest Press’ long-running Nunatak First Fiction Series, Hiromi Goto’s inaugural outing was recognized at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes as the Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian regions that year, as well as becoming co-winner of the Canada-Japan book award. Goto’s acclaimed feminist novel is an examination of the Japanese Canadian immigrant experience, focusing on the lives of three generations of women in modern day Alberta to better understand themes of privilege and cultural identity. This reprinting of the landmark text includes an extensive afterword by Larissa Lai and an interview with the author, talking about the impact the book has had on the Canadian literary landscape.
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Cries from the Ark
$20.00A pitch-perfect debut and a call to act in the service of Earth through radiant attention.
Humankind, at present, has breached floodgates that have only been breached before in ancient stories of angry gods, or so far back on geologic and biological timelines as to seem more past than past. Against this catastrophic backdrop (at the end of consolations, at the high-water mark), and equipped with a periscopic eye and a sublime metaphorical reach, poet Dan MacIsaac has crowded his debut vessel with sloths and gipsy-birds, mummified remains and bumbling explorers, German expressionists and Neolithic cave-painters.
MacIsaac knows that in order to render a thing in language, description itself must be open to metamorphosis and transformation; each thing must be seen alongside, overtop of, and underneath everything else that has been seen. With the predominant “I” of so many poetic debuts almost entirely absent, Cries from the Ark is catalogue and cartography of our common mortal–and moral–lot.
“These poems are fecund as black dirt, as carnal and joyous. Each piece is an owl pellet, a concentrate of bone and tuft, of bison, auk and Beothuk. Not since Eric Ormsby’s Araby have I read a book so empathic and so glossarily rich. Fair warning, MacIsaac: I’ll be stealing words from you for years.” –Sharon McCartney
“MacIsaac sings a raven’s work, sings the guts from our myths, sings our world with the breath that ‘for a century/ of centuries / only the wild grass / remembered.’ Present but acquainted with antiquity, MacIsaac’s instrument is our own breathing as we say these poems of reverence to ourselves.” –Matt Rader
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Endlings
$18.00Endlings takes us across continents and through the long expanse of aeons to give voice to the dead. In poems that are lyrical, exact, and deeply melancholic, Joanna Lilley demands audience for the final moments of animal extinction. From the zebra-horse quagga and chiding dodo, to the giant woolly mammoth and delicate Xerces Blue Butterfly, the haunting, urgent words of these “endlings” cut to the bone to expose the brutality of Nature and the devastating repercussions of human ignorance and intent, while giving hope that our humanity will help save what remains.
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Fauna
$20.95In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature?
A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her.
Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.
Fauna, Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada.
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Götterdämmerung
$20.00Götterdämmerung is Len Gasparini’s fifteenth book of poetry since the early 1970s. What distinguishes this collection from his earlier work is the long title poem: a tour de force that covers new ground in the genre of ecopoetics by launching an acerbic yet lyrical assault on the Anthropocene. Other poems explore such diverse themes as memory, art, and botany. Also included are three literary essays that evince the importance of language and imagination.
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Ice Diaries
$26.95What do we stand to lose in a world without ice?
A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent — Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth that is nobody’s country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent.
In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life. Ice Diaries is a haunting story of the relationship between beauty and terror, loss and abandonment, transformation and triumph.
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Icefields
$23.95In 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slips on the ice of the Arcturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slides into a crevasse, wedged upside down nearly sixty feet below the surface. As he fights losing consciousness, a stray beam of sunlight illuminates the ice in front of him and Byrne sees something in the blue-green radiance that will forever link him to the ancient glacier. In this moment, his life’s purpose becomes uncovering the mystery of the icefield that almost was his tomb. Along the way, he encounters similarly fixated individuals, each immersed in their own quest: the healer and storyteller Sara; the bohemian travel writer Freya Becker; the entrepreneur Trask; the poet Hal Rowan; and Elspeth, greenhouse keeper and Byrne’s lover.
First published in 1995, Wharton’s Icefields is an astonishing historical novel set in a mesmerizing literary landscape, one that is constantly being altered by the surging and retreating glacier and unpredictable weather. Here–where characters are pulled into deep chasms of ice as well as the stories and histories they tell one another–is a vivid, daring, and crisply written book that reveals the human spirit, loss, myth, and elusive truths.
This updated Landmark Edition includes an author interview with Smaro Kamboureli and an Afterword by award-winning writer Suzette Mayr.
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Iceland Is Melting and So Are You
$20.00The urgency of the climate emergency is explored in this latest collection by award-winning poet Talya Rubin. It offers recognition of, and salve for, the vast mysteries of the natural world, our human interior, and the relationship between the two.
In these poems, human and wild meet in everyday encounters: the melting of ice sheets and fathoming ecological disaster while listening to news reports on the radio; moments of childhood ice skating and unrequited love alongside geological formations and weather patterns. Underlying the collection is a mild sense of absurdity, one that mirrors our existential plight of continuing on in the face of what feels like impossibility.
Iceland Is Melting and So Are You asks us to consider what we have kept frozen and unexamined within us and—in doing so—recognize the complex grief and wonder we face in considering the end of the human epoch.
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Lake of Two Mountains
$20.00A hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory
Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
flint-dark far-off
sky on the move across the lake
slant sheets closing insky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In” -
Moving to Climate Change Hours
$18.00Ross Belot’s latest collection is a dark ode to the end of oil. From industrial accidents to frozen highways Belot charts the ends of a life that face a working man in stripped-down lyric poetry. These are poems that have seen it all and acknowledge the darkness that’s coming while still finding beauty in the arched neck of a tundra swan. Belot has a filmmaker’s sense of atmosphere and an environmentalist’s urgency and his stark lines take the reader deep into the heart of industrial man.