Cast your VOTE for 2025's book selections HERE!
Meetings are held on the fourth Tuesday of every month except December. Meet at 7 p.m. at the River Action office, 822 E. River Dr. Davenport, IA.
2024 Environmental Book Club Selections
January 23rd - The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality by Chris Jones
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Interested in the truth about Iowa and the Midwest's water quality? You won't get it from Iowa's agricultural and political leaders. Among midwestern Corn Belt states, Iowa contains some of the world's most productive farmland; the state frequently tops all others in harvested totals of corn and soybeans and has helped the U.S. be the world's largest producer of corn every year since at least 1961. Iowa also has a lot of animals that eat corn and soybeans. The state is first in egg and pork production and fifth in the number of feedlot cattle. Concentrating both cropland and livestock within the state has created efficiencies in production, transportation, fertilization, and accumulated wealth for a lucky few. The immensity of this production has come at a cost: soil erosion, the loss of wildlife habitat, a lack of public parks and recreation areas, foul air from animal waste, and especially degraded water. Iowa has over 70,000 miles of streams, and only 15 segments of these meet all the designated uses outlined under the Clean Water Act. The pollutants from Iowa's rivers ultimately drain to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, part of which is killed off every summer by Corn Belt pollution from farms 1,500 miles upstream. More than 20% of Iowans drink water treated for the removal of nitrate--a regulated drinking water contaminant that results from corn and livestock production--and nearly 7,000 private wells are contaminated with this pollutant.
February 27th - The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
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In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty.
March 26th - The Devil's Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance by Dan Egan
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Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it’s also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present, and future of what has been called “the oil of our time.” The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. First discovered in a seventeenth-century alchemy lab in Hamburg, it soon became a highly sought-after resource. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan harrowingly reports, our overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” in waterways from the coasts of Florida to the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes and beyond. Egan also explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide―which risks rising conflict and even war.
April 23rd - Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants by Jane Goodall
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Seeds of Hope takes us from Goodall's home in England to her home-away-from-home in Africa, deep inside the Gombe forest, where she and the chimpanzees are enchanted by the fig and plum trees they encounter. She introduces us to botanists around the world, as well as places where hope for plants can be found, such as The Millennium Seed Bank. She shows us the secret world of plants with all their mysteries and potential for healing our bodies as well as Planet Earth. Looking at the world as an adventurer, scientist, and devotee of sustainable foods and gardening--and setting forth simple goals we can all take to protect the plants around us--Goodall delivers an enlightening story of the wonders we can find in our own backyards.
May 28th - The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
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Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent. At once personal yet scientific, richly informative and beautifully written, The Genius of Birds celebrates the triumphs of these surprising and fiercely intelligent creatures.
June 25th - Of Time and Place by Sigurd Olson
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Of Time and Place is a legacy from one of the best-loved nature writers of our time. In this, his last book completed just before his death, Sigurd F. Olson guides readers through his wide-ranging memories of a lifetime dedicated to the preservation of the wilderness.
July 23rd - A Forager's Life: Reflections on Mother Nature by Mike Krebill
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Mike is one of America’s most acclaimed foragers and wild food educators, a living encyclopedia of all things wild and edible. A Forager's Life is about a life spent in nature and in the classroom – from the thousands of wild edible forays with adults and young people, to the legendary Euell Gibbons and the first Earth Day, to the rise of today’s great foraging wave, a wave that is bringing city folks and country folks together in search of that most basic of life’s pleasures: wild foods. It's about waking up to the natural world, with the nurturing help of great mentors along the way. At its heart, it's the story of a natural-born teacher who never stopped being a curious little boy, and who knows how to appeal to the curious kid in all of us. That’s what earned him multiple awards during his long career as a middle-school science teacher, environmental educator and naturalist.
August 27th - Oak: The Frame of Civilization by William Bryant Logan
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Professional arborist and award-winning nature writer William Bryant Logan deftly relates the delightful history of the reciprocal relationship between humans and oak trees since time immemorial. For centuries these supremely adaptable, generous trees have supported humankind in nearly every facet of life. From the ink of Bach’s cantatas to the first boat to reach the New World, the wagon, the barrel, and the sword, oak trees have been a constant presence in our past. Yet we’ve largely forgotten the oak’s role in civilization. With reverence, humor, and compassion, Logan awakens us to the vibrant presence of the oak throughout our history and in today’s world.
September 24th - The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
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Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."
October 22nd - Gathering Moss by Robin Kimmerer
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Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.
November 26th - Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction by David George Haskell
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We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution’s creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animal groups and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution. Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets, and shows that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, just, and beautiful. The appreciation of the beauty and brokenness of sound is therefore an important guide in today’s convulsions and crises of change and inequity.
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