An Update from Your Chair: Shoals to the Shores

May 2, 2020

We are becoming more aware of the power of nature with every update on the COVID-19 crisis. Thank you to all of our members and neighbors in various professions who are working to make our lives healthier and safer each day. Also, thank you to those who are doing their best to keep our communities safe by practicing defensive strategies against the spread of this disease.

We are inspired by those individuals who are adapting to safely experiencing nature and reflecting on our needs to protect our environment. We look forward to “Enjoying” and “Exploring” in the outdoors with our comrades in the protected future.

While some enjoy the nature in their backyards and some watch livestreams of environmental films and forums, others are focusing on a time to read a good book. Here are some book suggestions from our Executive Committee members.

Bob Hastings wrote:
Tough decision to make since there are so many great environmental books, but I picked two, one from my childhood and one from adulthood:

Childhood - Thrills of a Naturalist's Quest by Raymond L. Ditmars (Curator of Mammals and Reptiles at the New York Zoological Park in early 1900's)

Adulthood - Walden by Henry David Thoreau (more of a philosophy of life rather than just environmentalism)

Roger Tanner wrote:

There are many influences which led me to treasure the earth and all its creatures great and small, but what brought them all together was reading a small volume of essays by Wendell Berry titled The Long-Legged House, and I will simply copy parts of a couple of paragraphs form one of the essay, "A Native Hill", which expresses the need to care for and nurture the environment much better than I could.

"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world--to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it.

...……...………...……...

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it.

…...……...……………...

We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."

Nancy Muse wrote:
This book had a great influence on me when I was in my early twenties. I have acted, based on ideas put forth in this book and others with related themes, to create change in my community and also on a greater scale, through environmental and political activism.

Progress as if Survival Mattered: A handbook for a conserver society. The kind of country and world a growing number of people want -- will be less populace, more decentralized, less industrial, more agrarian. Our anxiously acquisitive consumer society will give way to a more serenely thrifty conserver society, one which relies most on renewable resources and least on the irreplacables. Recycling will be taken for granted and planned obsolescence won't. Nuclear proliferation will be viewed in retrospect as a form of temporary insanity.

Joe Watts wrote:

Here's one from childhood and another as an adult.

My Side of the Mountain, a children’s book, had a remarkable impact on my life, giving me a desire to live in nature, to eat wild foods and to care for the planet. I no longer make acorn flour (it’s awful and bitter), I’ve thankfully never stolen a Peregrine Falcon chick from a nest on the side of a cliff and I never managed to live in a hollowed out old tree, but it nurtured a love of nature in my soul that continues to this day.

Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac read as an adult conjured up the landscapes of my childhood reading in new light, highlighting the diversity found in our most treasured places. “The same logic that causes big rivers always to flow past big cities causes cheap farms sometimes to be marooned by spring floods.” Love the language of Leopold.

We invite our members to share how they are enjoying nature and protecting the environment in their own unique ways!

Visit out Facebook to share your post. https://www.facebook.com/SierraClubAL/

Or email alabamasierra@gmail.com to submit a photo or an idea.

You may see your submission in our next newsletter!

Here are a few experiences from your Chair:

I have admired the new additions to my shady woodland yard with natives from Ruffner Mountain Nature Preserve’s drive-thru plant sale in Birmingham. Some of these additions include a beautiful, biodiverse selection of Sassafras, Red buckeye, Bottlebrush buckeye, Eastern red columbine, and Cardinal flower.

They still have some plants left!

https://ruffnermountain.org/nativeplantsale

On April 20th, reflecting on 10 years since the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf, adult and little one explored the difficulties of “cleaning up the oil” in this kitchen science lab. Enjoy this lab by using vegetable oil (add red dye to represent yucky toxic chemicals in the oil), add water, and whatever cleaning items you might find!