Reading List: Titles to accompany Indian Summer Festival and to spark conservations
Upstart & Crow partners with 2022’s ISF; recommends other sources of wise words
SUMMER, AT LAST. Out and about, things to do, places to go, people to meet, books to read! And festivals galore. We’ll get back to that in a minute.
Summer also is a time when a lot of communities begin to welcome the salmon home, although these days there’s no guarantee that wild salmon will fill our rivers and replenish our freezers and smokehouses. The fact is, for all that our waters glisten as brightly as ever in the summer sun, what’s happening beneath the surface is a huge cause for alarm. And raising the alarm is a new book, Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of our Favourite Fish (Henry Holt and Co.). It is a devastating account of how Canada, like so many other countries, has sold out wild salmon to industrial fish farming, basically exchanging a natural wonder for a national disgrace. If you’ve read Alexandra Morton’s Not on My Watch: How a renegade whale biologist took on governments and industry to save wild salmon (Random House) then some of this won’t be news. But it is a story that bears repeating, and Salmon Wars authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring new urgency and new perspectives to an issue that we all need to think about every time a salmon steak is on the menu or on the barbie. Coles Notes: Unless it’s from a closed-containment or land-based operation that doesn’t pollute our ocean waters, if it’s farmed it’s foul.
In a more celebratory mood (!), we’re delighted to be a partner and official bookseller of the Indian Summer Festival, which takes place (in person!) from July 7 to July 15 on our home of Granville Island. (Stay tuned for festival coverage here at Stir.)
This year’s ISF theme is Inner/Outer Climates, and there can hardly be a more succinct summary of almost all our internal/external discussions in this climate crisis, recession-looming, and now post-Roe (and potentially post-salmon roe) world.
Coming to the ISF and featured at Upstart & Crow are:
Entangled Life: How Fungi Makes Our Worlds, Changes Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Random House) is now a perennial bestseller, one of those books brimming with fascinating information that is at once utterly surprising and leaves you feeling surprised that you never knew about it in the first place. Author Merlin Sheldrake shares how these marvellous organisms not only play essential, hidden roles in human life, but also offers a new perspective on collective collaboration and survival. It’s a “Best of” and multi-award winner. If you haven’t picked it up already (“Oh, it’s on my list.”), this is your rallying cry to do so! Merlin will appear with several other artists at 5×15: The Art of the Wild on July 15.
Some thinkers are before their time, and as a result, some books are, too. Robin Maynard and Leah Betsamosake Simpson’s Rehearsals for Living (Penguin Random House Canada) is a balm and an urgent vision—a call for a different way of ordering our societies and life here on Earth. These two acclaimed, transcendent writers combine debate, dialogue, and correspondence to offer a poetic map for where we can go from here. To read each of these writers individually is a joy; to engage in their shared thinking is a gift. When one feels overwhelmed at the current state of things, this is a powerful place to begin the long, sustained journey towards a better future. Maynard and Simpson will appear in person at Imaginarium: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, hosted by Jarrett Martineau and Sirish Rao, on July 9.
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh asks… Are we deranged? How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? His work, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press) examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. It’s the articulation of a question many of us ask not only of society but of ourselves—and Ghosh’s exploration posits a way forward, out of individual moral reckoning and into collective action. Ghosh will be attending Parables for a Planet in Crisis virtually.
Other authors at the festival include bestselling thinkers Naomi Klein and Avni Doshi.
Here are a few more titles that help to feed and soothe inner climates as we consider others.
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet (Little, Brown and Company) by Leah Thomas examines the connections between environmentalism, racism, and privilege and asks us: how can we avoid making common mistakes of colonialism or gatekeeping when advocating—and practising for—a more green, just world? Thomas argues that the fight for our planet lies in tandem with the fight for civil rights—and, really, isn’t this what we’re all awakening to, slowly or quickly?
Meantime, pondering all of this will take place within 4,000 Weeks—or at least that’s the average lifespan of a person. Oliver Burkeman has written an engrossing, meaningful book of the same name (Penguin Canada), subtitled Time Management for Mortals, to counter our current obsession with “getting stuff done.” How can we best use our weeks, and how does one construct a truly meaningful life in the brief time we have? This charming work asks that… and offers us tools to find our own answers.
One such tool might be to rely upon others, or at least that’s what Will Buckingham posits in Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World (Granta)—a manifesto of welcoming strangers in our online, partisan, divided, and atomized world. The philosopher and traveller grappled with the death of his partner by throwing the door open to new people. He shares these experiences, alongside anthropology, history, and literature, to demonstrate the tangible benefits of connection on both an individual and societal scale.
Regardless of your inner conversations or the ferocity of the outer world, we hope you’ll be generous to yourselves and others in these times. Reading and sharing wise words are a good place to start.
Related Articles
