Broken Forests Book Club

During our Endangered Boreal Symposium Series and Tour in 2022, we shared with all our participants, mentors and guides our favourite books that have helped us to appreciate and understand our connections to the natural world and the spirits that exist within natural spaces. On this page please find the Living List of great books that seek to understand our human connections to the forests and the ways in which authors/researchers are seeking ways in which to “foster wildness” all over the Earth.

BOOK LIST

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

 

 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by American professor Robin Wall Kimmerer and published by Milkweed.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she 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. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

 

 

Landscape and Memory is A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year in 1995.  In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art. Published by Vintage Books.

 

 

 

The Great Cosmic Mother, Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by the wonderful Artist, Monica Sjoo and Poetess, Barbara Mor is a truly “life-changing” text! The Authors research pre-patriarchal Matri-focal cultures that existed for thousands of years all over the world. These communities lived with and for the forests rather than from them. The book proves that contemporary Indigenous cultures are directly descended from these pre-HIStoric communities. It also details how patriarchal religions and cultures systematically and ruthlessly eradicated these so-called Goddess Cultures in order to gain and assert their power. Instead of cocusing global human attention upon possession and money, these Matri-focal communities aimed at kinship and sharing.