April 22 is Earth Day. Here are some great books about the environment by Canadian authors to commit to reading.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, where two things are ever-present on people’s minds: how bad the wildfires will be this summer and when the next big earthquake will hit. Although Aaron Williams (class of 2017) wrote Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017) as a memoir of one summer (of many) on a firefighting crew in the dense forests of British Columbia, it wouldn’t be possible to write such a memoir without touching on the impacts of a warming planet on creating the conditions that are making wildfires worse every year (2023 was Canada’s worst season on record). From hectares of dry brush where forests were clearcut to fire seasons that begin earlier and end later each year, Chasing Smoke not only describes a wildfire fighter’s lifestyle but a problem that must be addressed if we don’t wish to see our planet go up in flames.
One might not think climate change influences earthquakes, and that’s not where Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) focuses his attention in On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Goose Lane Editions, 2021). But science acknowledges that as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires increase in frequency and severity, so too does global warming contribute to the frequency and severity of earthquakes. “As a result of the man-made global warming, the melting of land ice, mainly in Antarctica and Greenland, occurs in an accelerating process and sea levels are rising worldwide” as are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. “Both phenomena also have an impact on earthquake risk since they lead to a small but notable increase in pressure on tectonic faults in the subsurface due to hydrostatic load….” And “sea-level fluctuations of just a few decimetres are enough to trigger earthquakes.” (https://www.gfz.de/en/press/news/details/mehr-erdbeben-durch-menschengemachten-klimawandel) Reading Craigie’s deeply researched book provides frightening insight into what can happen when the next Big One hits.
In Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) Andrew Reeves (class of 2016), an award-winning environmental journalist, tackles the eponymous environmental crisis head on. When I began reading Overrun, I’d never heard of Asian crap, much less the crisis they’ve caused. But as I read Reeves’ entertaining account of how, with all good intentions, this voracious and prolific fish was introduced to control invasive water weeds in aquaculture farms in the southern US, I became increasingly aware of just how dangerous it can be to import any species of life to any part of the world where it lacks natural predators. From a few fish in the 1950s, several species of Asian carp have taken over river systems from the mouth of the Mississippi River watershed north to where they’re a handful of miles now threatening the ecology of the entire Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system. This is what happens when humans, with all the best intentions, believe they can improve on billions of years of evolution and try to take nature into their own hands.
Of the books I’ve reviewed to date, these three are the ones I’d recommend most highly as Earth Day reading. But they’re not the only ones to touch on environmental themes, even though the environment is not the main thrust of the book. I also highly recommend Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) by Virginia Heffernan, which advocates for a different approach to resource extraction, one that is more environmentally safe and concerned with the welfare of Indigenous Peoples. The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW, 2018) by Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) focuses predominantly on community sharing of the harvest of fruit trees within any city, but in so doing it also speaks to feed the human population by stopping our environmentally stupid wasting of nature’s bounty just because it sits on privately owned land.
While Jenn Thornhill Verma’s (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) is a memoir of a family’s lost way of life, one that had endured for generations in many families, it’s also a tale of the consequences of overfishing, not only to the environment but to those who depend on the sea for their living. And for those of us currently living in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a cautionary tale about the way deal with dwindling salmon populations. And finally, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2019) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is more directly about the link between different people’s food-producing labour with a particular month, it’s also a compelling series of essays about how people can and do choose to live in harmony with the seasons. And it’s hard to imagine anything more environmentally advantageous than that.
One of the sweetest memories I have from my childhood is my mom making preserves and canning or freezing fruit. My favourite was her strawberry jam. One June day my dad would take us all out to a pick-your-own place. Our parents paid us by the basket we picked. We always ended up eating almost as much as we put in the basket.
Then we’d go home and help my mom sort through the berries: the firmest went into the freezer and the mushy ones into the jam pot, often with rhubarb picked fresh from our garden. She’d always make bread the same day so we could feast on warm strawberry jam on oven-fresh bread.
I remembered those days fondly while reading Helena Moncrieff’s The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW Press, 2018). At its heart, it’s a book about making good use of the thousands of fruit trees in any city that bear fruit, only to rot on the ground while people are going hungry. It’s about connecting property owners willing to share the fruit, volunteers willing to pick it, and neighbours in need. It’s about reducing food waste, connecting people to their environment, and rebuilding the food literacy we’ve lost over the last few generations.
The Fruitful City explores the concept of fruit gathering and sharing in many more dimensions than I imagined were connected, in the process sharing a wide range of fascinating facts. Here are some of the interesting things I learned from this book:
“Tree Climbers International [who knew?] touts the benefits of being up a tree, including exercise, accessibility and a full sensory experience with hands on bark and the sound of the wind whistling through leaves. Japan is home to a tree-climbing school and has led the way in using trees for therapy.”
Neuroscientists have used functional MRI to show how acts of giving, such as volunteering for an organization that picks fruit and donates it to those in need, activate the brain’s mesolimbic reward system—the same system engaged in feeling good from monetary gain.
The Canada Food Guide was developed during WWII to combat nutritional deficiency during rationing. But since that war ended, food illiteracy has grown steadily with the advent of convenience foods that mean we no longer need to know how to grow anything, or how to tell what’s poisonous from what’s safe.
Like Andrew Reeves’ Overrun, Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken, Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go, and Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light, among many others, The Fruitful City is thoroughly researched; I learned a lot and for me that’s one of the biggest pleasures of reading. And Moncrieff’s writing is always high quality and, well, clever. Consider this:
Bohemian waxwings are said to get drunk on winter berries. Whitehorse residents have rescued the wobbly birds from wonky flight paths and window crashes, incarcerating them in hamster-cage drunk tanks until they sober up. … In a freeze-and-thaw cycle through the fall, the fruit ferments. The little creatures either can’t tell the difference or they like the experience.
Who wouldn’t love that image? Not to mention the recipes at the end of every chapter.
Full disclosure: Helena Moncrieff is the partner of one of my dearest friends from the class of 2015, Havard Gould. But that in no way influenced how much I enjoyed this book, not least because of the memories it evoked of my mother’s many varieties of jam or the canned peaches that came from the tree in our backyard or the strawberry-rhubarb crisp that she served up warm with ice cream after a summertime dinner.
My mouth is watering with the memories.
Read my reviews of other books from the prolific class of 2016:
A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, by Mary Jane Grant. Review coming soon.
Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon.
I’ve long been intrigued by rules and expectations around gift-giving. In my family growing up, gift-giving was uncomplicated. You bought or made something you thought the recipient would like.
Your only expectation in giving it was that the recipient would appreciate the thought that went into it even if they didn’t appreciate the gift itself. And if there was something specific about the gift that didn’t work—it was the wrong size, or you already had one—it was not a personal sleight for the recipient to exchange it for something that worked.
I had no idea gifts could be used to hurt people until I was an adult. Then I met my husband’s mother. I don’t recall her giving me anything for Christmas or my birthday for the first three years I was with her son; why would she? We lived together (unmarried) and I was the wrong faith (atheist). She didn’t like me.
We got married on December 7, 1983. For Christmas that year, we flew from Vancouver, where we’d moved after my mother had a health crisis, to Kingston, where my partner had grown up and his mother still lived. It was our first Christmas with his family since he’d moved away from them two years earlier.
For Christmas, my MIL gave me a nightgown and a housecoat. The nightgown was an odd choice because she knew I slept in the nude; I ignored the obvious hint. I did need a new housecoat, and I tried to be grateful for this one (and wore it until it wore out) even though it wasn’t at all my style.
A few days later, I saw both garments on sale at Woolworth’s, the nightgown for $9.99 and the housecoat for $19.99. This would have been a day or two after my husband’s birthday, for which she gave him a plush, Pierre Cardin housecoat with the $60 price tag still pinned into the neck. (This was 1983, when $60 was worth about a billion in today’s dollars.) I’m not sure how she could have given me a more obvious message that marrying into her family did not mean that I was on the same level as anyone else in the family, a message my husband confirmed was likely exactly what she meant. After that, she only gave me gifts if my husband pushed her to. A few years later, he told her that he’d taken to sharing his annual birthday cheque from her 50/50 with me. Shortly after that, she stopped sending him anything.
One family member on my side was an absolute genius at buying gifts. She loved flea markets and kept her eyes open year-round for gifts her loved ones, especially the young children, might enjoy. She didn’t always hit the mark, but even when she was miles off base, we all valued her gifts because we knew she put a tremendous amount of thought into them. Unfortunately, she and her partner were not always as good at receiving gifts. I think they assumed that because we always showered them with praise for the gifts they offered, knowing this meant a great deal to them, they assumed that they always hit the mark. They further assumed that if others didn’t hit the mark with them, that meant they weren’t trying very hard.
They were not easy to buy for. But on one occasion, I thought I really had gotten it right with a colourful wall hanging in a particular South American folk style. The look of disappointment on their faces when they opened it said everything. At some point, they said they didn’t want to exchange gifts anymore because they couldn’t afford it, and I’m sure that was part of it. But I think it was also that we could just never figure out what they’d appreciate, and they grew tired of that.
In the past few years, I admit I’ve begun to tire of gift giving. Our annual Christmas wish list has turned into a list of hyperlinks to exactly the gift the individual wants. I’ve never been a fan of buying gifts because I like them regardless of whether I think the recipient will like them. But neither am I a fan of people being so particular about what they want that all the mystery and surprise of gift-giving is gone. I
This brings me to the latest issue, which started with one person refusing a gift. They had a reason, which I didn’t understand, but it was a cash gift, so it was easy enough to redeposit. Months later, when I thought the reason for refusing the gift had passed—my bad for not checking my assumptions—I brought back gifts from a trip that I planned to give everyone for Christmas. I needed to give one of the gifts a good deal sooner than Christmas because it would spoil.
The intended recipient took pains to refuse my gifts in a very polite text. But I still found their refusal … confusing. I ended up giving the spoilable item to someone else. As to the other item, the would-be recipient suggested that I enjoy it myself. But I would never buy something at that price point for myself. So, I’ve decided to keep it for them. It will only improve with age. If they won’t accept it before I die, I’ll leave it to them in my will.
I have to say again that the person who refused my gifts was not in any way rude in the way they refused them. Yet I’ve still spent a lot of time puzzling over my own hurt response to this. It’s been suggested to me that no one is obligated to accept a gift, which is certainly true. It’s been suggested that my difficulty in accepting this refusal is the opposite of showing love. It’s been suggested that I shouldn’t allow gift-giving to become a source of conflict.
I’ll be perfectly honest in saying I don’t know what’s right, but the whole situation led me to thinking about gift-giving in general. So I did a bit of research (emphasis on “a bit”).
Gift-giving goes back millennia and serves a variety of purposes: gifts to gods in exchange for a bountiful harvest or an edge in battle. Gifts to leaders of other clans or tribes or nations to establish friendship and trust. Gifts at weddings to bless the marriage with fecundity, at births to pray for long and happy life, at anniversaries and birthdays to express a wish for more of the same.
The most famous anthropologist to study gift-giving was Marcel Mauss, who wrote an essay, appropriately called “The Gift“, that examines the ways gift exchange builds social and economic relationships. Mauss’s student, the famous Claude Lévi-Strauss, posited that structures such as kinship systems, commerce, and gift exchange are similar across cultures. Other anthropologists and psychologists have noted that in building social and economic bonds—yes, the value of the gifts exchanged is part of it, in much the same way that the food served and clothing worn at a state event are part of it—gifts form part of the glue that binds cultures, and individuals, together.
A web page called “The Psychology of Gifting” lists a half-dozen reasons why people give gifts: to build and reinforce relationships, to show love and devotion, for symbolic communication, to receive something in return, to help others, or to find a mate. It also lists four main types of gifts: those that are symbolic of the giver and receiver, those that are symbolic of the giver’s knowledge of the receiver, those that are symbolic of the occasion, and those that contain an array of significant meanings.
There’s a reason virtually every national capital in the world has an inventory of gifts received from other nations, gifts no one will ever use because they belong to no one person and that’s not their function. Such gifts are offers of friendship and trust, offers for two nations to let down their guard and establish mutually beneficial relationships.
Similarly, personal gift-giving is an act of both reaching out and welcoming in. We let down our guard, show our vulnerability. In giving a gift, we hope the recipient will receive it in the spirit in which it’s intended. The harder we work at finding the perfect gift, the greater our anticipation of the recipient’s pleasure—and the deeper our disappointment if it’s not received with the joy we’d hoped for.
When people don’t show their appreciation for a gift, much less when they simply refuse it, it hurts. And it hurts all the more because the gift-giver’s guard is already down. Rejection of the gift feels very much like personal rejection.
Sometimes in a scenario like that, people express their hurt by getting angry and looking for explanations. What happened to what they thought was a mutually trusting and caring relationship? And that hurts even more.
What’s especially interesting to me about this situation is that I, as the person whose gift has been refused, am considered the one who’s at fault. Why am I making something out of nothing? Who am I to make the other person feel bad? If only I would have accepted the rejection without saying anything, everything would have been all right. There’s no responsibility on the person who refused the gift to recognize how that might have felt to me. There’s only a responsibility on me to accept the rejection graciously.
I still believe gift exchange, whether it’s interpersonal or international, is valuable.
It left me wondering, briefly, if gift-giving is worth it, if letting down one’s guard is worth it.
I still think it is. Although I’m still feeling hurt about the current situation, which has ballooned out of all proportion at a time of year when, in my culture, we’re supposed to be appreciating one another, I still believe gift exchange, whether it’s interpersonal or international, is valuable. Just as I think, and history demonstrates, that gift exchange serves many valuable purposes, talking through misunderstandings in gift exchange provide an equally valuable opportunity to communicate about our differences and similarities and come to new understandings.
But to do that, both parties need to agree to set aside hard feelings and listen to those they’ve hurt. That’s never easy. But another thing I’ve always believed is that the harder things are to do, the more worthwhile they’re likely to be. So I’ll wait until the other party is ready to talk, and then I’ll listen and hope they’ll do the same.
