Hobbies, etc.

School keeps me busy, but I try to "improve" myself in my spare time.  I especially like to read literature classics.  For a number of years, I've been working my way through a long list of British and American literature, most of it from the 18th and 19th centuries.   I also read a lot of nonfiction and some fiction environmental/science books.   If you get a chance, here are some books along those lines that I highly recommend reading (in alphabetical order by author):

  • Michael Mayerfeld Bell's Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability
  • Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
  • Michael Brower & Warren Leon's The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices
  • William J. Burroughs' Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos
  • Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging
  • Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
  • Albert E. Cowdrey's This Land, This South: An Environmental History
  • John Cronin & Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s The Riverkeepers
  • William Cronon's Changes in the Land
  • Donald Edward Davis's Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians
  • Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
  • Kenneth S. Deffeyes's Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
  • Barbara Freese's Coal: A Human History
  • Blaine Harden's A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia
  • Jean Hegland's Into the Forest
  • Mark Hertsgaard's Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
  • Ronald Jager's The Fate of Family Farming: Variations on an American Idea
  • Virginia Scott Jenkin's The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession
  • Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer
  • Benjamin Kline's First Along the River: A Brief History of the U.S. Environmental Movement
  • Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac
  • Ben Logan's The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People
  • Gene Logsdon's Living At Nature's Pace: Farming and the American Dream and The Contrary Farmer
  • Richard Manning's Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie
  • John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Encounters with the Archdruid
  • Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind
  • Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats
  • C. Wylie Poag's Chesapeake Invader: Discovering America's Giant Meteorite Crater
  • Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma
  • Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World
  • Jennifer Price's Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America
  • Daniel Quinn's Ishmael
  • Mark Reisner's Cadillac Desert
  • Adam Rome's The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism
  • Stephen L. Sass's The Substance of Civilization: Materials and Human History from the Stone Age to the Age of Silicon
  • Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark
  • Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation
  • Ten Steinberg's Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History
  • Sandra Steingraber's Living Downstream
  • Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s and Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West
  • Ann Vileisis's Kitchen Literacy : How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back
  • Ernest Zebrowski, Jr.'s Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters

    • Besides reading, I enjoy gardening, whole wheat bread-making, yoga, and jogging.  Cliff and I finally purchased a farm in the summer of 2003 complete with an old farmhouse, a few acres of open land, about 55 acres of forested mountainside, and two beautiful streams. I enjoy puttering around the place and watching the bluebirds and phoebes that have taken up residence around our house. Cliff fenced off a huge garden area from the deer and put in a 1.3-acre vineyard with hundreds of different varieties of grapes. He has started up a business called Chateau Z Vineyard, selling grapes at the Lynchburg Community Market. He now has all the permits to operate a small farm winery as well (so small we call it a "nano-winery"!), so he will start selling wine in 2008.

    Above: A view of our farmhouse

    Above: Great glacial scenery in the Steens Mtns, Oregon

    Above: Hugging a California redwood--gotta love 'em!

    Above: Enjoying the foggy California coast

    Above: Smelling the roses at Shore Acres State Park, Oregon

    Above: Hanging out by a beautiful creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains