Another Reading List

Sand  County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
Let's just say that it's not every day you get to read a serious contender for Most Useful and Beautiful Book Ever Written.  I'm reading it very slowly.

Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach

A Utopian novel written in 1975 based on the premise that Northern Cal, Oregon, and Washington secede from the Union in order to establish an ecologically sound, steady-state economy and society, while the rest of the US continues on with status quo.  Well-thoughout, entertaining, and insightful.  Interesting to see what smidgens of progress we've made that are forecast in this book, and where we're even more retrograde than could probably be imagined in 1975.   For instance, no mention of the internet or wireless technology at all which has become almost a necessity of life, for better or worse.  He does mention picture phones but these seem to be landline-based.  He does foresee the shift towards a biology-based science and society as carried out by the leadership of women, and from what I can see this is how it is going to happen, if it happens at all.  Also he makes a very strong point of describing how the shift to Ecotopia changes how people experience and live in their own bodies in a positive way, which is probably not something you can ever track qualitatively but makes a huge difference in quality of life, and is something I value immensely about living in Ka'u, where you can go to the post-office in your pajamas or with spiders in your hair and nobody thinks the worse of you.

A Druidry Handbook, John Michael Greer

One of the dozens of books, it seems, written by the author of the famous and excellent blog The Archdruid Report, the first part of which is an excellent quick and candid introduction to the Druidry tradition in the West, and makes a strong case for the importance of this alternative religion and philosophy, which stresses relationship to nature, personal, sensual experience, and creative ritual making.   Discovered some backstory on one of my favorite words "pantheism," which I discovered one day in the dictionary while in middle school at a time when I needed a word to help articulate what I felt to be true.  Pantheism is an invention of John Toland (1670-1722), an Irish writer involved in the Druid Revival movement of that time (and the first person to be called a freethinker!).