doddcasting

My Top Five #Greenreads of 2011

This list is in no particular order. I also included a selection in OnEarth magazine’s best-of-the-year roundup, so technically, I’ve got six favorites. Find Top 5 Greenreads from other OnEarth contributors here, and share your own on Twitter and Tumblr with the hashtag #greenreads. (Note: As is standard for these sorts of things, I avoided picks from my own publication.)

“Who Cries for the Goose Killer?” by Robert Sullivan (New York)
I love Sullivan’s writing and the way that he consistently transports the reader to places at once nearby and familiar but also strange and alien. (Witness his books Rats and The Meadowlands, which both take place in locations I pass almost every day but could never claim to have truly visited if Sullivan’s work hadn’t taken me there.) In this piece, he follows the wildlife biologist responsible for killing geese around New York City’s airports to avoid jet/bird mid-air collisions. Like all of Sullivan’s best pieces, the story reminds us that even in the midst of America’s densest cities, nature remains a vital part of our lives — and difficult to tame.

The End of Country, by Seamus McGraw
McGraw’s story starts when a young woman with a nose ring visits his mother’s rocky hillside farm in northeastern Pennsylvania and offers her money to drill on her land. Or perhaps it starts four hundred million years earlier when that farmland was part of a vast inland sea, whose teeming lifeforms left their carcasses of carbon behind, eventually forming the natural gas-rich layer of rock known as the Marcellus shale. The two stories are irrevocably intertwined, and McGraw — in what starts as a quest to determine whether his mother should take the gas company’s offer — brings to vivid life the deal with the devil that many residents around Dimock, Pennsylvania, found themselves making in the early stages of the gas boom that is transforming their lives and communities. McGraw has a tendency to overdramatize some of his key moments, as when he imbues a Penn State professor’s calculations in his office with the tension of a Jason Bourne movie, but it is his familiarity with the people and places of northeastern Pennsylvania and his willingness to examine how the promise of easy gas money is affecting their lives (and his own) that make this book so memorable.

“Crunch,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, sub req.)
I eat a lot of apples, especially in the fall when we can get our favorite varieties from the farmers market. I’m not as head-over-heels for Honeycrisps as many market-goers seem to be (I prefer Macouns), but I was still fascinated to learn about the history of apple cultivation in America and how Honeycrisps were “created” at the University of Minnesota — earning the school more than $10 million in royalties and spawning efforts to breed a much-heralded successor, the SweeTango, which could be the next big thing in red-skinned deliciousness. (Runner-up in the revelatory-New Yorker-reporting-that-will-never-let-you-look-at-everyday-foods-the-same-way-again category: “We Have No Bananas” by Mike Peed.)

Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook
Speaking of revelatory reporting on everyday foods, Estabrook’s deeply researched book forced me to ban out-of-season, non-local tomatoes from my kitchen for fear that we might get one from Florida. Nearly all of America’s winter tomatoes are grown there, even though the state’s sandy soil shouldn’t support them and has to be pumped full of chemicals to make them grow at all, after which they’re picked while still green and tasteless, then doused with yet more chemicals to make them red (but still tasteless). Worse, the migrant workers in Florida’s tomato fields are subjected to many of those same chemicals, producing horrific birth defects and cancers. And finally, some of those unfortunate field workers are held in literal, modern-day slavery — all so that we can buy cheap, tasteless tomatoes to adorn our salads year-round. Count me out.

“How to Hatch a Dinosaur,” by Thomas Hayden (Wired)
Really, I have to explain this one? Let’s just say it wraps up a huge number of my geeky loves in a tight red bow — and is, incidentally, one of the best profiles I’ve read of renegade paleontologist Jack Horner.