If I’m honest, when I hear the word “squid,” I don’t think of their remarkable predatory skills.
I don’t think of their millennia-old significance in mythologies from around the world.
I think of deep fried calamari and chips.
Squid
Natural History
The Sea Trilogy
While many may likely most readily recognize Rachel Carson as the author of “Silent Spring,” the 1962 environmental science book that successfully reached a wide reading audience and opened the eyes of millions to the risks of indiscriminate overuse of pesticides, it was as a marine biologist that she began her writing career and became a popularly read author.
A Cornucopia of Books
I slowly arose from my feasting-induced state of inertia this weekend, still a bit fuzzy-headed from a lingering high blood-to-gravy ratio, and called up Mark Avery’s blog on my laptop to see what book he had selected for his Sunday Book Review this week. Much to my surprise, and very much in keeping with the spirit of the just concluded U.S. holiday from which I was still recovering, his list of book recommendations was overflowing, not only with his own choices, but with those brought by his guest contributor Stephen Moss as well.
Lives of Weeds
The common definition of a weed is a wild plant growing in a place where humans don’t want it to be growing. The problem with this – aside from it being astonishingly arrogant of us toward the complexity of the natural world – is that it is also short-sighted, in that there may well be, and very likely is, more to the plant in question growing where it is growing than we can readily perceive and understand.