"OUR EARTH" Book Discussion Club

Come, share your ideas and learn more about environmental topics in this space for thoughtful exchange, around fiction and non-fiction books.

Starting from a common base to have real discussions about the environment, this book discussion club is a great way to deepen ideas, have respectful debates while listening to the points of view of others and broaden our understanding and vision on this important topic. Together, we may discover new forms of commitment and imagine new sustainable and desirable horizons.

This month's selection is Fen, bog & swamp: a short history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis, by Annie Proulx. "From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx - whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth - comes an urgent and riveting history of wetlands, their ecological role and how the loss of them threatens the planet. Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth's most desirable and dependable resources, and in four illuminating parts Proulx documents the emergence of their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit and the consequent release of their stored carbon. Wide-ranging and idiosyncratic, Proulx's explanation of wetlands takes readers to the fens of sixteenth-century England, Canada's Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia's Great Vasyugan Mire and America's Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and introduces the nineteenth-century explorers who launched the ravaging of the Amazon rainforest. Proulx was born in the 1930s, a time, as she says, when 'in the ever-continuing name of progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife.' Fen, Bog & Swamp is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation from a writer whose passionate devotion to observing and preserving the environment is on glorious display." -- Provided by publisher.

A limited number of copies will be available at the Check Out Desk, or you can borrow a digital copy from our online collection here.

Questions about this program? Contact the branch at 240-777-0970.

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Accommodation Requests

People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing should request English-language captioning or sign-language interpretation at least five days before the library-sponsored program they plan to attend. Contact the Assistant Facilities and Accessibility Program Manager at 240-777-0002 with all other accommodation requests.

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