Get Access The Colors Of Nature: Culture, Identity, And The Natural World Drafted By Alison Hawthorne Deming Offered As Digital Copy

many excellent, evocative, and thoughtprovoking essays, I would love a second anthology with new ones, An interesting collection with a diverse range of viewpoints, The introduction andessays in The Colors of Nature movingly address the question, "What is the earth to people of color" Exploring history, displacement, return, and relationship to place, these writers show that the ways Americans have impacted nature are inseparable from racism and inequities in economic and political power.
Full review to come soon,
Colors of Nature is an anthology ofdiverse authors on the environment,
Divided into four sections ofessays each Return, Witness, Encounter and Praise here is the teaser from the back of the dust jacket:

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in today's world is reflected in our richly various storiesstories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery.
For centuries, this richness has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature,

Including work from more than thirty contributors of widely diverse backgrounds, this collection works against the grain of this traditional blind spot by exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the last value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future.


Bracing, provocative, and profoundly illuminating, The Colors of Nature provides an antidote to the despair so often accompanying the intersection of cultural diversity and ecological awareness.

Some of these essays were excellent, Unfortunately, there were some essays not as good as others, or that made the collection feel overly repetitive in its theme, and that brought my rating down, The Colors of Nature is an excellent collection of essays on "Culture, Identity and the Natural World"its subtitle, Intentionally seeking out multicultural writers from diverse backgrounds, this book explores a wide range of modern perspectives on nature in the United States with nods to other countries and cultures as to be expected from people with deep roots outside the USA.


As other reviewers have noted, not every essay will captivate every reader, but I've been pleased at how few haven't had something of importance to me, and I suspect those which didn't resonate with me may well be of interest to others.
I also have to admit one essay, Jennifer Oladipo's "Porphyrin Rings" didn't do much for me at all until, at the very end, I realized she was echoing conclusions I was arriving at myself regarding the nature of "native" and "invasive" plants.
She writes, "We know the the truth about adjusting our ways to accept all peoples just as well as we know that, no matter how much we fear spreading clumps of winter creeper, we can't yank them out without damaging part of the world around it.
I will still remove foreign plants that overwhelm endangered local species, but I will think much more about the meaning of the difference, and my role in creating and maintaining boundaries.


Enrique Salmon's "Sharing Breath: Some Links Between Land, Plants, and People" that I've ordered a copy of his book "Eating the Landscape" and am picking up a copy of "Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science" at the library today.


This is a good book, Having come to the conclusion that books are a contact sport, I've dogeared many pages and highlighted many passages, One I particularly want to carry with me is, "Before the European invasion, there was no wilderness in North America there was only the fertile continent, where people lived in a hardlearned balance with the natural world.
" Lewis Owens, Burning the Shelter"

Fresh from thinking of wilderness as a construct of the unaware and of displaced plants functioning as a lesson about replaced peoples, and seeing myself as a vagabond in a land where people once had roots that went thousands of years deep, I have much to think about, and am glad.
Like any anthology, a mixed bag: some great essays, some impenetrable ones, The great ones, though, are excellent: thoughtprovoking, educational, and enjoyable, Even the lessgreat ones taught me and may make me a more considerate person,

The most discouraging line of the book was in the introduction: “The political temper in the United States, as this collection goes to press, is one of anger, fear, and hatemongering” and this was.
Oh, for those innocent days! The essays didnt feel dated, though: in some cases, things have improved since then in others, not so much, but the authors optimism carries through and has left me feeling, not exactly hopeful, but at least strengthened.
I felt like this was a beautiful and thoughtprovoking collection of essays that challenged my thinking about the world around me and my place in it, While I connected more with certain selections than others, I think that this is an important book, I will definitely revisit and chew on some of the ideas integrated throughout this read!

Specific ideas that I'd like to consider further:
the language used to identify things in the world around us In History by Jamaica Kincaid
the language used to identify our place in the world Learning the Grammar of Animacy by Robin Wall Kimmerer
labor and reciprocity vs abundance This Weight of Small Bodies by Kimberly M.
Blaeser
"pure" wilderness Burning the Shelter by Louis Owens
decolonizing the mind Becoming Metis by Melissa Nelson This is one of the most beautiful essay collections Ive ever read.
This collection of short essays is full of insight concerning diverse cultures and their interactions with nature, It was nice to read nature writing which was not from the point of view of a privileged white male, Collection of short stories: some were completely boring to trudge through others were beautiful, This is a collection of essays not short stories as another reviewer stated that offers a variety of perspectives regarding interactions with the environment, This collection is essentially a response to the problem of the whitewashed conversation of environmentalism, ecology, and appreciation of nature, Here, we see "environment" redefined as we are asked consider some challenging questions about environmentalism: What does race and poverty have to do with the destruction of our environment What if "environment" isn't synonymous with "nature" What if it also includes urban settings Does our knowledge of history and culture affect our relationship with the land Does our lack of national culture in the U.
S. contribute to our waste of natural resources Can we learn from our history and the way the indigenous peoples lived

It's a provocative and moving collection of essays.
I've assigned it to composition students to read, and they find it accessible and more interesting than some of the standard discourse about "going green, " I highly recommend. A collection of short essays mostly focused on environmental racism, Interesting and insightful. Poet and writer Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in, She earned an MFA from Vermont College and worked on public and womens health issues for many years, A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming is native to New England, but has studied and taught in many other regions as an instructor and guest lecturer, Her books of poetry include Science and Other Poems, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Praising the volume, judge Gerald Stern wrote: “I greatly admire Alison Demings lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning.
I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowled Poet and writer Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in, She earned an MFA from Vermont College and worked on public and womens health issues for many years, A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming is native to New England, but has studied and taught in many other regions as an instructor and guest lecturer, Her books of poetry include Science and Other Poems, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Praising the volume, judge Gerald Stern wrote: “I greatly admire Alison Demings lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning.
I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use but I am equally takenI am takenby the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge.
” The collection, described by Deborah DeNicola in the Boston Book as “a dense, majestic, wise and ambitious book,” is listed among the Washingon Posts Favorite Books ofand the Bloomsbury s best recent poetry.
Demings other poetry collections include The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Genius Loci, and Rope, Genius Loci was praised by D, H. Tracy in Poetry: “Alison Demings title means spirit of place, but be warned, Deming doesnt belong, or want to belong, to a single place long enough to find its genius, and so she functions like a naturalist of naturalism, classifying the spirits of place as

she encounters them.
”In addition to numerous journal and anthology publications, Deming has published works of nonfiction, including Temporary Homelands, a collection of essays, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred into the Real.
She also edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology, and co edited, with Lauret E, Savoy, The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural Worldsecond edition, Deming is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
She has received the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Gertrude B, Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America, She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson, sitelink.