According to Patrick Stadille, spider specialist, humorist and science teacher at Carmel Middle School, Orb spiders are docile and make excellent outdoor pets! In his little book, Spiders in Your Neighborhood, you can learn much more about many kinds of spiders. He was, at one time, afraid of spiders but upon learning about them, he know allows the friendly ones to crawl on his arm...he likes to feel the silken dragline emanating from the spider! His book that he first published himself is now being published by Heyday Books in Berkeley! You can find it at Pilgrims Way Books in Carmel.

Wendell Berry, author of many books on exploring our connection/relationship to the land and how we treat it, has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Literary Acheivement Award. One of his early books, The Unsettling of America, inspired me over thirty years ago. Here is a review from Amazon:

"The mid-20th-century environmental crisis that led to important protective legislation in the 1970s, is, to poet/farmer Wendell Berry's mind, also a crisis of character, agriculture, and culture. Because Americans are divorced from the land, they mistreat it; because they are divorced from each other, they mistreat those around them. Berry, writing in a prophetic mode, argues that if Americans are to heal the environmental wounds their land has suffered, they will also need to create more meaningful work, sustain happier and healthier lives, and return to what conservatives call "family values." The Unsettling of America is a quarter century old* now, but most of its arguments remain current."

On the Passion for Place Resource Page you can find the link to a conversation Wendell Berry had with Diane Rehm about a year ago.

*The Unsettling of America was published in 1977.

The overarching message of Passion for Place is that it is a "bioregional book with a global vision." Listening to Tony Juniper, author of What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? on the Diane Rehm Show, led me to go to his website where I learned about the initiative One Planet Living which is based on bioregional thinking and acting. Click here to learn more about the practicalities of bioregional living and projects happening around the world. Maybe you, too, can initiate something similar in your own bioregion.   

Click here to read the review

Boom is published by the University California Press

Here is a description of the print journal:

  "Thoughtful, provocative, and playful, Boom: A Journal of California aims to create a lively conversation about the vital social, cultural, and political issues of our times, in California and the world beyond.

Boom is edited by Jon Christensen, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Pritzker Fellow in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Department of History at UCLA, and our editorial team at UCLA, beginning with the Fall 2013 issue.

Boom includes a wide range of photography, art, and writing, from scholarly articles to journalism, personal essays, interviews, and short informal pieces.