Eco Book Group

Through a blend of books on topics such as Ecology and Sustainability, Nature to Fiction, we want to explore the current Climate Change crisis, and what we can do about it.

So, we welcome you to our Eco Book Group, led by Alexander, whose aim is "to provide a space for people to approach challenging topics in a welcoming environment." Join us and spend an evening talking about books over a glass of wine and nibbles.

The £5 you pay for your entry acts as a book voucher redeemable against next month's book.

This month's book is Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

This month we will be exploring indigenous American knowledge and experiences through the fabulously popular and melodic writing of Kimmerer. Trained in both scientific enquiry and spiritualist empathy, she offers us a unique perspective on the world, one which we sorely need to learn from, in this humble bookseller's opinion.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.