Life from the Stacks: Champion Trees, Creative Spaces, and a Library Full of Possibilities
Life from the Stacks is a weekly column by Joanne Wilson, Branch Coordinator at the Garberville Library. Wilson shares the wonderful world that awaits beyond the doors to your local library, within the binds of books, and as limitless as your imagination.
[Background images by Secretum Mundi, sourced from Wikimedia Commons]
“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
An old Chinese proverb says, “What is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. What is the second best time? Today.”
I have just finished reading the most fascinating book. It’s a thin little piece of nonfiction, only about 200 pages, easily read over a wintry weekend. It has the unfortunate title of The Man Who Planted Trees, with a subtitle of Lost Groves, Champion Trees and the Urgent Plan to Save the World. Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Written in 2012 by Montana author, Jim Robbins, this book is about a Michigan nurseryman, David Millarch, who became concerned about the loss of our old growth forests. I say this while looking at the forests surrounding my home, but I know these wood covered mountains around me have been logged several times. At the time this book was written around 90% of our old growth trees were gone. The logging goes on despite the fact that these trees are our best defense against climate change. These trees clean our air, our water and our soil. David Millarch came up with an excellent plan to reforest the world with champion trees. It’s a way that we in Humboldt County are particularly adept at and have been practicing for decades. He began to hunt down the old growth trees, the champion trees left in the world, the ones that had survived climate change and the explosive growth of human population. He began to clone them. How familiar are you with cloning? I’ll bet many, if not most of us, have done it in the past. Now when you get to the really old trees, like the redwoods, the success rate is small, only 4-8%. However, cloning is something we are very good at. Why not trees? The opportunities presented in this book boggles the mind. If you would like more information about this project, we have the book at the library or you can Google what became of this project by looking up the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. How does reforesting the world sound to you?
This week at the library on Wednesday night we are showing the movie, A Man Called Otto. This Tom Hanks movie is based on the Swedish best selling novel, A Man Called Ove by Frederik Bachman. If I tell you the plot, you’ll most likely say, ‘Why would I want to see that?” Trust me…you do. It’s about a man who has lost everything he cares about. He’s been forcibly retired from his job, he’s been ousted from the presidency of his Home Owner’s Association and most recently he lost his wife to cancer. He is depressed and angry at the world. He decides to commit suicide and attempts it several times in different ways. Sound like a fun evening? No, probably not, but you will love this film. Really. We’ll start the film promptly at 5:00 and free popcorn will be served. It is rated PG-13.
Friday morning from 11:00 until noon, the library will be hosting the Salmon Creek 0-5 Play Group and Friends. We’ll sing our morning song, do a bit of dancing and make a creative craft. As always, we’ll be reading a few great books.
Saturday, we’ll be working on week 2 of our Creative Space beginning block printing class. This class is for artists ages 12 and up. It begins at 10:30 and ends at noon when the library opens. Materials will be provided.
Our Art Lobby is currently showing the wonderful paintings done by Carol Henderson. These paintings are part of Ms. Henderson’s Harvest series. They will be shown in the Art Lobby through the end of January.
Meanwhile, enjoy the break in the rain and clear the webbing between your fingers and toes until the next atmospheric river returns.
The Garberville Library…not just books and it’s all free.
Joanne Wilson
Branch Coordinator
Garberville Library
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Bill Bryson Is An Entertaining Writer
The author Bill Bryson writes fascinating books, educational as well as entertaining, and I listened to most of them last winter. He explores in depth looks at many aspects of human life, history, and geography through his intense research, interviews with experts, and following tangents deep into the past. He travels the world, including the United States, and tells about what he sees, and for the reader it’s an educational, often humorous experience, and I recommend all of his books.
One is called The Body and yup, he goes through every system and organ, traces the history of anatomical discovery by scientists, doctors and self-educated laymen who often made the first and subsequent discoveries. A continuing theme, in this and his other books, is that often the true discoverer or inventor doesn’t get the recognition or credit, personal or financial, just by chance. You will cringe at the early medical techniques, at least I did, Bryson’s basic message being that you, especially women, would have been better off by not going to a doctor back in the olden days. (But hey, killing off those thousands or millions of people accidentally, out of ignorance and inexperience, lead to many discoveries and treatments which did work, so what a tradeoff, eh?)
In The Body there was an astounding process illustrated by Bryson which I’ll attempt to describe, paraphrase, as an example of how amazing our bodies are: When a baby is breastfeeding it will inject certain enzymes (or something like that) into the mother’s body through her breasts, which will then interact with the chemical makeup of her mother’s milk, and transform it before delivery, to optimize that individual baby’s health. (I should have just quoted Bryson at length but you get the idea: read or listen to the book to get the unfiltered description.)
In his book Shakespeare: The World as Stage, Bryson investigates The Bard’s work and life and comes to the conclusion that the conspiracy theories are most likely wrong, that it was Shakespeare who wrote his plays, and not someone else. (Bryson has lived in Great Britain for many decades. His book about growing up in Iowa, The Thunderbolt Kid,” is an amusing and entertaining read, and he’s also published travel books about Australia, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and exploring England, among many others.)
His book The History of Everything was the only one which included sections beyond my comprehension, as he got into the beginning of the universe, black holes, quarks, and really went deep, too deep for me at times. In One Summer: America, 1927, the chapter about Babe Ruth was pretty damn great, as well as the rest of the book.
(Our local library has many Bill Bryson books and books on CD, or they can all be ordered free of charge.)