by David Vaina
Our Santa Fe River’s Environmental Book Club, launched this past January, has selected its monthly book club selections for August through June 2023.
The club will meet in August at the Civic Media Center in Gainesville from 2-3pm on Sunday, Aug. 14 to discuss Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. The discussion will be facilitated by Iguana publisher Joe Courter.
Robinson has been writing speculative fiction for many decades now and counts Ursula K. Le Guin as one of his literary heroes (as do many of us!). His work is economic and political theory with lots of science and technical details mixed in.
Perhaps what’s unique about this book is its style (many vignettes stitched together) as well as its utopian optimism about our future as we accelerate deeper toward a world re-configured by climate change. Though it reads fairly fast, please note The Ministry is a relatively long book (500+ pages) and we hope you will spend these 90+ degree (or hotter) days in north central Florida getting an early jump on it.
Looking ahead, our monthly selections are as follows:
September: Robert Knight, Saving Florida’s Springs: A Prescription for Springs Health (Zoom meeting, date and time TBD)
October: David Ehrenfeld, Beginning Again: People & Nature in the New Millennium (Curia on the Drag, Oct. 23, 2-3pm)
November: Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Curia on the Drag, Nov. 20, 2-3pm)
December: Elvia Alvarado, Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (Curia on the Drag, Dec. 18, 2-3pm)
January: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Curia on the Drag, Jan. 29, 2-3pm)
February: Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty in the World (Curia on the Drag, Feb. 26, 2-3pm)
March: Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (Curia on the Drag, March 26, 2-3pm)
April: Helen MacDonald, H Is For Hawk (Curia on the Drag, April 30, 2-3pm)
May: Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (Curia on the Drag, May 28, 2-3pm)
June: Linda Hudson, Solar Storms: A Novel (Curia on the Drag, June 18, 2-3pm)
The Alachua County Library has many of these books in multiple formats for cardholders to borrow at no charge.
We ask you please check Our Santa Fe River’s Facebook page for any changes in the schedule due to nasty weather or COVID-19. Please contact David Vaina, the group’s organizer and Our Santa Fe River board member, via email at david.vaina@gmail.com for additional info.
Our book club is a small group of kind, thoughtful, progressive, and laid-back citizens who welcome all who share our concerns about the future for both the human and non-human worlds. Happy reading!