Alumnx books
William Ginn ’74
Valuing Nature: A Handbook for Impact Investors. Island Press, 2020.
As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, the resources needed far outstrip the capabilities of nonprofits and even governments. Yet there are seeds of hope—and much of that hope comes from the efforts of the private sector. Impact investing is rapidly becoming an essential tool, alongside philanthropy and government funding, in tackling these major problems. Valuing Nature presents a new set of nature-based investment areas to help conservationists and investors work together.
Garrett Conover ’78
Sauna Magic: Health, Happiness, Community. Maine Authors Publishing, 2019.
Sauna Magic is a lyrical and evocative celebration. Imagery and story embrace a tradition that sustains calm renewal and thoughtful quiet in a world that too often seems overly busy, and overwhelming. The introductory chapter invites readers into a remarkable realm provided by the elemental resonance of fire, stone, water, and wood, and a ritual shared widely all over the world. Subsequent chapters profile a diversity of saunas and their people. Each exploration personalizes experience and provides a dreamscape that will reward seasoned practitioners and intrigued newcomers alike. Within is an accessible, luminous love song to health, happiness, and community.
Kevin P. Timoney ’78
Hidden Scourge: Exposing the Truth about Fossil Fuel Industry Spills. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.
A six-year investigation into the impacts of fossil fuel production in western North America. Hidden Scourge takes the reader on a journey behind the firewall of disinformation to uncover scientific truths about crude oil, saline water spills, and the covert cumulative impacts of the fossil fuel industry on ecosystems and society. The book began when the author noticed a suspicious pattern in data reported by the Alberta Energy Regulator. For tens of thousands of spills, recovery volumes exactly matched the reported spill volumes. In short, the data were too good to be true. And so began a search for the scientific truth about spills.
Susan B. Inches ’79
Advocating for the Environment, How to Gather Your Power and Take Action. North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Advocating for the Environment begins with how we must learn to think differently in order to heal the planet. We must see and treat each other and the earth as if our lives depend on them. The first half of the book shows how understanding and working with people with different views is the key to moving policies forward. The second half is all about action. How to use power for good, how to work with decision makers, how to organize events, manage a coalition, communicate with the public, and work with the media are all laid out in an easy to read and reference format. A bibliography and sample press releases, public testimony, and letters to the editor fill out this complete field guide to citizen advocacy
Liz Cunningham ’82
Ocean Country. North Atlantic Books, 2015.
Ocean Country is an adventure story, a call to action, and a poetic meditation on the state of the seas. But most importantly it is the story of finding true hope in the midst of one of the greatest crises to face humankind, the rapidly degrading state of our environment. After a near-drowning accident in which she was temporarily paralyzed, Liz Cunningham crisscrosses the globe in an effort to understand the threats to our dazzling but endangered oceans. This intimate account charts her thrilling journey through unexpected encounters with conservationists, fishermen, sea nomads, and scientists in the Mediterranean, Sulawesi, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and Papua, New Guinea.
Glen Mittelhauser ’89
Wildflowers of Maine Islands. University of Maine Press, 2021.
Wildflowers of Maine Islands is an identification guide to all the wildflowers on islands along the coast of Maine from Muscongus Bay (situated in Maine’s Midcoast region) east to the Canadian border (Knox, Waldo, Hancock, and Washington counties). This portion of the Maine coast and the adjacent islands are heavily influenced by the cool marine environment that, coupled with the geomorphic characteristics of the region, has produced unique assemblages of plants that often differ significantly from those in the southwestern half of the Maine coast. Tempered by the cold Labrador Current and dotted with hundreds of islands, this easternmost portion of the continental United States fosters arctic species, threatened and endangered species, rare community types, and a diversity of habitats not found elsewhere in Maine
Lelania Avila ’92
An Abecedarian Reflection: Parenting through Childhood Cancer
This book features 26 action verbs illustrated with art and poetry to describe one mother’s journey. An Abecedarian Reflection is a collection of hand-lettered poems accompanying multimedia art pieces (pen and ink, pencil/colored pencil, pastels, watercolor, acrylics, collage). The book was inspired during the January 2020 open mic at the Northeast Harbor library. As Lelania Avila viewed art from students at Mount Desert Elementary on the walls, she envisioned 26 words, with poems scrolling beneath.
Andrea Lani ’95
Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail. Bison Books, 2022.
In Uphill Both Ways, Andrea Lani tells the story of the 500-mile hike she took through the Colorado mountains in 2016 with her husband, Curry Caputo ’95, and their three kids, and the hike she and Curry took on the same trail two decades earlier, while reflecting on the changes that have taken place on the landscape and within herself over that same period. Uphill Both Ways is at its essence a book of human ecology; the author goes into the mountains to deepen her connection with the natural world while confronting the environmental toll wrought by a century and a half of natural resource exploitation in the Rocky Mountains
Eli Nixon ’99
Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs. The Third Thing, 2021.
Eli Nixon is proposing a new/primordial holiday and everybody is invited! Through comics, puppetry, and other crafty modes, Bloodtide uses anthropomorphism to destabilize anthropocentrism. The floating holiday (to celebrate anytime) is built around reversing patterns of extraction and shifting our human-centered lens on time, nature, debt, and ancestry. It’s a holiday about interspecies enmeshment, cultivating awe, and healing sites of environmental and cultural harm. Holiday activation includes collective and individual opportunities for costume creation through cardboard transformation, staging a 450-million year parade, performing a pre-human pageant, assembling a detritivore pie, contributing to habitat restoration and reparation efforts, singing crabaoke (altered lyrics), encapsulating time, trying impossible dances, and more.
Ryan T. Higgins ’06
Thanks for Nothing. Disney-Hyperion, 2021.
Ryan T. Higgins celebrates the season of thanks in this Little Bruce book, the latest in the Mother Bruce series. It’s autumn in Soggy Hollow, and the mice have a lot to be thankful for. But Bruce the bear is not so thankful for all the thanking. This bite-sized Little Bruce book is perfect for fans of the Mother Bruce board books. In addition to the Mother Bruce series, Ryan is also the author and illustrator of Norman Didn’t Do It!, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates, We Will Rock Our Classmates, BE QUIET!, and What About Worms!?
Richard MacDonald (’06)
Little Big Year: Chasing Acadia’s Birds. The Natural History Center, 2020.
Little Big Year documents Richard MacDonald’s year-long adventure in search of the birds of Acadia National Park and his corner of Maine. With each bird found, Richard weaves a narrative filled with fun facts and stories from his many years studying the natural world, birding, and traveling from the Arctic to the Antarctic. His year is book-ended with chickadees: a black-capped chickadee on the Schoodic Christmas Bird Count and, 364 days later, a boreal chickadee near the Sunkhaze Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. He voyages out on research vessels into the Gulf of Maine to look for seabirds, hikes Acadia’s mountains to see snowy owls, takes a nighttime bicycle ride into Great Pond Mountain Wildlands to find the rare chuck-will’s-widow, and views shorebirds from the cockpit of a sea kayak. Anyone with an interest in natural history will want to read this book.
