The Natural History Society Book Club will meet on Monday, April 23, 3:30-5:00 at the “Pink House” next to the Port Townsend Library.  We will discuss The Last Wild Edge by Susan Zwinger.

Naturalist and author Susan Zwinger travels the northwestern edge of North America, from the Arctic Circle to the Olympic rain forest.  She travels by pickup, by day hiking, by watercraft (sailboat, Zodiac, kayak), and backpacking.  Her near poetic writing describes aspects of unique wild landscapes, including tundra, glaciers, bogs, fjords.    She invites her readers “to slow down, to kneel down, to gaze long,” to examine the ecology of small organisms (lichens, liverworts, fungal mycelia) as well as  the big animals (bears, wolves, eagles) and plants (cedars, hemlocks). She observes the effects of clearcutting on ancient forests and other intrusions by human civilization into this remote edge.

In March the Natural History Society Book Club will discuss Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods by David Alt.  We will meet at the Pink House, next to the Port Townsend Carnegie Library, on Monday, March 26, from 3:30-5:00.

Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods tells the tale of a huge Ice Age lake that drained suddenly, and repeatedly. In the 1920s geologist J. Harlen Bretz came to the conclusion that the dry scablands of eastern Washington were sculpted by water.  The flood waters from the broken ice dam raced across western Montana, the Idaho panhandle, eastern Washington, down the Columbia River Gorge, out to the Pacific Ocean.

The book is also the story of geologists grappling with scientific controversy, in which personalities, pride, and prejudice conflict with scientific evidence.

On Monday, February 26, 2018 the Natural History Society Book Club will discuss  The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. We will meet at the Pink House, next to the Port Townsend Carnegie Library, from 3:30-5:00.

Author Elizabeth Kolbert describes the currently occurring mass extinction, the sixth in the history of the world. The species going extinct is human beings, who Kolbert describes as having altered life on Earth as no other organism has before. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

Jefferson Land Trust Natural History Society book club will discuss One Square Inch of Silence by Gordon Hempton on Monday, January 22, 2018.  We will meet at the Pink House next to the Port Townsend Carnegie Library from 3:30-5:00.

Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton warns us that natural silence is the fastest-disappearing resource in the U.S.  His book recounts his road trip across the country in a 1964 VW bus, recording and measuring natural sounds from one side of the country to the other.    He talks with people he meets along the way about the role of quiet in their lives.  His destination is Washington, D.C. where he meets with federal officials to talk about the need for natural silence preservation.

The “one square inch of silence” is an actual place, located in one of America’s last naturally quiet places, in the Hoh River area of Olympic National Park.

The Jefferson Land Trust Natural History Society book club will meet on Monday, December 4, 2017 — a combined meeting for the months of November and December.  We will meet at the Pink House, next to the Carnegie Library in Port Townsend, from 3:30-5:00.

The book selection for the last meeting of 2017 is Shadows of Our Ancestors: Readings in the History of Klallam-White Relations, edited by Jerry Gorsline.

This book is a collection of readings on the diverse experiences of the S’Klallam tribe in their interactions with Europeans on the Olympic Peninsula. It goes into detail about their way of life before European contact, the first known European sighting of the S’Klallams, the Treaty of 1855, and other later interactions between the Europeans who settled in the area the S’Klallams had inhabited for generations. The readings are drawn from oral testimony, letters, journals and the research of anthropologists and historians.