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Volume 9, Issue 1 | January 2022
New Landscapes exhibit by Juliet Shen
In the Miller Library January 4-29
Winter in My Veins by Juliet Shen
We are pleased to welcome Juliet Shen to the library's public exhibit space this month with her New Landscapes. She grew up in New York City and has lived in Seattle since 1983.

After a 35-year career in graphic design, Juliet resumed drawing and painting, her original passion. She owes her reconnection with fine art to acceptance and encouragement from supportive artists of the Duwamish River Artist Residency. Starting in the summer of 2012, she began making drawings in Seattle’s industrial Duwamish waterway with them, and continued by herself in the Union Bay Natural Area, a reclaimed wetland on top of an old waste dump. When inclement weather finally forced a retreat indoors to the studio, she used her observations of the shifting Northwest landscape to create drawings combined with relief printing.

Juliet has experimented with compositions that pay homage to the Chinese landscape tradition, but with a contemporary approach. She has made paintings reflecting environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest, such as the restoration of the Elwha River following dam removals and the daylighting of urban streams in Seattle. She paints wetlands, wild rivers and tidal currents in a semi-abstract style that relies on fine brushwork.

Of this series, she says, "I am inspired by the beauty and contradiction coexisting in our local ecozones. I see landscapes as mirrors of human conduct."
Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food
By Lenore Newman
Reviewed by Tracy Mehlin
book cover
When I first heard the phrase “food security” I thought of barriers due to poverty or living in inner city food deserts without grocery stores. After a particularly wet November one year when floods closed the I-5 freeway for a few days I heard the concept also applied to the danger of our region being cut off from the food supply because trucks bearing produce from the south couldn’t get through. Lenore Newman is director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. Her book Lost Feast introduces another aspect of food security — the plants and animals people consume going extinct. Newman reports humanity has lost over 90% of named vegetable cultivars, and 87% of pear cultivars: “Think of a great library of flavors. For the last century we have been burning all of the books.”

In America, the long-extinct passenger pigeon once flew in flocks so numerous that the sky could be obscured for days at a time. The birds were a symbol of the boundless abundance the new world represented and a reliable food source for Native people and for the waves of poor immigrants that poured in from abroad. But by the second half of the nineteenth century the flocks had grown so scarce that the bird was reserved for the very wealthy at fancy New York restaurants, such as Delmonico’s.

Each chapter starts and ends with an extinction dinner prepared by a friend who has a talent for cooking and a fondness for animals succeeding in human environments, like seagulls and rats. In the chapter that covers cultivated plants such as apples and pears they decide to prepare the ancient Roman dish “pears patina,” which included grated bosc pears, cumin, pepper, and honey baked with eggs. The author insisted her friend not include “garum” a fermented liquid fish ingredient the Romans would have added for some tasty funk or as Newman described it, “an essence of  low tide.”

In Lost Feast we visit Hawaii, Kazakhstan, British Columbia, Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand and many more regions of the world to explore how plants and animals evolved over millennia to the cuisines we know today.

Most of us know by now that honeybees and myriad other pollinating insects are essential for most all of our favorite fruits and vegetables. Newman details the history of the human-honeybee intertwined relationship and documents why the insects are so crucial for food production. Bees are under threat from pesticides, parasites and habitat loss — if the bees disappear so will affordable fruit.

Lenore Newman has a passion for regional cuisine, love of food and an academic’s dedication to thorough research. The historic details she uncovers are never tedious or dry and the reader can trust her as an authority in food history. Her writing style is witty but also serious, as she draws the reader in with personal stories of her research journey followed with deep background information and lamentations on how much food culture has been lost already. To counter the depressing reality of food extinction Newman leaves us with the Zen Buddhist concept of wabi-sabi: “… we should love life while balancing that love against the sense of serene sadness that is life’s inevitable passing.”
The Wild World Handbook by Andrea Debbink
Illustrated by Asia Orlando

Reviewed by Laura Blumhagen
Wild World Handbook cover The Wild World Handbook offers something special for all ages, though it's aimed at ages 8-12. Part biography, part nature guide, part workbook, it's a visually appealing book you'll want to dip into over and over.

The nine chapters each feature a particular habitat: mountains, forests, deserts, polar regions, oceans, freshwater, cities, rainforests, and grasslands. For each ecosystem there are two adventurers, scientists, or artists featured, some more familiar than others. George Washington Carver, Frederick Law Olmsted and Wangari Maathai are among the better-known people featured. The diverse group includes Robin Wall Kimmerer, Almir Narayamoga Suruí, Margaret Murie, Rue Mapp, and many others whose work may be new to readers. Each chapter features conservation success stories, field trips, and do-it-yourself projects, including stewardship ideas and gardening tips.

At a time when hope is more vital than ever, this book reminds us that anyone can do something to help conserve habitats. Check it out!
ask a librarian
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You can reach the reference staff at 206-UWPLANT (206-897-5268),
hortlib@uw.edu, or from our website, www.millerlibrary.org.
Digital resources
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