Carl Safina is in some ways a modern Rachel Carson, an ecologist who writes excellent stuff about ecology. The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World is his latest work. I saw him recently at the Gustavus Nobel conference where he gave this talk (the actual talk starts at about 9:00, following an epic-length introduction which I’m sure is very nice but you may want to skip):

He’s a great writer and a great speaker. The book is about nature, ecology, the world, etc. under current conditions of environmental threat including climate change. In the area of natural history writing, is may be the best book to come out this year. Also, the Kindle (or other eBook) edition of this book should be quite satisfying because it has only a few illustrations (including a couple of maps) but they are all line drawings and should do fine in that format.

You know that we’ve recently spoken of chickens on this blog (as we sometimes do). Here I’ll simply note that Carl, as a writer, has this interesting quirk … during those times when he is not writing but is thinking about writing, he goes to his back yard and stares at the chickens for a while.

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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