How are YOU Celebrating Earth Day?

Happy Earth Day!! What are you doing to commemorate and celebrate this day? Better yet, what are you doing to help nurture and appreciate this wonderful planet?

Here's a thought: how about walking or bicycling down to Broadway Books and picking up some inspirational reading material? Need some ideas? Here are some relatively new books that might inspire you to take action to save the planet:

• Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben. The bestselling author of Deep Economy shows that we're living on a fundamentally altered planet and opens our eyes to the kind of change we'll need in order to make our civilization endure.
• Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy, Daniel Goleman. The bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence reveals the hidden environmental consequences of our decisions as consumers and explores changes we must make to save our planet and ourselves.
• Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town, Susan Hand Shetterly. The author takes us into the woods and along the shorelines, mudflats, and paths of rural Maine, focusing her attention on the ways humans and animals share the land, especially as our mutual habitat is changing.
• In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, Gretel Ehrlich. By the author of one of my all-time favorite books, The Solace of Open Spaces, this book presents a vivid portrait of the indigenous cultures that inhabit the Arctic and the challenges to those cultures as a result of the unimaginable changes taking place on Earth from a warming climate.
• Lives of the Trees: An Uncommon History, Diana Wells. This sweet book is all about trees, from the origins of their names to their use in sacred rituals, from their medicinal properties to their place in art and literature -- an exploration of our deep-rooted connection to trees.
• For the kiddies: The Earth Book, by Todd Parr. This kid-friendly, eco-friendly picture book explores the importance of environmental protection and conservation on a level kids will enjoy.

And how about some books by Northwest authors to get you excited about the natural world:

• Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, Kathleen Dean Moore.This book offers a collection of accounts of carefully observed excursions into the wild, as well as a profound meditation on the healing power of nature.
• The Far Corner: On Land, Life, and Literature, John Daniel. The essays in this book take readers to beaches, old-growth forests, sagebrush steppe-lands, and deep-river canyons -- wild places and places scarred by human uses -- as well as through inner terrains exploring mortality, creativity, and spirituality.
• Wild Things: Adventures of a Grassroots Environmentalist, Donna Matrazzo. This book tells the story of the author's environmental activism in the Portland area and provides information on how each of us can get more involved in saving the places we love.
• Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest, Robin Cody. In this collection of essays, the author brings the ear of a novelist and the eye of a reporter to the people and places that make the Northwest distinctive -- from the streams to the woods, his prose rings with a sense of place.

We've got lots more books along these lines; these are just some of the newer ones. Come see for yourself and find just the right one(s!) for you. And for goodness sake, bring your own bag!