Ben Rawlence

This book is the perfect read for those of you that might think, “I get that climate change is real but how bad is it really?”. The answer in short is: It’s quite bad. This book tells the story of climate change through the unique perspective of the Boreal lens. It doesn’t hold your hand or pull any punches and it lets you reach your own conclusions.

I had never expected a book about trees to be so interesting as the author cleverly intertwines the story of the forest and its innerworkings with the indigenous peoples that have lived in it. There are tons of facts about fungi and soils and permafrost that I now care about and appreciate.

The author’s voice and writing style really captures your imagination and wonder with his vivid descriptions of the forest surroundings while deferring to his expert guests to paint the sobering picture of our troubled future.

This is a life-changing book with a strong call to action that garners a sense of urgency. It inspires hope and an appreciation for the complexity of nature that will (fingers crossed) find a way.… (mehr)

THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEE CAMP WHERE LIVES ARE LEFT IN LIMBO

Dadaab is the world’s largest refugee camp, but it lies forgotten in the scrublands of northern Kenya. It has roughly the same population as Leicester, some 500,000 people. Most have fled from neighbouring Somalia. But the Kenyan government has also placed people fleeing Sudan there, out of the way.

Author Ben Rawlence visited Dadaab with the NGO Human Rights Watch. He has built a powerful picture of life in the camp through exhaustive interviews with nine residents about their lives and their hopes. Tawane grew up in Dadaab, but is now a youth leader, taking risks for Western aid workers too scared to leave their compounds. Muna is a Somali woman who arrived at the camp as a baby. She is now under threat from her family for marrying a Sudanese man. Others have fled famine or more recent wars.

Rawlence says Dadaab is “the meeting point between two contradictory arcs of the twenty-first century: the rule of law that had spawned the international humanitarian system and…the chaos unleashed by the end of the colonial project to subjugate and carve up the globe.”

He shows how Kenya’s invasion of Somalia in 2011 was not the simple anti-terrorist manoeuvre it was presented as at the time. And it made the situation much worse for the refugees. The refugees are not allowed to work. But they cannot survive on United Nations rations alone, particularly as they have to constantly pay bribes to police and officials. So a vast and complex black market has grown up.

The refugees dream of being resettled in the West, as a tiny minority of others have been. Rawlence writes, “The young men and women at the youth centre were the ones left behind, who followed the progress of their friends abroad on Facebook.” They set the nightmare of their current lives in limbo against the risk and expense of trying to get to the West.

Ken Olende, Socialist Worker 2490, 9 February 2016
https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/city-of-thorns-the-forgotten-r...… (mehr)

If you are feeling sanguine about the prospect of global climate change, this is a good book to dive into. Rawlence lays out the facts on the ground as he finds them on a globe-circling tour of where the forests stop in the Arctic and the tundra begins. He quotes both scientific experts he encounters in the field and the people who live in these remote areas as he focuses upon the predominant tree species in his sprawling travels. And he always keeps his narrative interesting.
[Audiobook note: The reader, Jamie Parker, does an astonishing job pronouncing botanical Latin names and a variety of indigenous languages. His reading is clear, precise, and well paced.]… (mehr)

Excerpt from a longer article:

Timely Take-aways for Life-long Learners: Trees and Forests
Whether exploring the impact of climate change or the restoration of forests, several new books examine individual trees, tree ecology, and forests of the world.

The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth
Ben Rawlence, Feb 2022, St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan
Themes: Nature, Plants, Trees
Combining storytelling with science, Rawlence takes readers on a quest to learn about the impact of climate change on the trees of the boreal forest.
Take-aways: Use the locations described in the book to engage students in a discussion about the shifting treelines around the world.

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Whether helping educators keep up-to-date in their subject-areas, promoting student reading in the content-areas, or simply encouraging nonfiction leisure reading, teacher librarians need to be aware of the best new titles across the curriculum and how to activate life-long learning. - Annette Lamb… (mehr)