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LOCATION: New Pond Farm Education Center

Co-Sponsored by New Pond Farm Education Center and Redding Land Trust

Delve more deeply into nature, ecology and wildlife with a new bookclub focusing on science, conservation and natural history! Whether you’re an avid birder, a devoted gardener or an enthusiastic weekend hiker, you’ll expand your understanding of the world around us while also meeting folks who share a devotion to our planet!

The Nature Book Club is moderated by Cole Tucker-Walton, a Redding Land Trust board member and author of Redding’s Big Outdoors column in the Redding Sentinel, and John McLeran, a member of the Redding Land Trust and Town of Redding’s Open Space Manager.

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper (2023)

A self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), Christian Cooper is an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper had an encounter with a dog walker, which exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

In his bestselling memoir, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today.

Previous Selections:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015)

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy (2023)