![\"The](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/03\/WinnieCover.jpg\")
<\/a>A.A. Milne\u2019s Hundred Acre Wood, home to Christopher Robin and his animal friends Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and the rest, was inspired by the Ashdown Forest in Southeast England, a 6000 acre area where the young Milne explored. In her book The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A\u00a0Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood<\/a><\/em>, Kathryn Aalto examines Ashdown and its role in shaping Milne\u2019s stories. Part love letter to the nature that ignited Milne\u2019s imagination, part guide to the flora and fauna that thrive in the area, and part literary memoir about the influence of the landscape on Milne’s work, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh<\/em> will be a trip down memory lane\u2014 or memory forest footpath\u2014 for many readers. The book includes photographs of Ashdown Forest as well as drawings by illustrator E.H. Shepard, Milne’s collaborator for Winnie the Pooh<\/a><\/em> (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner<\/em> (1928), among many other works. (You may also recognize the prolific Shepard\u2019s illustrations from the children\u2019s classic The Wind in the Willows<\/a><\/em> by Kenneth Grahame.) Kathryn Aalto\u2019s book will have you seeing the potential for a home for a honey-loving bear the next time you look at an old walnut tree. Available at the John T. Richardson Library, call number 578.094225 A112n.<\/p>\nSpring may not have officially sprung yet, but the weather has warmed (at least temporarily) and the birds are singing a little louder. As the earth begins to thaw, let’s look at three new books in the DePaul University Library collection about our relationship to the great outdoors. A.A. Milne\u2019s Hundred Acre Wood, home to <\/p>\n<\/a>Moving to a darker side of our relationship to the environment, Kevin Bales\u2019 new work Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World<\/a><\/em> examines the connection between ecological destruction and human trafficking. Bales spent seven years travelling in Africa, South America, and Asia to look closely at dangerous hotspots for modern slavery that are also hotspots for environmental degradation. Why is this? Why does disregard for human rights tend to correlate to disregard for ecological sustainability? How many of us unknowingly contribute to this cycle by what we have in our pockets, our refrigerators, and our closets? Bales attempts to unravel these questions through interviews, historical overviews, and facts and figures. Readers will be confronted with what author Bill McKibben calls<\/a> “a bracing reminder that a mentality that allows throwaway people also allows a throwaway earth.\u201d Readers will also come away with food for thought on how to be part of the solution. Available at the John T. Richardson Library, call number 306.36209172 B184B2016.<\/p>\n<\/a>For an artist\u2019s eye view of the natural world, check out Sylvania<\/a><\/em>, award-winning photographer Anna Beeke\u2019s collection of photographs taken in American woodlands. Beeke celebrates the natural beauty of trees in different areas of the United States. Some photographs feature trees seemingly untouched by encroaching civilization, while others capture trees coexisting with roads, satellite dishes, homes, and people\u2014 with and without chainsaws. The photographs are interspersed with poetic text by Brian Doyle that reflects on his personal wonder of trees, a wonder that many readers will relate to:
\n“I think we are absorbed by forests and woods and thickets and copses and wilderness in general because shadows and flickering light are dangerous and alluring and mysterious. There are stories in the shadows, in the forest, flitting through the trees. How many legends and fables and myths are set in the forest? The forest is where possible lives. The forest is beyond the reach of sense and reason. The forest is not a place for logic and culture and civilized opinion. The forest is ancient and itself. The forest is hidden life and deeper secrets. Anything might live there and probably does and the only way to find out is to slip in beneath the eaves and vanish into it in exactly the same way you vanish into a story” (p.74-75).
\nAvailable at the John T. Richardson Library, call number 779.092 B4147S2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"