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John Muir (1838–1914) was one of the first modern preservationists. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, and wildlife, especially in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, were read by millions and are still popular today. His direct activism helped to save the Yosemite Valley and other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he founded, is now one of the most important conservation organizations in the United States. His writings and philosophy strongly influenced the formation of the modern environmental movement. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Nature

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The Desert by John Charles Van Dyke, published in 1901, is a lush, poetic description of the natural beauty of the American Southwest. What land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky! Van Dyke, a cultivated art historian, saw sublimity in the desert's lonely desolation, which previous generations had perceived only as a wasteland, and his book has a conservationist flavor which seems distinctly modern. The deserts should never be reclaimed, he writes. They are the breathing spaces of the west and should be preserved for ever. The changing colors of the sky, hills, and sand impress Van Dyke, as do the mirages. He celebrates the long overlooked commonplace things of nature-- cactus and grease wood, desert animals, and winged life, the birds and insects. His writing has a philosophical undertone. Not in vain these wastes of sand ... simply because they are beautiful in themselves and good to look upon whether they be life or death. Anyone who views with equal awe fiery sunrises and weeds growing out of pavement cracks will enjoy this reading of Van Dyke's The Desert. (Summary by ...

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Nature, Travel

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The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second (Malthus)....

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Science, Nature, Philosophy

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volunteers bring you 20 recordings of The Open Window by Edward Rowland Sill. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for February 27th, 2011. Edward Rowland Sill, American poet and educator, was born in Windsor, Connecticut. He was a modest and charming man, a graceful essayist, a sure critic. His contribution to American poetry is small but of fine quality. His best poems, such as The Venus of Milo, The Fool's Prayer and Opportunity, gave him a high place among the minor poets of America, which might have been higher but for his early death. (summary from Wikipedia)...

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Humor, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

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Nature is a short essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson published anonymously in 1836. It is in this essay that the foundation of transcendentalism is put forth, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Recent advances in zoology, botany, and geology confirmed Emerson's intuitions about the intricate relationships of Nature at large. The publication of Nature is usually taken to be the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Henry David Thoreau had read Nature as a senior at Harvard College and took it to heart. It eventually became an essential influence for Thoreau's later writings, including his seminal Walden. (Summary excerpted from Wikipedia by Neeru Iyer)...

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Nature, Philosophy

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Orphaned Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle in Yorkshire, and finds herself in a house full of secrets and mysteries.

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Children, Nature, Philosophy, Mystery, Animals

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volunteers bring you 17 recordings of Growing Old by Matthew Arnold. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for April 17, 2011. Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterized as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. (summary from Wikipedia)...

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Instruction, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

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volunteers bring you 18 recordings of Safe in their Alabaster Chambers by Emily Dickinson. This was the Weekly Poetry project for May 6, 2012. Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.[3] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Fantasy, Nature, Philosophy, Religion, Poetry

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volunteers bring you 17 recordings of After Music by Josephine Preston Peabody. This was the Weekly Poetry project for April 10, 2011. Josephine Preston Peabody was an American poet and dramatist. She was born in New York and educated at the Girls' Latin School, Boston, and at Radcliffe College. (summary from Wikipedia) After Music is taken from An American Anthology, 1787–1900, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908)...

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Instruction, Nature, Philosophy, Music, Poetry

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volunteers bring you 14 recordings of What Is Love? by Ernest Dowson. This was the Weekly Poetry project for July 15, 2012. Ernest Christopher Dowson, born in Lee, London, was an English poet, novelist and writer of short stories, associated with the Decadent movement. Dowson is best remembered for some vivid phrases, such as days of wine and roses from his poem Vitae Summa Brevis....

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Poetry, Nature, Philosophy

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Written in the first century b.C., On the Nature of Things (in Latin, De Rerum Natura ) is a poem in six books that aims at explaining the Epicurean philosophy to the Roman audience. Among digressions about the importance of philosophy in men's life and praises of Epicurus, Lucretius created a solid treatise on the atomic theory, the falseness of religion and many kinds of natural phenomena. With no harm to his philosophical scope, the author composed a didactic poem of epic flavor, of which the imagery and style are highly praised. (Summary by Leni)...

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Poetry, Nature, Science

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volunteers bring you 11 recordings of Departerd Days by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was the Weekly Poetry project for May 8, 2011. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was an American physician, professor, lecturer, and author. Regarded by his peers as one of the best writers of the 19th century, he is considered a member of the Fireside Poets. His most famous prose works are the Breakfast-Table series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). He is recognized as an important medical reformer. 1830 proved to be an important year for Holmes as a poet; while disappointed by his law studies, he began writing poetry for his own amusement.[22] Before the end of the year, he had produced over fifty poems, contributing twenty-five of them (all unsigned) to The Collegian, a short-lived publication started by friends from Harvard. Four of these poems would ultimately become among his best-known: The Dorchester Giant, Reflections of a Proud Pedestrian, Evening / By a Tailor and The Height of the Ridiculous. Nine more of his poems were published anonymously in the 1830 pamphlet Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings. (su...

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Instruction, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

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volunteers bring you 20 recordings of After Long Grief by Madison Cawein. This was the Weekly Poetry project for July 22, 2012. Madison Cawein was a poet from Louisville, Kentucky. His father made patent medicines from herbs. Cawein thus became acquainted with and developed a love for local nature as a child. His output was thirty-six books and 1,500 poems. His writing presented Kentucky scenes in a language echoing Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. He soon earned the nickname the Keats of Kentucky. ( Summary from Wikipedia )...

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Nature, Philosophy, Romance, Poetry

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volunteers bring you 15 recordings of Adam and Eve (From “Paradise Lost,” Fourth Book) by John Milton. This was the Weekly Poetry project for Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 (though written nearly ten years earlier) in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, redivided into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification; most of the poem was written while Milton was blind, and was transcribed for him. Milton first presents Adam and Eve in Book IV with impartiality. The relationship between Adam and Eve is one of mutual dependence, not a relation of domination or hierarchy. While the author does place Adam above Eve in regard to his intellectual knowledge, and in turn his relation to God, he also grants Eve the benefit of knowledge through experience. ( Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Nature, Philosophy, Religion, Poetry

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volunteers bring you 13 recordings of Song of the Kicking Horse by Bliss Carman. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for September 26th, 2010.

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Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

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The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk is another in the long list children's books by the conservationist, Thornton W. Burgess. In this book, Jimmy Skunk has encounters with Reddy Fox, Peter Rabbit, Unc’ Billy Possum and other acquaintances of his in the Green Meadows and Green Forest. Along the way, we learn some of the habits of Jimmy and his friends and we learn little lessons about life such as the importance of always keeping one's temper, keeping promises and not playing practical jokes. We are also treated to a philosophical discussion by Jimmy Skunk on the advantages of defensive weaponry. (Summary by John Lieder.)...

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Children, Nature, Animals

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volunteers bring you 18 recordings of Freshness of Poetic Perception by Paul Hamilton Hayne. This was the Weekly Poetry project for October 7, 2012. Paul Hamilton Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He left his law practice to persue his literary interests. He became a literaey critic and magazine editor in Grovetown, Georgia, where he lived until his death. (Summary by David Lawrence)...

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Poetry, Nature, Philosophy

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volunteers bring you 15 recordings of Petals by Amy Lowell. This was the Weekly Poetry project for November 27, 2011. Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family, sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell. She never attended college because her family did not consider that proper for a woman, but she compensated with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. In the post-World War II years, Lowell, like other women writers, was largely forgotten, but with the renaissance of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's studies brought her back to light. According to Heywood Broun, however, Lowell personally argued against feminism. Her poem, “Petals” is published in her collection A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912). (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Bob Go...

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Instruction, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s life for two years, two months, and two days around the shores of Walden Pond. Walden is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. Along with his critique of the civilized world, Thoreau examines other issues afflicting man in society, ranging from economy and reading to solitude and higher laws. He also takes time to talk about the experience at Walden Pond itself, commenting on the animals and the way people treated him for living there, using those experiences to bring out his philosophical positions. This extended commentary on nature has often been interpreted as a strong statement to the natural religion that transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson were preaching. (Description amended from Wikipedia)....

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Nature, Philosophy

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A collection of short nonfiction works in the public domain. The essays, speeches and reports included in this collection were independently selected by the readers, and the topics encompass history, government, military history, science, philosophy, sports, nature and religion. (summary by J. M. Smallheer)...

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History, Nature, Philosophy, Religion, War stories, Science, Politics