A Natural History of the Spirits (On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime)

A Natural History of the Spirits offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the threatened marine gastropods whose shells have both mystical and monetary meaning; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of the yellow gardenia, we may more deeply understand how we create home.

For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A Natural History of the Spirits grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.