For Love of Lakes

By Darby Nelson
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
ISBN-10: 1611860210
ISBN-13: 978-1611860214
Paperback: 224 pages
Dimensions: 6″ x 9″
Publication Date: October 1, 2011

Category:

Description

For Love of Lakes weaves a delightful tapestry of history, science, emotion, and poetry for all who love lakes or enjoy nature writing. For Love of Lakes is an affectionate account documenting our species long relationship with lakes—their glacial origins, Thoreau and his environmental message, and the major perceptual shifts and advances in our understanding of lake ecology. This is a necessary and thoughtful book that addresses the stewardship void while providing improved understanding of our most treasured natural feature.

In the tradition of Aldo Leopold’s seminal work, A Sand County Almanac, For Love of Lakes focuses on the lakes, ponds, and waters outside your very home and the intricacies of these ecosystems.

4 reviews for For Love of Lakes

  1. Rev. Diane Roth referenced For Love of Lakes in something she wrote. “I really enjoyed your book.”

    “This spring I picked up a book by a retired college professor and ecologist, Darby Nelson. It is called For Love of Lakes. The book is part memoir, part geology, as he writes lyrically of his boyhood love of lakes, and yet exposes how many of them have become degraded. How can we say we love lakes, and let them fall to ruin?, he wonders. Is it because we don’t understand them? In a lake, so much happens under the surface, where we cannot see.”

    “Two paragraphs in his introduction struck me: ‘If I think of time as a river, I predispose myself to think linearly, to see events as unconnected, where a tree branch falling into the river at noon is swept away by current to remain eternally separated in time and space from the butterfly that falls in an hour later and thrashes about seeking floating refuge. But if I think of time as a lake, I see ripples set in motion by one event touching an entire shore and then, when reflected back toward the middle, meeting ripples from other events, each changing the other in their passing. I think of connectedness, of relationships, and interacting events that matter greatly to lakes.‘”

    See the entire Faith in Community: Of Rivers and Lakes post.

  2. Don Shelby on MinnPost.com “Darby Nelson, a Modern-Day Thoreau”

    “It may come as no surprise to regular readers of this column that I am a fan of Henry David Thoreau. I have read all of his works and possess a handwritten page from his journals. I’ve walked the shoreline of Walden Pond and stood on the spot where he built his tiny cabin. I have visited his grave.”

    “Darby Nelson likes Thoreau even more than I do.”

    Read More from Don Shelby’s Darby Nelson: A modern-day Thoreau

  3. School Library Journal

    Nelson, Darby. For Love of Lakes. Michigan State Univ. Oct. 2011. c.270p. illus. bibliog. ISBN 9781611860214. pap. $24.95. NAT HIST
    Nelson (biology, emeritus, Anoka-Ramsey Jr. Coll.) brings to bear his training as an aquatic ecologist in this eloquent paean to the natural beauty and wonder of lakes. Intermingling a lifelong fascination with lakes and cogent scientific commentary, this book will generate newfound respect for and appreciation of lakes. Nelson invokes prominent naturalists like Henry David Thoreau and Louis Agassiz as he explores the glory of lakes and explains their scientific significance. Like these classic observers of nature, Nelson teaches us to look closely at the minute features of lakes that, under close scrutiny, reflect the larger miracle of the universe. While lay readers may find the science chapters to be slow-going at times, the nature sections, replete with detailed observations, will more than compensate for this challenge. VERDICT Ideal for aficionados of nature writing. Readers who enjoyed Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek will find this book similarly rewarding.—Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law, PA

  4. Star Tribune

    “For Love of Lakes” takes on a hefty challenge: how to explain the paradox of why people love lakes, but continue to do things that ruin them.

    To search for answers, Darby Nelson, an aquatic biologist, retired teacher and former Minnesota legislator, jumps in with both feet. He snorkels through lily pads, paddles a canoe through dense floating mats of stinky algae, and picks his way along a shoreline crowded with docks, steel cribbing, cement slabs and planking.

    Read Review

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