Strange Harvests
Giving and Taking from the Natural World
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"[Strange Harvests is] an impressive addition to the modern travelogue, painting some of the world's most remote terrain in visceral and sometimes breathtaking prose . . . an engrossing read." --NPR
An original and magical map of our world and its riches, formed of the stories of the small-scale harvests of seven natural objects
In this beguiling book, Edward Posnett journeys to some of the most far-flung locales on the planet to bring us seven wonders of the natural world--eiderdown, vicuña fiber, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano, and edible birds' nests--that promise ways of using nature without damaging it. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities, but to their harvesters they are imbued with myth, tradition, folklore, and ritual, and form part of a shared identity and history.
Strange Harvests follows the journeys of these uncommon products from some of the most remote areas of the world to its most populated urban centers, drawing on the voices of the people and little-known communities who harvest, process, and trade them. Blending history, travel writing, and interviews, Posnett sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape. What do they tell us about capitalism, global market forces, and overharvesting? How do local microeconomies survive in a hyperconnected world? Is it possible for us to live together with different species? Strange Harvests makes us see the world with wonder, curiosity, and new concern.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time author Posnett combines a background in modern-day finance and an interest in historical trade practices in this evocative look at precious natural objects. He begins with eiderdown, the soft down feathers of eider ducks, long used around in the world in bedding and garments. He goes on to edible bird's nests, vegetable ivory, sea silk, guano, and other trade items, examining their fluctuating value as international commodities and their natural environs, many of which are now endangered. Occasionally, Posnett offers the objects as history in a nutshell, noting that if Iceland's cultivation of eider, where the species has long been protected, attests to the country's "steady rhythms, its insulation from cataclysms, then Russian eiderdown is a portrait of the country's constant political upheavals"; a Russian biologist notes her country has never successfully cultivated the species. But for the most part, he is careful not to overextend his reach and concentrates on delivering scrupulous descriptions of his subjects and their locales, including both desolate fjords and tropical caves. In the best passages, he capture the harvesters at work, from an Icelandic priest gently lifting eiderdown from abandoned nests, to a Borneo bird nest harvester trodding in flip-flops through ankle-deep guano. Posnett aims to record "for posterity" the wondrous details of these objects and he succeeds marvelously.
