Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Working with the UEC--One Hit, One...Balk?

The Urban Ecology is one of the particularly wonderful resources in Milwaukee. Working on sites adjacent to Riverside and Washington Parks, their focus is on environmental education. Their big upcoming project is the Eat Local Challenge. It's not just the UEC--Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast, Outpost Natural Foods, and two farmer's markets, Fondy and Westown, are also involved.

We're also participating, by leading a book club discussion of Plenty: Eating Local on the 100-Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. Two things to mention up front: 1) This is a book club discussion; the authors are not involved and 2) This is the same book as Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. It is not unusual for a publisher to change the subtitle of a book for paperback publication. And isn't even that unusual to change the title itself, but it does confuse people.

Plenty is an eat-local challenge book, much like Bill McKibben's Enough and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, but taken to the nth degree. Who knew that no grain was grown within 100 miles of Vancouver? It's funny, sort of like reading a Bill Bryson take on the subject.

The discussion is at the Urban Ecology Center on Tuesday, September 14th, at 7 PM. Say hi to me, as I'll be helping coordinate the discussion.

Alas, our other current collaboration with the Urban Ecology Center is on hold. We were cosponsoring an event for The Green Travel Guide to Southern Wisconsin, but the there was a problem with the first date, Wednesday, August 18th, so alas, this event is postponed indefinitely. It's a great book that we're selling quite well, so we're hoping to put something new together. For now, please unmark your calendars.

Asides:

1. I never posted a link to our last email newsletter, which, by the way, now has the wrong info for the Green Travel Guide to Southern Wisconsin. Here it is.

2. Did you notice that Plenty has the same sort of look as Mona Simpson's My Hollywood, the highly-anticipated novel coming out August 3rd that we are hosting a reading for on Thursday, October 21st? Instead of checking, I'm just guessing it's the same artist, Elina Nudelman!

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