"If wanting more awe is a kind of greed, I was greedy," writes Tamara Dean in her luminous essay collection, Shelter and Storm. Struggling with the realities of climate crises, Dean and her partner spent 15 years trying to live a sustainable life in a rural area of Wisconsin known as the Driftless: an unglaciated landscape marked by steep bluffs, old-growth forests, and, increasingly, natural disasters. They planted a garden, built a house of clay bricks, and worked to re-create a prairie habitat on their land. But Dean also searched for wonder and the species that inspire it: monarch butterflies, coneflowers, freshwater mussels, "slow blue" fireflies. Her essays chronicle her efforts to live in concert with the land and make it more hospitable to flora and fauna in danger of disappearing.
Dean's narrative is no naïve rural idyll: she writes honestly about floods, fires, tornadoes, and the debilitating effects of Lyme disease. "Nature has an agenda of its own," she admits, "and a certain degree of wariness is wise." Dean explores the complications of living amid natural phenomena that are indifferent or downright harmful to humans. She also writes about the challenges faced by her neighbors in the Driftless, many of them farmers with deep roots in the region who must deal with rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and unstable geopolitical forces. Shelter and Storm is a thoughtful portrait of an area whose beauty is often hidden, and a call to consider the implications of one's personal choices for the planet's future. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams