Al Gore tonight in Beverly Hills: tickets still available

Al Gore is hitting stages again with a brand-new book. "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis" picks up the environmental themes of "An Inconvenient Truth" and presents a call to action. He's in the Los Angeles area tonight at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Independent bookstore Book Soup, which is helping to present the event, has tweeted that there will be tickets available at the door. The $40 ticket comes with a copy of "Our Choice." Start your (hybrid) engines: The show is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Al Gore at George Washington University, Nov. 5. Credit: Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press/MCT

The power of the Gulf Stream

Florida researchers are looking into whether the powerful Gulf Stream might be a renewable-energy resource. Florida Atlantic University is trying to find out if underwater power-generating turbines could harness the current off Florida's east coast.

Sounds good, right? Well, Stan Ulanski, author of "The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic," thinks it might work -- but it also might have costs. On the University of North Carolina Press blog, he writes:

Though the Gulf Stream can move for surprisingly long distances, hugging the eastern seaboard from Florida to North Carolina, southern Florida probably has the greatest potential for success for such a project....

How much energy can safely be extracted versus the environmental effects?

Potential obstacles to a full-blown project include the effects the turbines might have on the marine life, recreational activities, and shipping.

How the turbines might affect the Gulf Stream's flow, if at all, is another question he raises. While sailors and fishermen have known bits about ocean patterns for decades, the details of the workings of the Gulf Stream are yet to be fully understood. In the opening to his book, Ulanski outlines one serendipitous accident that set off a new line of scientific inquiry:

In January 1992, a merchant ship encountering storm conditions near the International Date Line in the North Pacific lost 12 containers overboard due to the heavy seas. Part of this cargo was 29,000 floatable, plastic bathtub toys: turtles, frogs, beavers, and yes, ducks. Some of these toys began coming ashore in southeast Alaska 10 months later. This unfortunate accident became a scientific gold mine.... Since 1992, these providential discoveries have continued as oceanographers tracked other floating objects, including 34,000 hockey gloves, 5 million Lego pieces, and at least 3,000 computer modules.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Key Biscane, Fla. Credit: joiseyshowaa via Flickr

How does your garden grow? Lethally?

In 399 BC, Socrates suffered punishment by death by drinking a tea of poison hemlock. Over the years, hemlock has gotten no less poisonous, although it appears perfectly innocent -- pictured, above, its leaves resemble parsley and flowers, Queen Anne's lace. Now poison hemlock finds a place in the pages of "Wicked Plants" by Amy Stewart, along with coca, the betel nut, the strychnine tree, ratbane, the opium poppy and killer algae. "I confess that I am enchanted by the plant kingdom's criminal element," she writes.

I love a good villain, whether it is an enormous specimen of Euphotbia tiucalli, the pencil cactus with corrosive sap that raises welts on the skin, on display at a garden show, or the hallucinatory moonflower, Datura intoxia, blooming in the desert. There is something beguiling about sharing their dark little secrets. And these secrets don't just lurk in a remote jungle. They're in our own backyards.

Stewart told our Home & Garden section that Southern California's most common wicked plant is oleander, a quick-growing shrub with attractive white or pink flowers that is often used in landscaping. It's accidentally killed children, she says, and is, sadly, commonly used by suicidal nursing home patients.

But for all the death and destruction in the book, it's a lot of fun. There are lots of old-style etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribs accompanying Stewart's encyclopedia-like entries, which include historical cases of death, poisoning and experimentation. More than once -- more than you'd think healthy -- curious doctors have given themselves minor doses of lethal plants to chronicle their effects.

And the experimentation hasn't stopped there. The book includes plants like peyote and mushrooms that are wicked enough to alter your reality but wouldn't really hurt you.

From May 31 to Sept. 5, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden will feature the exhibition Wicked Plants: Shedding a Dark Light on Suspicious Species, based on Stewart's book. Tonight, she'll be in Pasadena at Vroman's Bookstore (with her new poison case, maybe), talking about the plants she loves, covets and fears, including the most deadly plant of all -- tobacco.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Briony Morrow-Cribs

Lofty shelterporn: 'New Treehouses of the World'

To flip through Pete Nelson's gorgeous "New Treehouses of the World" is to get drawn into his utopian vision, that "treehouses could be used for the greater good." How exactly, is a little murky -- basically, hanging out in a treehouse will get you closer to nature, maybe see it from a new perspective -- but the constructions themselves are transcendentally convincing.

Nelson, who is a fine photographer, is also the founder of the TreeHouse Workshopin Seattle. In an early chapter, he shows how his treehouses are constructed. Then he travels the U.S. and the world -- Thailand, Brazil, India -- to find some amazing structures that most of us will never be able to visit, let alone replicate. The photos inspire lust and awe: see our gallery.

Few city-dwellers like me have the kind of property that might accommodate one of these brilliantly-imagined treehouses. But we can dream (and we do have bookshelves).

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Pete Nelson / "New Treehouses of the World"

Hog heaven: Michael Perry's 'Coop'

Michael Perry lives in rural Wisconsin on a farm with his wife, two daughters, a vintage truck and an assortment of animals, which he writes about in "Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting." He explains in an interview with Powell's that he's not running a big professional farming operation.

I think we're doing what a lot of folks are — getting a few chickens, getting a few pigs, just trying to raise more and more of our own food. And we're not at the cutting edge of this; you look at people like Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan — these are the people who are really leading us.... I'm sort of writing about the rest of us, who are trying to figure out a way to incorporate these things into our day-to-day lives while probably, truth be told, paying the rent mostly through other efforts.

But what's encouraging is that I'm seeing more and more of it. This idea that you have to be just a farmer or just a writer is kind of a new thing. If you look back a few decades, the plumber used to have a few chickens in the back yard. It's not about becoming a farmer; it's about incorporating those things into the rest of your life.

Powell's asks with some horror about pigs -- apparently they'll eat humans, if it appears that humans are  what's for lunch. "Yes, they're omnivorous, and that includes you," Perry says. "It's nothing personal; the pig's just hungry. And to be fair to the pig, I don't know why we're shocked about them eating us when many of us quite happily eat them."

Tending pigs and chickens is pretty time-consuming, which doesn't always jive with a writer's schedule. Perry, who can write for 16 hours at a stretch, also volunteers as a local emergency responder and plays in a band. And this spring he'll be busier than usual, as his long list of appearances will take him across Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest -- leaving his wife holding the feedbag.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Pug Father via Flickr

Word of the Year 2008: hypermiling

The New Oxford American Dictionary has selected the 2008 Word of the Year: hypermiling.

Hypermiling is doing everything possible to get the most mileage from your car. If you have a fuel-efficient vehicle (like the Honda Fit, pictured) or a hybrid, that's only the beginning. If you drive the speed limit, keep your car tuned up and keep your tires properly inflated, you're getting closer.

Hypermilers will go further, taking simple get increasingly obsessive measures: They'll drive without shoes to be more sensitive to the gas pedal. They'll remove roof racks to reduce drag. They'll coast down hills. They'll make sure they only park in spaces that they can exit by pulling forward, to avoid having to back up. (If this sounds a bit preposterous, NPR interviewed some hypermilers in June; listen for yourself.)

But hypermiling is not just for obsessive penny pinchers. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants you to be a hypermiler -- except he calls it an EcoDriver. Schwarzenegger, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Environmental Defense Fund launched a nationwide EcoDriving campaign earlier this year with a helpful how-to ecodrive website. Or maybe that should be how-to hypermile.

That's the problem with new words. "Hypermiling" has been around since 2004, but it's still got competitors in the name-the-trend marketplace. Maybe becoming the 2008 Word of the Year will put it over the top.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Honda

Thomas Friedman's pregnant moment

In Sunday's paper, Susan Salter-Reynolds profiled Thomas Friedman and his new book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America." She sets up the issue:

What we need is a Green Revolution. This is our chance to show the rest of the world how to create a sustainable future. And we are blowing it. We have the knowledge, Friedman believes, but we lack the political will.

Friedman said that several threads of understanding -- about the economics of oil, the challenges of global warming and the effects of increased consumption -- came together for him in 2007. "I had this pregnant moment a year ago in May at a conference in Aspen," Friedman recalls. "I realized that the IT revolution would inevitably be replaced by the ET [energy technology] revolution."

Salter-Reynolds writes, "Friedman works by his own idiosyncratic process: speeches, followed by columns and articles, usually written on airplanes, followed by books. 'I am a verbal person,' he admits. 'I talk my ideas out.' "

Which is why it's particularly neat that the Aspen Institute has put this video speech online. It's five minutes of him talking out the ideas that would become his book -- his "pregnant moment."

--Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit:  Jennifers S. Altman / Los Angeles Times

Running naked in the woods: wilderness living

Earlier this year, Perseus Books released "Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery" by Jim Motovalli; this week, the folks at The Cleanest Line blogged about it.

In 1913, Joseph Knowles, with much fanfare, set out into the Maine wilderness for two months, in nothing but a loincloth, to show how man could live off the land. The media and American audiences ate up his reports — filed in charcoal on birch bark — about life in the woods, surrounded by bears and berries.

"Above all else I want to emphasize that my living alone in the wilderness for two months without clothing, food, or implements of any kind was not a wonderful thing," Knowles went on to write in his book "Alone in the Wilderness." "It was an interesting thing, but it was not wonderful." Later a scandal erupted over whether he'd actually lived off the land as he had claimed.

The funny thing is that The Cleanest Line is the blog of the Patagonia Co. "Why would these guys send us — an outdoor clothing company — a book about a guy dead-set on proving how unnecessary clothes are for the outdoor experience?" they ask. The answer they find lies in the way we think about man's relationship to the natural world.

While Knowles was a nature man, he also set out to prove that man need not fear the wilderness, because he could master it. As one reviewer notes, contemporary environmentalists strive for more "harmonious" balance. Nowadays, instead of walking into the woods naked and walking out in a bearhide, you can keep warm in a store-bought jacket and watch the bears from a safe distance.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Zach Klein via Flickr

Just for fun: a video of Nat King Cole singing "Nature Boy" after the jump.

Writing nature: not for dreamers

In the new Bookforum, Verlyn Klinkenborg reviews "American Earth," the 1,000-page anthology of nature writing edited by Bill McKibben.

This is literature for a cause, a cookbook for getting something done, a partial archive of the documents that shaped ecological awareness as we know it. It is also, in some sense, a philosophical and political primer, a reminder of the principles that ultimately bind the disparate, fractious environmental movement together.

Simply writing about the transcendent beauty of the natural world seems to have slipped out of fashion. In the Editor's Letter of the new issue of Granta, "The New Nature Writing," Jason Cowley writes that he was not interested in "the old nature writing ... the lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer." There is, it seems, a sense that nature writing is activism, that something must be done. Klinkenborg notes:

... writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers — for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.

He has a point: Few people who don't believe in global warming are likely to be drawn to an enormous anthology subtitled "Environmental Writing Since Thoreau." It's likely that Granta's "New Nature Writing" is also preaching to the converted, but it's trying not to be didactic — the pieces are formally diverse, including "the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue." Start with Anthony Doerr's "Butterflies on a Wheel" to get a gist of where nature writing is headed.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Yosemite National Park by James Gordon via Flickr

John Muir, nature man of Yosemite

Naturalist John Muir is the focus of a feature in this month's Smithsonian magazine. The man who championed protecting natural spaces — especially in what is now Yosemite National Park — was born in Scotland, moved as a boy to Wisconsin and later hiked from Kentucky to south Florida; there, he got sick and headed to California to recuperate. Once he found the wilds of Northern California in 1868, he was smitten. He climbed rocks, cursed the sharp hooves of sheep that tore up wildflowers and even snuck President Teddy Roosevelt away from his handlers and into the backcountry for three nights of camping.

He also wrote like a fiend.

Most of Muir's writings — which appeared, predominantly, in magazines — are in the public domain. The Sierra Club has put many of them online, in HTML format, with the original illustrations (in other words, no PDF downloads). But if you prefer book form, there have been reprints, and in 1997 the Library of America published "John Muir: Nature Writings," a weighty 928 pages. Here's a taste from "The Yosemite," originally published in 1912:

But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them. Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidently against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light....

If that's not to your taste, a selection of books about Muir are after the jump.