O/U Nature & More Book Club - July 2025
Outside/Underground Book Club is a bi-monthly reading group for those who want to learn more about the fascinating world around us . O/U explores topics around science and nature through memoir, poetry, non-fiction & more. We meet every other LAST Thursday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire.
This month’s O/U Book Club selection is Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in July to discuss.
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Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in Other Minds
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.
But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?
By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own. https://bookshop.org/p/books/other-minds-the-octopus-the-sea-and-the-deep-origins-of-consciousness-peter-godfrey-smith/8487100?ean=9780374537197&next=t
O/U Nature & More Book Club - May 2025
Outside/Underground Book Club is a bi-monthly reading group for those who want to learn more about the fascinating world around us . O/U explores topics around science and nature through memoir, poetry, non-fiction & more. We meet every other LAST Thursday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire.
This month’s O/U Book Club selection is Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm by Isabella Tree. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in March to discuss!
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An inspiring story about what happens when 3,500 acres of land, farmed for centuries, is left to return to the wild, and about the wilder, richer future a natural landscape can bring.
For years Charlie Burrell and his wife, Isabella Tree, farmed Knepp Castle Estate and struggled to turn a profit. By 2000, with the farm facing bankruptcy, they decided to try something radical. They would restore Knepp’s 3,500 acres to the wild. Using herds of free-roaming animals to mimic the actions of the megafauna of the past, they hoped to bring nature back to their depleted land. But what would the neighbors say, in the manicured countryside of modern England where a blade of grass out of place is considered an affront?
In the face of considerable opposition the couple persisted with their experiment and soon witnessed an extraordinary change. New life flooded into Knepp, now a breeding hotspot for rare and threatened species like turtle doves, peregrine falcons, and purple emperor butterflies.
The fabled English nightingale sings again.
At a time of looming environmental disaster, Wilding is an inspiring story of a farm, a couple, and a community transformed. Isabella Tree’s wonderful book brings together science, natural history, a fair bit of drama, and—ultimately—hope.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/wilding-returning-nature-to-our-farm-isabella-tree/6394219?ean=9781681373713&next=t
O/U Nature & More Book Club - March 2025
Outside/Underground Book Club is a bi-monthly reading group for those who want to learn more about the fascinating world around us . O/U explores topics around science and nature through memoir, poetry, non-fiction & more. We meet every other LAST Thursday of the month.
Sign up for book clubs at Glendora Bookshop by email, call/text, or just stop in and inquire.
This month’s O/U Book Club selection is The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Be sure to snag your copy at Glendora Bookshop (book club members take 10% off book club reads!) and join us in March to discuss!
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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer is donating her advance payments from this book as a reciprocal gift, back to the land, for land protection, restoration, and justice.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-serviceberry-robin-wall-kimmerer/21259025?ean=9781668072240&next=t&next=t