No matter where you might live, even if you live in the very center of a big, bustling city, Lyanda Haupt says you are always connected to Nature. The wild is with you, no matter where you are. An award-winning author, naturalist, and eco-philosopher, Haupt’s work explores the connections between humans and the wild natural world. She reads from her newest book, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit.
“I was conflicted about using this word, spirit, because it means so many things to so many people,” Haupt says. “I thought people might make assumptions. Maybe it would be New Age-y, maybe it would be religious. If you are New Age-y or religious, it’s okay, you can still enjoy this book. But what I really meant by that word in this book, those things that are part of our beautiful, deep human intelligence that aren’t accessible by the quantification language of science. Things like our imagination, our capacity for wonder and awe, our love of beauty, the deep repose that comes over us in a forest, a kind of silence—all of these things that inform our wild intelligence as humans, and yet, we don’t have specific language for it.”
Haupt’s writing is acclaimed for combining scientific knowledge with literary, poetic prose. Her previous books include Mozart’s Starling, The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild; Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness; Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks; and Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. She is a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Nautilus Book Award, a finalist for the Orion Book Award, and a two-time winner of the Washington State Book Award. She now lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Haupt has created and directed educational programs for Seattle Audubon, worked in raptor rehabilitation in Vermont, and as a seabird researcher for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the remote tropical Pacific. She will be hosting a craft talk at 10 a.m. on March 18 and a reading at 2:15 p.m. in the Student Commons Lounge as part of the Kalamazoo Valley Writers Series.
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