Please join Everybody Reads on Tuesday November 13th to meet environmental writer, Stephanie Mills.

Tough Little Beauties: Selected Essays and Other Writings is a diverse and thoughtful collection by one of our country's more courageous voices. Tough Little Beauties examines issues that remain timely: overpopulation, ecological degradation, and the Peak Oil crisis as well as a lived spirituality. Named by Utne Reader as one of the world’s leading visionaries and a prolific writer and speaker on ecology and social change, Stephanie Mills lives in northwest lower Michigan. Her most recent book is Epicurean Simplicity (Island).

Advance Praise For Tough Little Beauties:

“Stephanie Mills has always been on the cutting edge and Tough Little Beauties bears out her obvious position as one of our leading social critics.”
     —Jim Harrison, author, Returning to Earth and Saving Daylight

    “Stephanie Mills speaks her mind as a woman who expects the best of human community, never dulling her keen awareness of the worst. Her love of language, wit, and amiable narrative voice make her an essential guide to what it means to live a life of conscience.”
         —Alison Hawthorne Deming, author, Genius Loci and Writing the Sacred into the Real

“Stephanie Mills’s words shine like light on rushing rivers, and her insights endure long after reading her essays.”
     —Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, author, Animals in the House and The Power of Words

    “The times have finally caught up with Stephanie Mills. As nature is no longer allowing humanity to deny that it is part of ecology, we need Stephanie Mills’s smart, personal, deeply spiritual writings on the relationship between humans and the more-than-human as never before.”
         —Freeman House, author, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species

“No matter where thinker Stephanie Mills takes us, her vow to the Earth is the bed of coals constantly burning in the heart of this book. Mills journeys easily between the real landscapes of the Earth and the inner ones of intellect and emotion. Always she is unflinchingly honest.”
     —Janisse Ray, author, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

    “There is no more thoughtful, observant, insightful, uplifting, and elegant writer in the English language than Stephanie Mills. Whether she is speaking of intricacies in nature, her personal travels and experiences, on the difficulties of the human/political  ondition, she lets the world in whole, brings forth meanings that are always unique, keen, deft, and often very funny. She is a classicist as a writer, an activist in spirit, ready to confront the juggernaut with considerable ferocity. Tough Little Beauties rewards the reader with insight into the difficulties we face as well as joy at the glory of it all.”
         —Jerry Mander, author, In the Absence of the Sacred

“Tough Little Beauties is a compendium of brilliant work spanning over twenty years. The collection contains essays not seen before in book form and reprinted work, including a fascinating journal of journeying in India and a healthy excerpt from the wonderful book In Praise of Nature. Whether readers are familiar or not with Stephanie Mills’ writing they’ll be happy to discover (or rediscover) a sizzling writer, firm in her beliefs, yet ceaselessly alert and questioning. The moral core of this book is thoughtful and solid, while its subjects take an impressive run through the likes of the relationship of humans to nature, techno-fantasy, parenting vs. not parenting, fatality and fetality, apocalypse, herpes, and Mother Teresa.”
     —John Keeble, author, Nocturnal America & Yellowfish

 

Other Books By Stephanie Mills

From Booklist - Epicurean Simplicity
Common usage equates epicurean with gourmet, so Mills' title may seem like an oxymoron, but Epicurus' philosophy actually focuses on simple pleasures, on savoring life as found in nature, and on practicing prudence and frugality. An "ecological wordsmith," Mills, whose books include Turning Away from Technology (1997), is drawn to Epicureanism because it celebrates sensual delights and recognizes the spiritual and intellectual richness of a materially simple way of life. She describes the admittedly imperfect version of "epicurean simplicity" she follows in her small house on 35 wooded Michigan acres in a cycle of stirring essays written in a scrubbed clean, exquisitely crafted style that perfectly embodies her ecocentric values. Rather than exhort, Mills tells provocative stories about gardening, bicycling, threatened amphibians and butterflies, invasive species, what happens to wildlife when lakefronts are developed, and why she doesn't own a television or computer. Mills' scrupulous, frank, and witty essays about the unintended consequences of rampant consumerism are grounded in deep ecological understanding and sensitivity to the demanding realities of people's lives and therefore praise simplicity without undue simplification. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

 

From Publishers Weekly- In Service of the Wild
A growing number of individuals have become actively engaged in ecological restoration. As Mills (Whatever Happened to Ecology?) defines it, "ecological restoration is the art and science of repairing damaged ecosystems to the greatest possible degree of historic authenticity." Here she repeatedly attempts to bridge the gap between art and science. The first half of the book, in highly personal prose, offers a paean to the 35 acres in northern Michigan she calls home. These chapters are not nearly as focused as those of the second half, which detail the specifics of five different restoration projects: Aldo Leopold's Sandy County Midwestern farm, which is acknowledged to be the birthplace of the restoration movement; the University of Wisconsin at Madison's arboretum; prairie preserves in and around Chicago; the Mattole River in Northern California; and Auroville, a supposedly self-sufficient, ecologically attuned village in tropical India. Interviews with the professionals and amateurs involved in the projects bring each to life and demonstrate the deep commitment some people develop to their environment.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.