THE BOOKSHELF
For further reading, we recommend the following featured selection:
In Tending Iowa’s Land: Pathways to a Sustainable Future, editor and contributor Connie Mutel questions her ancestors’ assumption that they had “laid claim to vacant wilderness.” She asks: “During their struggles for survival, did they recognize that other people had occupied that land for thousands of years? Did they question, as they cleared the trees, what would happen to the native animals and plants thriving there? Or consider that each action has a cost, each taking a giving?”
Many resource books sit within arm’s reach of the main desk at Iowa Natives, but Connie Mutel’s works are among our most loved. Our copies are dog-eared, highlighted, and tea-stained. Her meticulous research and clear writing have taught us much.
Published by University of Iowa Press in 2022, Tending Iowa’s Land examines the decisions that have strained the ecosystems we depend on and offers practical ways to move forward.
Mutel writes that “there is reason to hope. In truth, although our environmental problems are worsening, we largely know how to solve them. It’s not solutions that we are lacking, it’s the collective will to enact them.” She urges us to “replace despondency with committed action at all levels.”
At Iowa Natives, we couldn’t agree more.
A retired senior science writer at the University of Iowa’s IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering, Mutel has written extensively about natural history, restoration ecology, flooding, and climate change. Her meticulous research gives us good reason to take her hope seriously.
In Tending Iowa’s Land, she brings together scientists, farmers, conservationists, and others whose research and experience offer pathways toward a more sustainable future. Organized into four sections—Soil, Water, Air, and Life—the book includes chapters examining Iowa’s environmental challenges and personal stories from people working to address them.
Tending Iowa's Land is displayed on the top shelf at the State Law Library of Iowa, inside the
State Capitol Building in Des Moines.
We chose this book for our fall stewardship issue because it addresses both agriculture and nature. In Iowa, the two are inextricably linked. As Mutel pointed out in our recent conversation with her, agriculture has no hope without functioning ecosystems. Indeed, if we continue to prioritize agricultural profit and productivity at the expense of healthy soil, water, air, wildlife, and people, we undermine the future of the very agriculture we claim to protect.
Three contributors stood out to us as we prepared this issue: a familiar voice from our pages, a biologist whose work helped shape our featured place, and a scientist whose concerns about Iowa’s water are central to his campaign for secretary of agriculture.
In "Loving the Lakes: Water as a Recreational Asset," Dr. Mary Skopec, who contributed to our spring 2026 issue, writes about her decision to stay in Iowa despite an earlier pull toward wilderness elsewhere. “Leaving Iowa would have been an easy choice,” she writes, “but staying to fight for a better environment had become imperative.”
Pauline Drobney, the first biologist at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge, our featured place this fall, recalls learning to appreciate the prairie with her grandfather. In “Knitting It Back Together: Iowa’s Tallgrass Prairie,” those early lessons lead into an account of Iowa’s prairie heritage and the work of restoring and protecting it.
Chris Jones’s chapter, “Pushing the Limits: The Intensification of Agriculture,” feels especially timely amid Iowa’s ongoing struggles with water quality. He reminds us that earlier generations made agricultural decisions to meet the needs of their day, without anticipating the future those choices would help create. Looking ahead, he calls for decisions made with environmental goals, “not just the number of bushels," in mind. We agree that the need for essentials like clean water, healthy soil, and functioning ecosystems must help determine what successful agriculture looks like.
As Iowa Natives approaches its second anniversary, we’re grateful for the people whose work gives us so much to share. Iowans like Mutel remind us how much there is to learn and how much we can still do. Their willingness to keep teaching, questioning, and caring for this place encourages us to do the same. We hope our journal helps carry their work forward, giving others good reason to care for Iowa and the generations who will call it home.
The scope of our challenges can feel overwhelming. But as Mutel reminds us, “Each time we address one problem, we also help to solve others.”
Mutel’s book invites us to learn about the solutions, then put them into practice as though our descendants’ future depends on it. Because it does.
Let us be the ancestors who choose differently—for ourselves and for those who come after us.
BOOKSHELF ARCHIVES
Past Issue Selections
Nightfaring: In Search of Disappearing Darkness
Nightfaring: In Search of the Disappearing Darkness by Megan Eaves-Egenes—editor of DarkSky International’s Nightscape magazine and founder of DarkSky London—is both a travel narrative and a call to reconsider our relationship with the night.
Why are so many people afraid of the dark? Monsters, predators, the unseen—through centuries of storytelling and mythmaking, natural darkness has been reduced to a metaphor for danger and evil. As a result, we have lost sight of its ecological and physiological necessity. Our efforts to predict, control, and illuminate the world have come at a cost: we have disrupted not only natural systems, but our own health.
Darkness is not an absence to be feared, but a condition essential to life. Humans, plants, and animals depend on cycles of light and dark to regulate rest, healing, and biological rhythms. Without true night, we exist in a kind of half-state—never fully restored, never fully ourselves. Even here in the Midwest, where open skies remain part of the landscape, true darkness is increasingly rare; for many Iowans, the Milky Way has faded from view, and with it, a direct connection to the night sky.
Eaves-Egenes weaves global travel with cultural reflection, exploring how different communities understand and protect the night. Across time, many cultures have honored darkness through story, ceremony, and observation, recognizing its role as teacher and guide. Yet today, much of humanity no longer experiences true night.
The book situates darkness within a conservation framework. DarkSky International designates reserves, parks, and communities that meet strict standards for limiting light pollution and preserving nightscapes. These designations require ongoing community commitment and annual reporting, demonstrating that darkness, like any natural resource, demands active stewardship.
Eaves-Egenes highlights global efforts to reclaim the night, including New Zealand’s pursuit of recognition as the world’s first DarkSky Nation. There, Māori perspectives frame the night sky as calendar, teacher, and ancestor—a viewpoint that positions the night not as empty space, but as a source of knowledge still relevant today.
On a more personal note, the author recounts moments of confronting fear in unfamiliar landscapes, including an encounter with a nocturnal predator in Tanzania. These experiences contrast with perceptions of danger in the United States, where fear is often directed toward other people rather than wildlife. She also challenges the assumption that constant illumination ensures safety, pointing to mixed evidence around lighting as a crime deterrent and suggesting that, in some cases, brightness may simply increase visibility for those with harmful intent.
The book further explores the psychological dimensions of darkness. Research suggests that darker environments can foster creativity, curiosity, and exploratory thinking—an insight long embedded in human tradition, from campfire storytelling to night navigation. In this way, the night becomes not only an ecological necessity, but an intellectual and cultural resource.
Eaves-Egenes also examines historical influences on our perception of darkness, particularly in Western contexts, where religious frameworks shaped associations between darkness, danger, and the unknown, often in contrast to light as purity or divinity. These ideas continue to inform cultural attitudes, sometimes distancing us from a more balanced understanding of the natural world.
Nightfaring reminds readers that humans are not the only beings dependent on darkness. Plant and animal species rely on the night. From nocturnal pollinators to migrating birds navigating by starlight, these largely unseen processes are foundational to ecosystem health—and by extension, to our own survival.
The book blends memoir, research, and cultural inquiry in a way that is both accessible and thought-provoking. Its central message is clear: reclaiming the night is both a personal and collective responsibility, one that begins with how we light our homes, our businesses, and our communities.
Ultimately, Nightfaring invites a shift in perception. When we recognize darkness as essential rather than threatening, it becomes a space of connection—linking us to ecological systems, cultural histories, and even our cosmic origins. As Carl Sagan observed, we are made of “star stuff,” yet without dark skies, we lose sight of that reflection.
Nightfaring asks readers not only to look up, but to reconsider what has been lost—and what might still be restored if we choose to make space for darkness again.
Soul External: Rediscovering the Great Blue Heron
In Soul External: Rediscovering the Great Blue Heron, Iowa writer and publisher Steven H. Semken offers a blend of field journal and spiritual inquiry—a meditation on myth, place, and belonging. His work reads as both grounded observation and mystical search. The result is nature writing that cherishes the land as sacred and recognizes the spirit in all things.
The book’s design enhances this meditative quality. Illustrated by Andrew R. Driscoll and arranged in a typographic layout that complements the lyrical flow of Semken’s prose, Soul External feels as much an art object as a written work. Driscoll’s images heighten its tone, reminding us that in nature’s gaze, we too are seen.
Semken writes as a seeker intent on understanding what it means to dwell within the natural world. “I did not feel that I was being religious,” he confides, “but I was cherishing this place as sacred.” Over years of watching and listening, he turns to the heron as “mentor and spirit guide,” tracing in its movements a model for his own attention and inquiry. Drawing from the language of naturalists, ecologists, philosophers, and mystics, his prose remains literary—lyrical and alive to the rhythms of what he calls “the center of the world.”
To know the heron, Semken learns, is not to define it but to enter into its mystery. “The herons’ nests are intended to be secrets,” he reminds us, urging readers to pause, “stand still…just twist your head and eyes to look around.” His prose carries a reverence that shifts simple acts of watching into moments of transcendence. The heron is equal amounts of earth and sky, water and fire, embodying an earthly balance. In the heron, Semken also senses a “holy spirit,” a lesson in humility and awe.
What emerges through these meditations is a way of seeing: the recognition that spirit resides not apart from the world but through it. Semken writes, “The world ultimately boils down to having faith in the unknown,” and from that acceptance arises his most beautiful idea—the “soul external.” To place one’s soul outside the self, within a rookery, a current, a stand of sycamores, is to affirm that life continues beyond personal boundaries. “I believe that to fully understand the heron, it must be seen as part of a more specific spot on earth,” he concludes. The bird, the tree, the water, the valley—all connected by a “fifth element” that “emits silence.” That stillness, he suggests, is spirit itself.
This collaborative work offers readers an invitation to remember our shared belonging. In rediscovering the heron, Semken and Driscoll evoke the early wonder of looking at the world and realizing it looks back. Soul External is an invitation to stand still long enough to feel that the land, too, is alive and attentive.
With the permission of the author and Ice Cube Press, an excerpt of Soul External: Rediscovering the Great Blue Heron is available on our website for readers to sample: "First Hint."
In Your Nature
We protect the things we love.
Jim Colbert doesn’t just love nature; he argues that close contact with the environment deepens a sense of care and conservation.
His memoir, In Your Nature, rings with childhood nostalgia: a first fish, a box turtle found in the woods, and a garter snake that ended up in a laundry basket. From Iowa’s most loved natives, like white-tailed deer and morel mushrooms, to its least understood counterparts, like cecropia moths and lichen, Colbert weaves an enchanting love-of-land tale.
His self-deprecating anecdotes are laugh out loud funny and relatable for anyone who has spent time tromping around in the woods. After an irksome encounter with wood nettle, he reflects, “Ignorance can be bliss, but ignorance can also be blisters.”
An avid hunter and fisherman, Colbert draws connections between conservation and his favorite hobbies. Those who live close to the land—finding, catching, or harvesting their own food—move through the world as nature intended. He says, “It’s a powerful, and emotional, thing to see first-hand where the meat on your dinner plate comes from.” Seeing the living animal changes one’s sense of responsibility.
Born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the author, a retired Iowa State University biology professor, has a passion for connecting others to nature that shines as he shares stories of field adventures with students, enticing them to put their hands on the same reptiles that beckoned him in his youth.
Colbert hooks the reader with that first fish and keeps us on the line until the final pages, calling us to deepen our own connections to nature, to notice and learn from the natural world, and to protect it for future generations—because we protect the things we love.
With the permission of the author and Hog Press, a chapter of In Your Nature is available on our website for readers to sample: "Field Notes From the Road Not Taken."
Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design
In Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design, author and garden designer Benjamin Vogt challenges us to rethink what beauty means in our outdoor spaces. Instead of treating our yards and gardens as static displays, where non-native plants are herded into compliance for curb appeal, Vogt urges us to rewild. His message is simple but profound: “Bring the prairie home.” By designing with native species, we create living, resilient landscapes where biodiversity comes first.
Vogt offers practical, detailed guidance for planning, planting, and managing native gardens—including strategies for addressing HOA concerns. Illustrated with images that capture the breathtaking beauty of these wild landscapes, the book demonstrates just how much can unfold when we release strict control and allow prairies to show us another way.
Ultimately, Prairie Up is both a philosophy and a call to action. We have a choice: to see the land we inhabit as something to subdue, or as something to care for with humility and compassion. Vogt empowers us to choose stewardship, to love the ecosystem we live in, and to rediscover our place within it.
Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature
Tina Welling’s Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature explores how deep engagement with the natural world can fuel creativity and self-discovery. Welling’s central message is that creativity is rooted in our relationship with nature; she asserts that “everything we know about creating, we know intuitively from the natural world.” Writing Wild offers a compelling framework for reconnecting with the land. Welling’s approach aligns with the goals of Iowa’s conservation leaders, who emphasize the importance of fostering a deeper connection between people and the natural world to encourage responsible stewardship. Her book suggests that by paying close attention to the ordinary and wondrous aspects of nature—whether that’s a dew-beaded spiderweb or the prairie wind—individuals can not only enrich their creative lives but also cultivate a sense of responsibility and care for the environment.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
In The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws on her Potawatomi heritage, scientific expertise, and lyrical storytelling to reimagine our relationship with the environment and each other. Using the serviceberry tree as a central metaphor, Kimmerer explores the concept of a “gift economy”—a system rooted in reciprocity, gratitude, and the sharing of abundance, as modeled by the natural world. She contrasts this with the prevailing economic paradigm of scarcity and competition, arguing that nature’s systems, exemplified by the serviceberry’s generous distribution of fruit to birds, insects, and humans, offer a blueprint for more sustainable and equitable human societies.
Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
Douglas Tallamy, professor of entomology and ecology at the University of Delaware and author of Nature's Best Hope, puts the onus on all of us to act now for the survival of life on planet Earth. What we are doing in our parks and preserves is not enough, as evidenced by continued species loss. He provides practical tips for reestablishing natural landscapes in our privately owned and rented spaces. It's all hands on deck, and Tallamy makes it clear what we can do to ensure there is hope for generations to come. Tallamy calls our time the “Age of Ecological Enlightenment” and says, “We are on the cusp of a new environmental ethic.” According to Tallamy, this ethic “is the only option left for Homo sapiens if we want to remain viable in the future.”