The Nebraska Master Naturalist Book Club is YOUR virtual monthly book club.
Gather in community with fellow Nebraska Master Naturalists as we explore the wonders of wildlife, the importance of sustainability, and the power of conservation through the pages of our favorite books. Let's read, discuss, and inspire action.
When: The fourth Tuesday of every month from 6:30pm-7:30pm CT.
Where: Zoom
Facilitator: Joy Branlund, Nebraska Master Naturalist
For Questions Email:
Joy Branlund, jbranlund@yahoo.com or Jamie Bachmann, jamie.bachmann@nebraska.gov.
REGISTER BELOW
May 26th, 2026| 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register Here
Speed and Scale: A Global Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis Now, by John Doerr
Description
In 2006, John Doerr was moved by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and a challenge from his teenage "Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it." Since then, Doerr has searched for solutions to this existential problem-as an investor, an advocate and a philanthropist.
Fifteen years later, despite breakthroughs in batteries, electric vehicles, plant-based proteins and solar and wind power, global warming continues to get worse. Its impact is all around droughts, floods, wildfires, the melting of the polar ice caps. Our world is squarely in a climate crisis and on the brink of a climate disaster.
Yet despite our state of emergency, climate change has yet to be tackled with the urgency and ambition it demands. More than ever, we need a clear course of action.
Fueled by a powerful tool called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), SPEED & SCALE offers an unprecedented global plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions before it's too late. Used by Google, Bono's ONE foundation and thousands of startups the world over, OKRs have scaled ideas into achievements that changed the world. With clear-eyed realism and an engineer's precision, Doerr identifies the measurable OKRs we need to reduce emissions across the board and to arrive by 2050 at net zero-the point where we are no longer adding to the heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere.
By turns pragmatic and inspiring, SPEED & SCALE intersperses Doerr's wide-ranging analysis with firsthand accounts from Jeff Bezos, Christiana Figueres, Al Gore, Mary Barra, Bill Gates, and other intrepid policy leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists and activists. This book is a launchpad for leaders of all kind, for anyone anywhere who can move others to act with them. With a definitive action plan, the latest science and a rising climate movement on our side, we can still reach net zero before it is too late. But as Doerr reminds us, there is no more time to waste.
June 23rd, 2026| 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register HERE
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger
Description
Award-winning environment and science reporter Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us. It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.
The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.
What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.
We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world.
July 28th, 2026 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register HERE
Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir, by Thomas C. Gannon
Description
Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.
August 25th, 2026 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register Here
Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals can Transform Our Lives- and Save Theirs, by Richard Louv
Description
Richard Louv’s landmark book, Last Child in the Woods , inspired an international movement to connect children and nature. Now Louv redefines the future of human-animal coexistence. Our Wild Calling explores these powerful and mysterious bonds and how they can transform our mental, physical, and spiritual lives, serve as an antidote to the growing epidemic of human loneliness, and help us tap into the empathy required to preserve life on Earth. Louv interviews researchers, theologians, wildlife experts, indigenous healers, psychologists, and others to show how people are communicating with animals in ancient and new ways; how dogs can teach children ethical behavior; how animal-assisted therapy may yet transform the mental health field; and what role the human-animal relationship plays in our spiritual health. He reports on wildlife relocation and on how the growing populations of wild species in urban areas are blurring the lines between domestic and wild animals.
Our Wild Calling makes the case for protecting, promoting, and creating a sustainable and shared habitat for all creatures—not out of fear, but out of love. Transformative and inspiring, this book points us toward what we all long for in the age of real connection.
September 22nd, 2026 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register Here
Book is TBD.
October 27th, 2026 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register Here
Book is TBD.
November 24th, 2026 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register Here
Book is TBD.
December 22nd, 2026 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm (CT) Register Here
Book is TBD
