Q&A: Author Margaret Renkl on beauty, climate change and her literary devotional, ‘The Comfort of Crows’ - Chattanooga Times Free Press
Q&A: Author Margaret Renkl on beauty, climate change and her literary devotional, ‘The Comfort of Crows’ | Chattanooga Times Free Press
"THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A BACKYARD YEAR" by Margaret Renkl (Spiegel & Grau, 288 pages, $32).
Essayist and New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl brings her keen eye and tender observations to her Nashville backyard in "The Comfort of Crows: My Backyard Year." Starting in winter, Renkl seeks — and finds — a remarkable clarity as she moves week by week through each season of a difficult year of change.
As the world around her tilts, Renkl grounds herself in the natural world of fox, bluebird and toad, urging her readers to stop and notice the beech trees and the snakeroot, "to consider the deep hollows of the persimmon's bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection."
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.