THE OREGON EXTENSION

Fall 2025 Book List will be posted soon

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In the meantime, here's what we read last year:

Incoming Students: Buy and finish reading the summer book over the summer.  We will discuss it over the first few days after you arrive in August.  We have ordered all the other books for the semester, and they will be here waiting for you. We order these to insure that we all have the same editions for our discussion groups.  

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Summer Reading

Brian Doyle, Mink River, 2010

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Segment 1: What is Nature?

Dianne Glave, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage, 2010.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 2007.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2015.

Jedediah Purdy. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, 2015.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2017.

Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, 1995. 

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Segment 2: What is Community?

Britt Bennett, The Vanishing Half: A Novel, 2020.

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning,  2001.

George Packer, TLast Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal,  2021.

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Segment 3: What is a Sustainable World?

Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming,             2017.

Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir, 2007.

ADDITIONAL BOOKS FOR EACH SKILL TRACK IN THIS SEGMENT

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Segment 4: What Does it Mean to be Human?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,  2005.

 

Wilderness Recreation

Rick Curtis, The Backpacker’s Field Manual.  2005.