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The 2023 Biophilic Leadership Summit Returns to Serenbe!

March 27, 2023Josh Niesse

Serenbe is host to an annual gathering called the Biophilic Leadership Summit, happening this year on April 23-26. The Summit is the only multi-day conference entirely focused on biophilic projects, research & principles, bringing together top industry thought-leaders in an intimate natural setting to network, build partnerships and learn from each other.

But what do we mean exactly when we talk about the term Biophilia?

Biophilia is the innate human connection to nature and other living systems. It is a concept that has been around for centuries, embedded in many spiritual traditions and indigenous worldviews, but it was not until the late 20th century that it began to be studied scientifically. The term biophilia was first used by German-born American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). Fromm defined biophilia as “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive.”

The concept of biophilia was later popularized by the legendary American biologist Edward O. Wilson in his book Biophilia (1984). Wilson defined biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” Wilson argued that biophilia is an evolutionary adaptation that has helped humans to survive and thrive. He cited the fact that humans are drawn to nature and that they find it to be a source of comfort and healing.

Wilson also argued that biophilia is a necessary component of human happiness and well-being. He cited the fact that people who live in close proximity to nature tend to be happier and healthier than those who do not. Biophilia is also being studied as a way to improve human health and well-being. There is growing evidence that exposure to nature can help to reduce stress, improve sleep, and boost creativity. These findings have gained popularity in recent years with multiple bestselling books on the topic including Richard Louv’s The Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder and Florence Williams’ The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative to name just a couple.

The concept of biophilia is a powerful one that has the potential to change the way we live and interact with the world around us. Serenbe is just one example of an increasing number of communities attempting to integrate biophilic design principles into the design of their neighborhoods.

As we reawaken to the benefits of living lives more connected to the natural world, gatherings like the Biophilic Leadership Summit offer opportunities for thought leaders in fields such as science, environmentalism, architecture, urban planning, builders/developers, and interested/concerned citizens from all walks of life to come to together and help grow the movement for a world infused with nature centered design.

Hills & Hamlets Bookshop is delighted to be the official bookstore partner of the Biophilic Leadership Summit. A number of important biophilic speakers will be featured at the summit, many of whom have written books in their respective areas of expertise, and Hills & Hamlets Bookshop will be on site for a number book signings throughout the gathering. Please refer to the summit schedule here.

Keynote speaker Fred Dust is the author of Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Conversation

Bill Browning and Catie Ryan are the authors of Nature Inside: A Biophilic Design Guide

Anjan Chatterjee, M.D. is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art

Dan Immergluck is the author of Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta

Philip James Tabb is the author Biophilic Urbanism: Designing Resilient Communities For The Future and Serene Urbanism: A Biophilic Theory and Practice of Sustainable Placemaking

Timothy Beatley is the author of The Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design and Healthy Environments, Healing Spaces: Practices and Directions in Health, Planning, and Design among others.

Jennifer Walsh is the author of Walk Your Way Calm

Don Stuart and the American Farmland Trust are the authors of No Farmers, No Food: Uniting Farmers and Environmentalists to Transform American Agriculture

5 Ways to Support Your Local Independent Bookstore

November 22, 2019Josh Niesse

For those who may not have been following the book industry news over the last few years, there has been a delightful and surprising resurgence of independent bookstores. According to the American Booksellers Association “there has been a 35 percent increase in the number of independent bookstore locations since 2009, existing locations are opening new locations, and established stores are being successfully sold to new owners, often younger owners as a new generation of booksellers enters the industry.” And this happened after nearly a decade of declining numbers as the industry struggled to adapt to the onslaught of Amazon and e-commerce. Even with this good news showing the impressive resilience of indie booksellers, we are facing a tough climate. Amazon’s share of the print book market expanded from 37% in 2015 to over 50% for the first time in 2019. All this is to say: if you are a lover of independent bookstores, please don’t get complacent at the news of our revival, we still have a lot of work to do. It is part of our personal mission to be part of a national movement to revive the independent neighborhood bookstore. To that end, here are some ways you can support your local independent bookstore that you may not have thought about.

Get Your Audiobooks From Libro.fm

Are you an audiobook fan? Have you heard of Libro.fm? If not, you need to know about it. It’s a simple to use smart-phone app and is the same price as Amazon-owned Audible ($14.99/mo) but you get to pick a local independent bookstore that your purchases support. Use the coupon code “switch” (as in, you’ll promise to switch from Audible to Libro) to get an extra free book when you sign up, and be sure to pick our Carrollton store location Underground Books as your bookstore to benefit from your purchases. I didn’t think I’d like audiobooks, but I am now a passionate convert. I constantly hear the phrase “I don’t have time to read” from customers in the store (usually the friends or spouses of customers, actually), and audiobooks are the perfect remedy for this problem. Listen during your commute to work, while you’re doing the dishes, working out, walking the dog, etc. and voila – you’ve made time to read! Libro also recently launched a bulk buying option for corporate/business groups (we recommend listening to Simon Sinek books with your work team!).

2. Purchase Gift Cards or Open a House Account

Most bookstores offer gift cards (both Hills & Hamlets Bookshop and Underground Books do), and buying gift cards to give to friends, family, or co-workers is an amazing way to show your support. If you work for a company that gives holiday gifts to employees, consider including gift cards from your local bookstore! We also offer a “house account” option at Hills & Hamlets Bookshop currently, where you can pre-purchase large blocks of store credit at a discount (the bigger the house account deposit you make, the better the deal). This is an especially good option for the serious reader, book-loving family, or the discount-sensitive book buyer. If you are an Underground Books customer and are interested in this option, let us know and we can discuss it!

3. Create a Home Library

The #1 reason people standing in our stores give us for why they aren’t making a purchase is that they don’t have room or have too many books they haven’t read already. If this is you we would like to refer you to this excellent article on author Umberto Eco’s famous home library and his philosophy toward book collecting. For those of us that may not have the room or budget to build a 30,000 volume home library like good ole Umberto, we would still say the problem is more likely that you don’t have enough bookshelves in your home than it is that you don’t have enough room. We draw great inspiration from our local friend and book collector Gilbert Huey, who converted his garage attic into an exceptional home library. We featured Huey’s library on the Underground Books blog a couple years ago, and you can see pictures and read about it HERE.

We can’t speak for everyone, but we would definitely rather have a home library than a man-cave or a she-shed. For locals to Underground Books, we’d like to recommend Adam & Sons on the square, which has a wonderful selection of beautiful bookshelves.

4. Bring Friends and Out-of-Town Visitors to the Bookstore

We learned early on at Underground Books how our community’s pride in the bookstore and sense of shared ownership became an important part of our recipe for success. When, in 2013 we successfully executed a crowdfunding campaign to raise almost $10,000 from over 120 people in our community for the down payment to purchase our building, we noticed how those supporters became our biggest champions. They had helped us overcome a huge hurdle to our long-term viability, and they were proud of it! And then they wanted to do more, so these core supporters started to do something amazing – they constantly brought new people to the store, local friends who had never been in before, or out of town guests they were hosting. And guess what? Many of those new customers buy books and become regular supporters. When we opened Hills & Hamlets Bookshop in 2016 we were able to get about 25 families in the neighborhood to pre-purchase big blocks of store credit before we opened in order to help us finance the build-out. Those families to this day form an incredible bedrock of support, and nearly all of them bring in new customers and guests to visit the store.

5. Foster an “Indies First” Mindset; Special Orders and Pre-Orders

In this video created to promote Small Business Saturday, New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin encourages viewers to visit their local indie bookstores on November 30 in honor of Indies First/Small Business Saturday.

“Indies First” is what independent booksellers call Small Business Saturday (it’s kind of a token effort to take the branding of the day back from American Express). It is usually a huge day for local bookstores, like it is for many small and independent retailers. What we really like about the name is that it reflects what we think is a good mindset to advocate for. We don’t ever try to tell people they shouldn’t shop for books online, as we believe it is for most people, not a realistic goal. While we would love for all of our local customers to ONLY get their books from us instead of amazon, we try to be realistic. What we ask is that you simply consider your local indie first before shopping for something online. If we don’t have what you want on hand, we can almost always order it. If you know there is a hot release coming out soon that you want to have, instead of pre-ordering it on Amazon, consider pre-ordering it from your local bookstore. You can email us at undergroundbooksllc@gmail.com or at hillsandhamlets@gmail.com with any special order requests. While we don’t have our websites set up for special orders, we have several thousand rare, vintage, or antiquarian books listed for sale at UndergroundBooks.Net and we have selections of signed books for sale at HillsAndHamlets.com, all of which are available for purchase through their respective websites.

As communities increasingly recognize the cultural value of having independent bookstores in their neighborhoods, but struggle to keep them financially viable, we are seeing an outpouring of creativity among indie bookstores as we all explore new and unique ways to thrive in an age of frictionless one-click e-commerce. Keep an eye out for a new and exciting development launching in early 2020 called Bookshop.org, which will be a similar model to Libro.fm but for print books and will offer a way to enjoy the convenience of online shopping while still supporting your local bookstore.

Seven Books To Change The Way We Think About Nature

June 02, 2019Josh Niesse

As booksellers in Serenbe, a self described “wellness community connected to nature,” we read a lot of books about the natural world, environmentalism, trees, green living, sustainable design, and so on. Below we’ve put together a list of 7 of our favorite titles related to nature and our human understanding of our place in the natural world. It contains only one work of fiction, and six works of nonfiction, but all are very accessible books, not requiring any special technical or scientific understanding.

If any of these titles sound interesting to you and you want to purchase them, just click on the picture or the title and you can buy them from us and support a small independent community bookstore in the process!

Click HERE to learn more about the Serenbe community our bookstore is in, which the New York Times called “a utopian experiment in New Urbanism being molded out of Georgia red clay.”

Without further ado, here is our list:

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of―and paean to―the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours―vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

2. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

3. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

After learning about the complex life of trees, a walk in the woods will never be the same again.

4. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams

From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas―and the answers they yield―are more urgent than ever. (signed copies available on our website while supplies last)

5. The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

“I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.

As children’s connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity.

In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply—and find the joy of family connectedness in the process.

6. The Wizard and The Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann

In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.

7. The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris (illustrator)

In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary ― widely used in schools around the world ― was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these “lost words” included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions ― the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual ― became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.

Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a “spell book” that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. The Lost Words is that book ― a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America.

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