What a wonderful collection of strange things! I know our patrons especially love learning the history of odd things, so we will definitely be recommending to our patrons.

In Strange Harvests, Edward Posnett investigates the ways that our "relationship with nature" has been "broken by capitalism" and uses a curiosity cabinet of natural objects to force his readers to look around their own homes and ask where from and by what processes they obtained the ordinary artifacts that make up their daily lives.

Posnett often refers to the Victorian quest genre and his work mimics it, taking him to far away places, subjecting him to trials, and sometimes imparting bleak and sober lessons about our impact on nature. He begins with the Icelandic (and possibly utopic) harvest of eiderdown. He looks into the systems of profit that rules its harvest (most of the profit does not go to those doing the work) as well as the division of labor (women are very involved in this work) and, finally, into what we destroy (arctic foxes, in this case) to protect a species we see as valuable.

Our next stop is in the nearly "insensate cave walls" of Borneo where the subject of the dangerous work of retrieving bird's nests encompasses issues such as clashes between East and West, monocultural agriculture, and fears about dampening or obscuring native voices. Similar chapters on civet coffee, sea silk, tagua nuts, and vicuna wool take on other such hard-hitting issues like conservation, cruelty, fraud, animal display, personal ethics, and slavery.

In the end, the importance of Posnett's work may not be the interesting, modern day curiosity cabinet he assembles, but the ways in which his work asks readers to come to know the products of their own lives. What is natural? Biodegradable? Ethical? What are the origins of the objects we live with? Where have they come from and who helped bring them to us? If more readers grapple with these questions, we might come to live in a more sustainable world.