Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless

Living mindfully with nature during a time of uncertainty

In the midst of the environmental crises of the early twenty-first century, Tamara Dean sought a way to live lightly on the planet. Her quest drew her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There, she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change--an experience at once soul-stirring and practical that she recounts in Shelter and Storm.

Dean’s boundless curiosity and gift for storytelling imbue these essays with urgency and a sense of adventure. She invites readers to share in her discoveries while hunting for water, learning that a persistent weed could be food, or burning a hayfield to recreate a prairie. Contending with the fallout of fires, floods, and tornadoes, she offers responses to natural disasters that reflect the importance of community, now and for generations to come. Whether tracking down a rare, blue-glowing firefly, engineering a beaver-friendly waterway to appease a dying neighbor, or building a house of earthen blocks, Dean unites personal experience with science and history, presenting a perspective as informative as it is compelling.

Keenly attentive to the stakes for our planet’s future--and the implications of extreme weather, shifting agricultural practices, and political divides--Shelter and Storm illuminates a thoughtful way forward for anyone concerned about climate change and its far-reaching consequences or for anyone searching, as Dean has, for a more sustainable way to live.

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Tamara Dean has been camping, fishing, hiking, and gathering wild foods from an early age, led and inspired by her parents. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive, and she is author of The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. She teaches writing independently and through writing centers across the nation.