Join Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS) at the Mountain Lakes House for a book club dedicated to readings about conservation, stewardship, and our relationship with nature. New book club members welcome!
Led by Diana Newby, FOPOS board member and Associate Director of Writing at Princeton University, we'll spend our fourth meeting discussing Richard Powers's book The Overstory. Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Overstory gives a sprawling and ambitious account of the interconnectedness of living things, with a particular focus on the complex relationship between humans and trees over multiple generations of American history. Through a rich, interwoven narrative structure that mobilizes multiple protagonists around the common cause of environmental activism, Powers invites readers to reflect on our shared ties and obligations to the well-being of the natural world.
We will spend our first hour discussing The Overstory, sharing impressions, reflections, and points of connection to the mission of FOPOS, as well as our personal relationships with nature. In the last half hour, we will enact the book’s focus on the place of trees in forest ecologies with a Mountain Lakes walking tour that emphasizes FOPOS's work on tree preservation, including a visit to our grove of American Chestnuts.
Meetup Location: Mountain Lakes House Parking Lot
Directions & Parking: We will meet at the Mountain Lake House parking lot, located within the Billy Johnson Mountain Lakes Nature Preserve. Here is a link to the parking lot location on Google Maps & Apple Maps. The address of the Preserve is 57 Mountain Avenue, Princeton, NJ 08540; this will bring you to the entrance of the Preserve, not our meet-up location. To get to the Mountain Lakes House parking lot, look for the white gate along Mountain Avenue, marked by a series of black mailboxes along the road. Drive slowly down the long paved driveway. The gravel parking lot will be on your left, approximately 1/2 mile down the driveway.
Event waiver: Please complete this event waiver - fopos.org/waiver. This needs to be completed once per calendar year.