I have seen pictures of Pittsburgh back in the day and know the famous “Hell with the Lid Off” quote about the city. But something that doesn’t get mentioned as often is how treeless the city used to be.

While going over these pictures, I found myself asking “but where are any plants? It is just soil and concrete.” Pittsburgh now isn’t as forested as I would like it to be, but it seems like a dense forest compared to what it used to be. Reading this alongside Pittsburgh Steps gave me a new appreciation of the city I call home.

Back in ‘17, I was looking at completing my grad school experience at the North Cascades. At the time, I was the “blog writer” for NCI. Because of that job I had discovered that I did enjoy writing, especially in the less formal “blog” format. So I bought my own website to make Rooted in Dreams.

One of the series of blogs that I wanted to focus on was Literature Appetizer. It became a good way for me to process the books I read, even if no one read those posts. But I always felt weird when I read “smaller” or not Environmental Education based books. Should I put that on the website, even if it is only a few sentences?

This is an experiment; combining all Lit-Apps for a season into one post. Let me know your thoughts!

Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I was told that the “Indians used to live here, but now they don’t. There was some fighting but not a lot.” I never serious questioned the history I was told until I went to the North Cascades. One of my cohort mates belonged to a federally recognized tribe and started to show me how lacking my education was.

I learned more from An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz than I learned throughout my 14 years in public education. While I think it is a great book for folks around the world to read, I fully believe this should be required reading for all American students in our Public School system.