Cincinnati-based nature writer John Tallmadge will talk tonight about discovering nature in one's backyard as part of a reading of the author's work.

The talk, sponsored by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, will be based on Tallmadge's second book, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City, about his experience of moving from Minnesota to Cincinnati and discovering the ability to find wilderness in a city.

"Tallmadge presents things that we don't usually think about and the way that these things are related to other things around us," associate English professor Bob Burkholder said. "There are all sorts of natural processes that we are not aware of."

Tallmadge is the final speaker in a series about nature-related subjects, Burkholder said. Recently, lecturers including environmental artist Stacy Levy and David Lettero, Penn State's Center for Sustainability operations director, have spoken about making natural processes known.

Tallmadge's first book, Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher's Path, is about wilderness travel and environmental values. In his second book, Tallmadge presents ideas about "here-at-hand" nature that surrounds society. "If we just think about the remote, the exotic or the pristine, we will never develop a truly intimate and ecological relationship with the landscapes where we live and work, which make up most of the country," Tallmadge said.

The unifying concept for nature movements like Tallmadge's is the existence of wilderness in all areas. Tallmadge said the idea about the plurality of nature came to him while contemplating the wilderness movement of the 1960s. "Everyone was repudiating society for nature, and in the course of this, people forgot about the rest of nature, calling it too messy, too damaged, too confusing," he said. "They wanted to preserve big tracts of wilderness, not their backyards."

In response to this, Tallmadge writes and speaks about the importance of recognizing problems society faces with nature in cities when people do things that are destructive. Tallmadge said the most prominent problem is pollution, which is what remains when people destroy nature for money. "Money is the universal solvent, and there is always a residue," he said. "We cannot escape the consequences of our actions. This is not a sustainable relationship with the natural world."

As a scholar, writer and editorial consultant, Tallmadge said his children were some of his best teachers early in his work. He tries to bring attention to and revisit the Midwest as a location of important natural discoveries.

The interesting and unexpected connections Tallmadge makes between nature and society are support Tallmadge's argument for finding nature in cities, said Ian Marshall, an English and environmental studies professor at Penn State Altoona College who has seen Tallmadge speak in the past.

"University students are probably not people to go out to the woods," Burkholder said. "Students may be interested in a way to find nature in cities and right outside their doors."