Here are some of my thoughts on some of the other non-fiction I've been reading.
American Chestnut: The Life Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel: This was a nice bit US historical ecology with lots of focus on how the death of the chestnut trees effect the people who lived with them. There are some nice bits of oral history collected in the book.
The 2nd part of the book is all about the efforts to breed a blight resistant chestnut tree which are on going. This bit had cool plant breeding stuff and some interesting characters. There are some bits about GM too. I think that using GM for this would be great I'd far I think there are less likely to be unintended consequences of a few genes deliberately inserted the ~10% breed in (but including those few genes) however the author is a bit less then enthusiastic about GM.
Cheek By Jowl by Ursula K Le Guin: This was book of essays about and defending fantasy. I quite like Le Guin's essays in general and I liked these too. My favourite was the long essay about different kinds of animal stories.
Moveable Feast by Sarah Murray: This was kinda fun but not very deep -- it's kinda "free markets are probably good and environmental destruction and global warming are bad" but not really looking into the interconnections between these things or these thing and the stories the author tells. However they are neat stories, and I now know more about Roman olive oil trade, shipping containers, and the
dabbawallas of Mumbai than I did before.