Canton Public Library

According to msnbc.com, the Doomsday Seed Vault located in Norway is scheduled to receive nearly 25,000 samples of seeds this week from around the world. The vault acts as a backup for living crop collections around the world to ensure crop diversity and future food supplies. The vault opened on February 2008 and is dug into the Platåberget mountain ("Plateau mountain") located near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, a group of islands north of mainland Norway. Look to CPL for more resources on seeds or search our Science in Context database for information on the Doomsday Seed Vault or Svalbard Global Seed Vault. [Photo courtesy of AP Images]

According to trendwatching.com in 12 Consumer Trends for 2012, one trend to watch out for in 2012 is what they have dubbed "eco-cycology" or "the phenomenon of brands helping consumers recycle by taking back all old items from customers, and then doing something constructive with them." While this is sometimes prompted by legislation and sometimes by companies themselves, ultimately it is prompted by you the consumer. Check out CPL resources to learn more about how businesses are greening their practices.

Salvage the bones: a novel by Jesmyn Ward was announced on Wednesday as the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. The novel — about a poor, rural African American family living in Mississippi and facing obstacles no less then Hurricane Katrina — was considered "a long shot, at best" to win the prestigious award according to a CNN article. Ward, herself a Katrina survivior, was surprised and delighted. Now on the radar, critics are quickly praising it as a "classical tragedy."

Once upon a river : a novel by Bonnie Jo Campbell — What if we were left to discover life, love and the world on our own at a very young age with no preconceived socially-defined rights and wrongs? This is one of the questions that Bonnie Jo Campbell will force you to ponder. The protagonist is 16-year-old Margo who sets out in a flat-bottomed teak rowboat on the Stark River in southwestern Michigan to find her mother, who has abandoned the family. Margo fashions herself after her hero, Annie Oakley, which adds a sense of timelessness to the novel — although unbelievably it is set in 1970. Margo sustains herself, and in fact thrives, in the face of every sort of adversity through a combination of courage, stubbornness and savvy. This novel is not, however, for the faint of heart. There’s incest, rape, murder and graphic descriptions of animal skinning, among other things. Though, like Jim Harrison's Michigan-based fiction, you will find yourself absorbed by Campbell's keen observations of the local environment.