Join Josie Iselin and Jessica Riskin for a conversation at Kepler’s Books on Nature, Science, and Art.

Gaze at Ernst Haeckel’s gracefully sinuous moon jellies, or any nineteenth-century compendium of nature illustrations bearing a title like “Animal kingdom arranged in conformity with its organization,” and the relationship between the natural world, and the human desires for beauty and order, starts to become apparent.

As parts of–and challenge to–this lineage, Jessica Riskin and Josie Iselin both explore the relationship between human nature and the natural world, skillfully blending scientific ideas with history, art, and culture. We are delighted that they will be joining us to discuss their newest titles, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest.

Josie Iselin is an artist, author, and designer who has been telling seaweed and kelp stories for over a decade. Her two books An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (2014, 2023) and The Curious World of Seaweed (2019) display her profound understanding of seaweed natural history and her deep connections within the seaweed science community. Iselin directs content development for the Above/Below campaign and is the lead author of the campaign’s web story, The Mysterious World of Bull Kelp (bullkelp.info). She teaches in the School of Design at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco. josieiselin.com