Useful, and More

The essays in this slim book, Coming to Land in a Troubled World, cover a lot of (ahem) ground and manage to avoid being the message of gloom and doom that often threatens to overwhelm environmental writing. Despite a tsunami of bad news about the state of Earth, reading is easier when the emphasis is on hope and resilience -- although, of course, one wonders if this is merely a denial mechanism to keep us motivated and sane. A discussion for another day, perhaps?

Kathleen Dean Moore's "Landing" leads off by deconstructing the artificial divisions that permeate our environmental conversations. It's difficult to communicate the complexity of the natural world, where everything is connected, but Moore reminds us that our tendency to reduce subtle interactions to such extremes as "Near / Far" and "Humans / Nature" misses the incredible richness of the layered truth surrounding us.  

Scott Russell Sanders follows with a literal prescription of principles for realization and action in "A Conservationist's Manifesto." You couldn't ask for a better To Do list, if you want to get going on saving what's left.

Finally, "Lifting the Veil" by Peter Forbes meanders through where we've been and how we got where we are, touching on Aldo Leopold, Scott Nearing, and the Buddha along the way. Ending with the how and the why of storytelling, he strikes a profound chord for anyone who wants to reach beyond the environmental choir. 

Published by The Trust for Public Land, this book also contains thinking points for evaluating environmental work, developed and used by that organization, as well as a list of useful facts and figures. I have no doubt that since it was published in 2003, the numbers have changed but the overall truth remains. Examples:

--Number of countries in the world that spend less on everything they buy than the U.S. spends on trash bags alone: 90

--Percentage of U.S. summer air pollution that comes from gas-powered lawn equipment: 5

       

--Ratio of time spent shopping to time spent playing with their kids for the average American: 7 to 1

This book came to me at a particularly good time. It prompted me to line up other books by these authors, a sign that my appetite for reading about nature remains unabated when it's presented with useful, hopeful terms. And of course, the need for this work remains.

Excerpt (Peter Forbes):

Human love is a vital and yet complicated part of the solution. But what do we hope our love will create? And, while being open to expressing our love, we must recognize that people express love in many different ways, some of which aren't healthy. Love can be liberating and it can be possessive. I value Leopold's bottom line, which is "a thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people."

But imagine how difficult this is in a culture dominated by fear. Fear is everywhere. We fear change. We fear one another. We fear what's being taken away from us. We fear what we can and cannot do. We fear knowing the truth. We fear what might be done to us. We fear truly feeling the beauty and the dis-ease of the world.  

Note: This book counts toward the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.