’Dust Clouds over Texas Panhandle“ by Arthur Rothstein, 1936
Despite easy access to online information and the convenience of being able to read the New York Times on my cell phone, I always feel a thrill when a hefty book comes my way. There’s something about the promise of hours of reading pleasure, of turning hundreds of pages, one after another, that will never be supplanted by a screen, no matter how many gigabytes it can store.
So I was happy to run across American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, a collection of essays edited by Bill McKibben. American Earth provides a roadmap through environmental thinking in the United States since 1837, when Henry David Thoreau first waxed eloquent about life on Walden Pond. But this book is no race through time on the interstate; with more than a hundred authors writing nearly a thousand pages, American Earth meanders through almost two centuries, stopping at quirky roadside attractions and traveling down little-known side roads. The destination, for the reader, is a thoughtful, broader understanding of the world we live in.
In the book’s forward, Al Gore, former vice-president and current dean of the save-the-planet movement, says, “Taken together, these essays, poems, cartoons and speeches show how our country’s attitude toward nature had developed and changed from Thoreau’s time to our own. Above all, they show us that environmentalism, while inevitably a source of conflict, is inherent in our national character, a fundamental part of our heritage as Americans.”
It’s a heritage to be proud of. In “Wintertrip Into New Country,” Bob Marshall, former U.S. Forest Service employee and one of the founders of the Wilderness Society, describes a trek he took in 1931, over a friendly wager, to track the origins of a river in Alaska. He describes the “fresh grandeur” that awaited him and his companion at their destination, but he also instructs on cold weather layering: First something to insulate the body; second, leather or closely woven cloth to keep the wind out. And he cautions: “… a person must be sure not to wear so much that he perspires, because it is disastrous to get wet. Most people who freeze to death in this North Country first got wet, either by breaking through the overflow or perspiring.” He describes his own gear, from his woolen underwear up, and recommends a caribou-fur parka and a muskrat cap on fairly cold days, though “it was never more than 31 below” on this particular trip.
Marshall is an iconic wilderness figure, and his writings—along with Rachel Carson, Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt and others—offer a solid background about wilderness exploration and thought before there was GORE-TEX or GPS navigation or even an environmental “movement” in this country. Contemporary writers such as Barry Lopez, Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams and Michael Pollan continue this tradition, providing thoughtful takes on beached whales, wolf packs, migrating birds and the particulars of animal feedlots.
But where this volume shines is in the unexpected. In a poignant excerpt from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick describes an unnamed protagonist coming across a collection of live animals. In this far-in-the-future scenario, most animals are extinct or available only through auction houses, and they are as rare and expensive as fine art is today.
Then there’s E.B. White, whose greatest contribution to environmental writing, according to McKibben, may have been children’s books, including Charlotte’s Web. White pens a graceful piece that begins with a rumination of earthly possessions as he watches Mary Martin move into his Manhattan neighborhood. He segues from this into the perils of universal pollution, the atomic bomb and the vagueness of prose on the presidential campaign trail in 1956, when both Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson tended to “speak of national security as though it were still capable of being dissociated from universal well-being, [as though] national verve somehow transcended the natural world.”
For this and for the song lyrics of Marvin Gaye and Joni Mitchell, the cartoons of R. Crumb and J.N. “Ding” Darling, who was head of the Bureau of Biological Survey (now U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) in the 1930s, and for all the other well-known and unknown writers represented, American Earth is a pleasure to read. It’s chock-full of elegant writing and pithy observations which, when taken as a whole, offer an unparalleled look at the world. The chronology is tied together by McKibben’s introduction to each piece, allowing the reader to place, say, Denis Hays as the founder of Earth Day in 1970.
But the real power of this collection is that it points out the inter-connectiveness of our lives and the environment. Although our industrial society has encouraged us to embrace technology and to view nature as separate from ourselves, these essays point to the impossibility of separating the natural world and the society we live in. The earth doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and connecting to it is possible even for those who don’t live in a cabin in the woods.