A cheering assessment of the future of the planet.
An optimistic look at how humans are showing greater respect for the natural world.
“There is deep agreement across western nations that we are all connected to the Earth,” writes Outwater (Water: A Natural History, 1996, etc.), “and that the natural world must be respected and preserved for the future.” Beginning with Native Americans, the author details Americans’ interactions with a continent whose bounty seemed limitless and ripe for exploitation. Unlike European settlers, tribal communities revered nature’s gifts and sought to balance human and animal needs. Outwater believes that their relationship with nature “echoes the sustainable balance we are trying to create today.” In a spirited, fact-filled history, the author chronicles changing attitudes and practices over many centuries. As a response to the Industrial Revolution, Romantic philosophers, poets, and artists “embraced nature as a spiritual force.” With industry sullying the environment and fomenting diseases such as tuberculosis, clean air and water were seen as curative. The rise of science, technology, and intercontinental trade inspired a vogue for collecting and classifying nature. “In Victorian times,” Outwater notes, “studying nature and building a personal natural history collection was seen as an appropriate way to praise God.” Public collections—zoos, museums, botanical gardens—attracted curious visitors, and tourists flocked to natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and Yosemite. Investigating nature and appreciating its aesthetic qualities, however, competed with the exploitation of waterways, forests, and land to serve increasing populations, the rise of cities, and westward expansion. To provide a picturesque experience of nature for city dwellers, landscape architecture—a term first used by Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted—combined traditional gardening with city planning. Although Outwater recounts many instances of detrimental environmental policies—e.g., Ronald Reagan’s head of the Department of the Interior called the environmental movement “a left-wing cult”—she offers, in an appendix, a list of major environmental laws enacted from 1964 to 1973 that have led to significant protections. In many cases, restoration has occurred more quickly than anticipated.
A cheering assessment of the future of the planet.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-08578-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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