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BAYOU FAREWELL

Name: BAYOU FAREWELL
Author: Mike Tidwell
ISBN: 0-375-42076-2

THE RICH LIFE AND TRAGIC DEATH OF LOUISIANA’S CAJUN COAST

by Mike Tidwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2003

First-rate report from a land even environmentalists forgot.

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Travel journalist Tidwell (Amazon Stranger, 1996, etc.) takes a lingering, eye-opening look at the bayous and marshlands of West Louisiana.

Initially intent on documenting the lifestyles and mores of today’s Cajuns, heirs of the French settlers known as Acadians who were tragically uprooted from maritime Canada in the 1750s by the conquering British, the author discovers more than predictable nostalgia for an oft-probed, fading tradition. With their boats, nets, and bayou camps, he realizes, these proudly stubborn people are essentially feeding America by delivering more shrimp, crab, and other seafood than any other region, or even several combined. But with their culture slip-sliding away, Tidwell finds many Cajuns strangely resigned to an even more disturbing fact: the actual ground they live on is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of 25 square miles (roughly the size of Manhattan) per year. The more he grows unabashedly enamored of the Cajuns’ work ethic, their good-humored, independent nature, and welcoming rituals in which ambrosial gumbos seemingly appear out of thin air, the more exercised he becomes over the idea that nobody seems to care (e.g., the national media isn’t reporting) that a unique American resource is literally going down the drain. In between night jaunts down the bayou to the shrimping “battleground” when the spring tides turn, the author looks for straight answers from the experts. It’s no surprise that decades of containing the Mississippi’s flood waters with increasingly massive levees has shut down the natural delta-forming mechanism; add a crazy-quilt of oil company pipelines, each with an attendant canal, and the marshland’s death sentence is final. Tidwell won’t quit until he finds a plan, and while there’s some hope for reversal, it’s arguable that this can be pulled off, even with massive Federal aid, in a state where political payoffs are a cottage industry.

First-rate report from a land even environmentalists forgot.

Pub Date: March 4, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-42076-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003

Categories:

NATURE

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOST TREES OF WILLOW AVENUE
by Mike Tidwell

- BOOK REVIEW
AMAZON STRANGER
by Mike Tidwell

- BOOK REVIEW
IN THE SHADOW OF THE WHITE HOUSE
by Mike Tidwell

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A FULL LIFE IN A SMALL PLACE

AND OTHER ESSAYS FROM A DESERT GARDEN

by Janice Emily Bowers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1993

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A naturalist and gardener explores Arizona desert life. Bowers (The Mountains Next Door, 1991, etc.—not reviewed), although a botanist for more than a decade, never wanted a garden: She studied wild plants and distrusted New Agers' talk of tomatoes that love carrots. Then, nearing 40, she conceived a passion to garden; here, 16 essays record her beginning green- thumb years. Bowers decided to garden organically, and she cogently demystifies some of the organic farmer's seemingly irrational methods. Her new conviction, though, occasionally veers into sanctimony: ``Professional agronomists...[are] often little more than shills for the pesticide industry'' while organic gardeners are ``large-hearted'' and ``reverent.'' An essay on composting finds the author musing on death and on mortals' return to the soil as her compost pile arouses oceanic feelings ``of being part of the endless nutrient cycles that keep our planet alive''—a familiar theme of ego-loss in nature writing that goes back to Thoreau's description of hoeing beans. Elsewhere, beginning with the statement that ``gardening imparts a sense of place and time that little else can,'' Bowers expounds beautifully on how Native Americans plant by natural events rather than by the calendar. When oaks bloomed and catbirds began to call in Massachusetts, Algonquins knew the soil had warmed enough to plant corn; in the author's own Sonoran desert, the stirring of harvester ants and the mesquite's new leaves signal that the danger of frost is past. Despite adroit detailing and many highlights, these essays as a whole feel inert, unleavened by action, progress, or other people; still, reflective and informed nature writing.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-8165-1345-7

Page Count: 172

Publisher: Univ. of Arizona

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992

Categories:

NATURE

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THE VOICE OF THE EARTH

by Theodore Roszak ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 1992

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Repeatedly, in this scholarly survey of cultural history, Roszak (History/California State Univ.; Flicker, 1991, etc.) evokes a back-to-nature philosophy, contrasting the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment with the romanticism of the noble savage; prehistoric animism and earth-mother religion with the rise of patriarchy and male-dominated, nature-dominating religion. All this by way of elaborating what he sees as the only salvation of the ecological crisis: a new ``ecopsychology.'' The new school celebrates the individual, seen in harmonious interrelationships with the family, society, Mother Earth, and, ultimately, the cosmos. Ecopsychology is informed by various post- Freudian schools: some Jung (collective unconscious), and something of Reich, Maslow, Gestalt psychology, and various California-style movements—in general, those schools that look upon the unconscious as the well-spring of creativity. ``The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious,'' Roszak says, containing ``the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time.'' Yes, time's arrow and the evolution of the cosmos figure large in Roszak's philosophy. Taking the Big Bang as a given, and borrowing arguments from systems theory, the Gaia hypothesis, and the anthropic principle, he sees the emergence of humanity as inevitable in the grand scheme of things. It follows, then, that we must get back on track with Mother Earth. How to do this finds Roszak lamenting urban- industrial society. Cities are bad. Deep ecology is good. The restorative work must begin in childhood, and must involve a breaking away from macho ideas and the invoking of some concepts of ecofeminism. Roszak turns a fine sentence and knows his history (if not his science), but his idealism pays no mind to the population problem, poverty, disease, or rising racial-ethnic conflicts; and it dismisses the cultural largesse of cities and pays scant homage to what science and technology might do. In short, there seems to be more wish than reality here.