Book Review: American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Whether you’re (still) trying to figure out what to get that hard to shop for greenie for Christmas or you’re looking for a good book to hunker down with over the holidays, a new volume edited by Bill McKibben and titled American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau is so packed with high-quality writing it is literally hard to put down.
McKibben, well known for his environmental writings, including The End of Nature (1989), the first book for a general audience about global warming, and more recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), has compiled the foundational writings of American environmentalism and stuffed them into a 1,000 page epic tome that anyone with a green bone in their body would love to add to their bookshelf.
Published by the non-profit Library of America, American Earth explores some of the most critical works to spark American environmentalism as we know it.
Beginning with a foreword by Al Gore and introduction by McKibben, the book quickly dives into excerpts from Henry David Thoreau and winds its way through the works of nineteenth and twentieth century masters like George Perkins March, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Garrett Hardin, and Michael Pollan. American Earth is unique in that it takes well-marked diversions away from classic environmental writing into the world of politics and popular culture.
McKibben differentiates the works in this anthology from earlier ‘nature writing’ that aimed to describe the natural world. By setting ‘environmental writing’ apart from these earlier works, McKibben sets the tone for the book. He writes in the introduction:
“But ‘environmental writing’ is something different from these. As defined broadly by the pieces in this book, it takes as its subject the collision between people and the rest of the world, and asks searching questions about that collision: Is it necessary? What are its effects? Might there be a better way? To a considerable degree, environmental writing can be said to overlap with what is often called ‘nature writing’; but it subsumes and moves beyond it, seeking answers as well as consolation embracing controversy, sometimes sounding an alarm. While it often celebrates nature, it also recognizes, implicitly or explicitly, that nature is no longer innocent or invulnerable…”
Stepping out of what would be considered traditional environmental writing, the book makes room for works
and speeches by politicians and jurists like Theodore Roosevelt’s stirring 1903 speech at the Grand Canyon and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s 1965 landmark legal dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton; for entertainers P.T. Barnum, Woody Guthrie and Marvin Gaye; for landscape architects and planners Frederick Law Olmstead and Benton MacKaye; and for activists like Cesar Chavez, Edward Abbey, Lois Gibbs, and Julia Butterfly Hill.
Fortunately for the reader, the high quality of writing presented throughout American Earth is matched by the rich photographs assembled in an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations. These images powerfully convey the wonder of our natural world, the costs of development and despoliation, and the passion of environmental activism. It includes artists like Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Carlton Watkins, Stephen Shore, and many others.
For more information on American Earth you can visit americanearth.org
Image: Library of Congress
