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American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

by Bill Mckibben

ISBN13: 9781598530209
ISBN10: 1598530208
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries.

Classics of the environmental imaginationthe essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Springare set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of "nature" join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

Review:

"Colonial Americans didn't have much use for the wild, for what one Puritan leader characterized as a 'savage, howling wilderness.' The territory beyond the fall line was inhospitable and dangerous, fit mostly for bears, Indians and wolves, as to the destruction of which, wrote one observer in 1634, there was 'little hope ... the country being so spacious and they so numerous.' If there was any good... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in the New World, those Colonials thought, it would be found in the settled places they had wrested from the obdurate ground, cities on hills surrounded by the hostile woods.

A couple of centuries later, with hundreds of thousands of people settled in the Ohio Valley and westward to the Mississippi, the backcountry was both an abstraction of empire-building politicians and a concrete thing to be subdued by lesser beings. Only a few oddballs, Henry David Thoreau notable among them, seemed to miss the Indians and the wild woods much. As Rebecca Solnit has observed, Thoreau 'spent a lot of time imaginatively repopulating with Indians the woods around Concord, and even prepared quantities of notes for a never-attempted history of Native America.'

Today, many environmental historians consider Thoreau and his 1854 memoir, 'Walden,' to mark the beginning of the environmental thought that would flourish with the arrival of John Burroughs, John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson in the coming decades. Thoreau was not the first writer to celebrate the American land — his intellectual ancestors include John and William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Garden — but he is our watershed, and Bill McKibben's wide-ranging anthology of modern American nature writing rightly begins with him, even if the canonical Thoreau is among the most heavily anthologized of American writers already.

McKibben brings solid credentials to the work as both a nature writer and an anthologist (of John Burroughs). Moreover, he is a reader, and even a glance at the table of contents of 'American Earth,' a volume in the estimable Library of America, indicates he has labored hard in the vineyards of the nation's literature to make it. Thoreau has been reprinted again and again, to be sure, but Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865) has not. The opening line of her largely forgotten poem 'Fallen Forests' is enough to suggest her place in the genealogy: 'Man's warfare on the trees is terrible.' And if her language is a little musty by modern lights, it merits a fresh hearing all the same.

Sigourney is not the only writer whom McKibben rescues from obscurity; it's always good to hear from Howard Zahniser, Kenneth E. Boulding and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who still have much to tell us. More, he reintroduces writers such as Walt Whitman and Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James, as ecological pioneers — in Cooper's case, for having been perhaps the first American writer to call attention to the remaking of the landscape by invasive species: 'The burdock and nettle, and thistle, &c., &c. are growing too plentifully under fences, and in waste spots; chickweed and purslane, &c., &c., spring up in the paths and beds so freely and so boldly, that it is the chief labor of the month to wage war upon their tribe.' The anthology contains work by the usual suspects: Muir, Carson, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez and lately Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver. They have been seen before, but they are particularly at home here.

What truly sets the anthology apart is not the mix of the obscure and the familiar but McKibben's habit of enlisting voices whom we are not accustomed to thinking of as environmentalists or ecologists. I'd be willing to bet that this is the first work of nature writing to feature the drawings of R. Crumb, of Zap Comix fame, alongside lyrics by Marvin Gaye ('Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas / Fish full of mercury') and a lively poem that should put Don Marquis, of 'archy & mehitabel' renown, on any government watch list of eco-radicals ('america was once a paradise / of timberland and stream / but it is dying because of the greed / and money lust of a thousand little kings'). A note to the watchers and listmakers out there: Marquis died in 1937.

Well selected, full of surprises and informed by McKibben's thoughtful commentary, 'American Earth' is the first anthology of American nature writing to come close to the standard Thomas Lyon set two decades ago with '"This Incomperable Lande": A Book of American Nature Writing.' Ours is an incomparable land indeed, and McKibben's collection is a welcome reminder."

Reviewed by Gregory McNamee, author of 'Gila: The Life and Death of an American River,' 'The Mountain World' and other books, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"In his introduction to this superb anthology, McKibben (The End of Nature) proposes that "environmental writing is America's most distinctive contribution to the world's literature." The collected pieces amply prove the point. Arranged chronologically, McKibbin's selection of more than 100 writers includes some of the great early conservationists, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and John Burroughs, and many other eloquent nature writers, including Donald Cultross Peattie, Edwin Way Teale and Henry Beston. The early exponents of national parks and wilderness areas have their say, as do writers who have borne witness to environmental degradationJohn Steinbeck and Caroline Henderson on the dust bowl, for example, and Berton Rouechand others who have reported on the effects of toxic pollution. Visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and Amory Lovins are represented, as are a wealth of contemporary activist/writers, among them Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Paul Hawken, and Calvin deWitt, cofounder of the Evangelical Environmental Network. McKibben's trenchant introductions to the pieces sum up each writer's thoughts and form a running commentary on the progress of the conservation movement. The book, being published on Earth Day, can be read as a survey of the literature of American environmentalism, but above all, it should be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the writing."

Publisher's Weekly

About the Author

BILL MCKIBBEN, editor, is the author of many books including The End of Nature (1989), the first account of global warming for a general audience, and most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007). Since 2006, he has organized the largest demonstrations against the causes of global warming in American history. He is scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781598530209
Subtitle:: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Author:: Mckibben, Bill
Foreword:: Gore, Albert, Jr.
Editor:: McKibben, Bill
Author:: McKibben, Bill
Publisher:: Library of America
Subject:: Essays
Subject:: Reference
Subject:: Nature conservation
Subject:: Environmentalism
Subject:: Ecology in literature.
Edition Description:: Hardcover
Series:: Library of America
Series Volume:: 182
Publication Date:: May 2008
Binding:: Hardcover
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Illustrations:: Y
Pages:: 1047
Dimensions:: 8.02x5.26x2.10 in. 2.26 lbs.

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