Old school Environmenalism

I've been re-re (and in some cases re-re-re-) reading some of my favorite environmental authors. Authors who I first read 15, 20 years ago and who instilled in me my initial concepts of ecology, sustainability and conservation. Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, John Muir. People who nudged the movement a little more towards the mainstream, a direction it continues to move today.

As with so many "classic" writings (Jane Austin, Emerson, Shakespeare), it's easy to read them once in school, put them on a shelf and avoid them for the rest of your life. Then, years later you pull them down again, on a whim or when you've read everything else in your library. You discover to your shock that the sick and twisted Lady Macbeth actually gives you nightmares. That the love affair between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy is strikingly similar to how you behaved when you were in love at 20. These books are classics not because teachers force them on their literature class, but because they speak to people, they address emotions and circumstances that have not changed in 500 years and will not change for 5000 more.






Annie Dillard changed the face of the environmental movement. Edward Abbey, John Muir and Aldo Leopold founded or inspired the formation of environmental organizations that are still active and influential today (EarthFirst, The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, respectively). What is easy to forget, what I am thrilled to discover again, is that they were also gifted writers. Their clear-eyed vision of the natural world is inspiring. After reading A Pilgrim At Tinker's Creek in the evenings before bed, I walk around the next morning in a daze, looking at flowers by the side of the road or birds on telephone wires as if I had never seen them before. I read Abbey's travels through the Four Corners and my eyes water and my throat becomes dry with the red dust of the dessert.






It seems environmental writers today are so serious, so overwhelmed with the significance of The Crisis that they have forgotten what it was that they loved about Nature to begin with. They overwhelm the reader with statistics and numbers and policies and they leave out the wonder that can be found in a school of fingerlings or the sight of a clump of bear fur stuck on a broken branch.

I know there's a crisis. I know we have to make change happen or we will loose the fingerling, the bears and the trees. I just don't want to loose my own sense of wonder along the way.