THE MAD SUGAR POP KULTCHUR RUSH

It’s a harrowing tale on numerous fronts: from the point of view of the region’s post-perestroika destitute manual laborers and loggers, of the various families trying to make ends meet at the unforgiving taiga’s edge, of the underfunded governmental organizations and individuals trying to help them while “managing” the tigers, and of the Amur tigers themselves, largely endangered and preyed upon by feckless poachers looking to cash in across the nearby Chinese border.

Vaillant, the Vancouver, BC, author who previously penned the heart-wrenching, deservedly much-admired Golden Spruce, imbues The Tiger with a fierce, fiery energy and dramatic narrative flow that reads novel-like at times, while at others like a top-drawer fact-driven piece from Smithsonian, Nat Geo or The New Yorker. The interweaved fates of the human characters and the shock-and-awe-inspiring tigers drive the book, delivering its timely message of “We’re all in this together.” Vaillant writes:

Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another’s territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers take only what they need.

Instead of beating us over the head with this message, Vaillant lets it slowly develop while allowing the story to unfold, its many larger-than-life characters sharing tales of the taiga and its inhabitants, the tigers, Russia both past and present, and much more that draws a portrait of a fragile enclave on the chill edge of a teetering world.

“If there is enough land, cover, water, and game to support a keystone species like [the tiger],” Vaillant writes, “it implies that all the creatures beneath it are present and accounted for, and that the ecosystem is intact. In this sense, the tiger represents an enormous canary in the biological coal mine.” Vaillant goes on to report that, as of December 2009, fewer than 400 tigers may remain in the Russian Far East (more than 75,000 were reported to having lived in Asia last century; this number has since dipped some 95 percent).

Yes, The Tiger is a real-life bloodcurdling thriller about an Amur tiger seemingly bent on revenge, relentlessly going after a poacher who’d crossed his path and foolishly invited his wrath (like a fearsome Udeghe tale featuring the mythical tiger-like monster/malevolent spirit Amba)—in that, it’s a pretty unputdownable read. It’s also a cautionary tale about the dangers of our Anthropocene age, as Vaillant has it, “characterized by increasingly dense concentrations of human beings living in permanent settlements on a landscape that has been progressively altered and degraded in order to support our steadily growing population”—in that, too, it’s a pretty unputdownable, and eminently compelling, read.

Tiger Protection Efforts in Primorye: Organizations to Support
Udeghe Legend National Park
Phoenix Fund
Tigris Foundation
21st Century Tiger
Wildlife Conservation Society

—Allen

*Yes, indeed, I’m talking vampires, werewolves, piranhas and zombies—sure, why not include our dear departed loved ones who, instead of silently nurturing the Earth six feet under, are reanimated, irascible and, of course, hungry for brains!

“THE ARCTIC IS CARRYING THE DEEP WOUNDS OF THE WORLD,”

Her timely, highly recommended book clashes great beauty (“The poet Joseph Brodsky said that the purpose of evolution was beauty,” she notes amid myriad descriptions of awe-inspiring Arctic allure) with dispassionate science (“The paradise called the Holocene is ending, and a new epoch, tentatively named the Anthropocene, is beginning—an era when climate will be forced against its cyclical ‘instinct’ to become cold again”). It’s this clash, really a jarring shift, like ice shelves themselves colliding, then violently crumbling as they part, that infuses Ehrlich’s text with its vigorous and heartrending power.

In her telling observations, she is as unrelenting as the melting ice: “Perhaps the term climate change should be changed to climate care, since it is carelessness that is bringing so many changes to life as we know it and most likely will bring much of the life of humans and megafauna on this planet to what may be the end”; or try: “When we lose an ecosystem we are losing our thumbprint uniqueness, our way of knowing the world and our strategies of survival.”

As tocsinlike and grim as this may sound, and is, Ehrlich also celebrates native ingenuity, creativity—primarily as witnessed through storytelling, myth and art—and toughened spirit—the will to survive, to balance a hierarchy of needs and to bask rather contentedly in the determinate beauty of a (still) ice-locked natural world—a little of the noble savage perhaps, but I’d never for a moment confuse Ehrlich with Rousseau.

I FIRST CAME ACROSS EHRLICH back in the mid-nineties when researching an Elliott Bay Booknotes story entitled “The Natural World & the Written Word.” I wrote, in part, about A Match to the Heart, her reminiscence of time spent recovering from a lightning strike she suffered while hiking near her Wyoming home: “[S]he approaches the natural world from an entirely different perspective, one that evokes awe at the ineffable, the edge of the infinite where lightning is born, delivered into our world then snatched back just as suddenly.”

Her evocation of awe at the ineffable certainly hasn’t been tamped down a decade and a half later in In the Empire of Ice; instead, it has simply been tempered, or annealed, by the observable—both quantifiable and qualifiable—onslaught of climate change, especially as she has first-hand witnessed it in her nearly 20 years traveling the Arctic Circle. (Her Arctic-themed books include Arctic Heart, This Cold Heaven and The Future of Ice.)

A 2007 National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to make a circumpolar journey and report on the environment and lives of indigenous Arctic people and how they were being impacted by climate change was the genesis of this book, which reads part-travel journal, part-scientific inquiry and part-requiem for a rapidly vanishing/never-to-return way of life. Ehrlich’s prose skitters, crackles and walrus-harrumphs its always-fascinating way from discussing diminishing albedos (surface reflectivity of the sun’s radiation, which can keep global warming in check) and the negative impact of more open waterways on native hunting, to the current value of jimajatuqangit (traditional Inuit knowledge) and the ultra-sensitivity of a narwhal’s eight-foot-long spiral tusk (actually a tooth with ten million nerve endings).

Ehrlich’s poetic predilection for anthropomorphizing the ice—it embraces, calms and cools, has legs that bend at the knees, it gets sick and dies; her glaciers have faces, toes and snouts—makes it a living, breathing character throughout the book, one whom we come to love and admire (or at least empathize with) as much as she does, and with increased fervency as we become more aware of how imperiled it is, losing more ground, literally, day by day, month by month, year by year. It’s an effective technique, handled in such a way as to not come across heavy-handed, and provides a solid narrative base as we move, across four chapters, from the Bering Straight to northwestern Russia to Arctic Canada and finally to Greenland.

Along the way we meet scientists and naturalists, but primarily natives, be they Inuits in Alaska and Canada, nomadic Komi in Russia or native Greenlanders; all struggling to adapt to the changes in their world and to continue to survive as best they know how. All the stories Ehrlich shares are compelling. “Arctic people are unique because of their environment,” she writes. “Isolated by ice and fierce weather, theirs represents a continuum of culture that spans tundra and ocean, ice sheets and glaciers, fjords and open-ocean ecosystems, steep coastal mountains, ice-flattened benchlands, and valleys that are verdant for the one-month-long Arctic summer.”

As much as this book is about, as Ehrlich punchily puts it, “genocide: the abuse of indigenous peoples at the top of the world [and] terricide: the abuse of the planet for progress and profit, paying no heed to the biological health of the world,” it is also about hope, about not wanting to see the vibrant people lovingly profiled and their ways of life destroyed or devastatingly compromised—humanity can change its ways, learn from past mistakes and oblivious misadventures—hope, then, even under current conditions, can exist, and persist.

“Surrender is not normally a word used to wage war against extinction,” Ehrlich writes. “But surrender we must—that is, surrender our sovereignty over the planet. The interglacial paradise in which we’ve been living so comfortably is shifting to a world that will not be compatible with human life.” She sums up, in elegant simplicity: “We can no longer hide from the truth.” In the Empire of Ice, then, amounts to full exposure, a heady mixture of terror and beauty, irrationality and reason, a mighty yawning abyss and a greater spirit to enlighten and ennoble in the face of adversity.

Let me close with one final Ehrlich observation, the first word she learned in Greenland:

The first word I learned in Greenland was Sila. It means, simultaneously, weather, the power of nature, and consciousness. For humans and animals that have co-evolved with ice and cold, there is no perceivable boundary between a “knowing” sentient being and the strong forces of weather.

—Allen

FAR FROM JUST FLIGHTY PERSIFLAGE

One of the true joys of Bright Wings, that is, in addition to Sibley’s captivating opaque watercolor and gouache paintings, is its avoidance of the obvious and cliché-riddled when it comes to poems about birds. As Collins relates in the book’s intro, “Because this gathering did not want merely to echo the work of past anthologizers, many of the obvious choices were passed over. Classics such as Keat’s and Coleridge’s nightingales, Yeats’s swans at Coole, Bryan’s waterfowl, Jeffers’s hawks, Hopkins’s windhover, and Poe’s raven have been showcased in so many books of poetry—bird-oriented or otherwise—that no editorial regrets were felt at the decision to leave them out. Instead, air time is given to many lesser-known poems, particularly more contemporary ones, in order to give the reader a better chance of being taken by surprise.”

Taking flight, then, are evocative, plumed words by poets as far ranging as Jonathan Aaron (“Cedar Waxwings”) and David Bottoms (“An Owl”) to Lisa Williams (“The Kingfisher” and “Grackles”) and David Yezzi (“Mother Carey’s Hen”)—but that doesn’t mean you won’t find Thomas Hardy (“The Darkling Thrush” ), D.H. Lawrence (“Humming-Bird” ), Emily Dickinson (“I have a Bird in spring” and “I dreaded that first Robin so” ) or William Carlos Williams (“The Birds” ). Again, Collins from his intro: “[R]ecent poems about birds may fall into the loose category of ‘ecopoetry,’ or they may remain in a state of post-Emersonian idealism regarding nature.” Whatever path they take in Bright Wings, they capture our fancy while simultaneously setting our spirit free, whether read silently or aloud, which, as with all poetry, serves them best.

I’ll let poet Juliana Gray have the parting words here, from her Bright Wings-included poem “Rose-Breasted Grosbeak”: “Oh, pretty bird! Oh, fluff and feathers, beak / and bright eye, alliterative name / in my throat!”

—Allen

‘There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.’ —Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’

PROPHETIC WORDS OR AN AGE-OLD OBSERVATION of the way change, by necessity, is initiated, that is, breakdown serves as accelerant? In America at Risk: The Crisis of Hope, Trust, and Caring by Purdue sociologists Robert Perrucci and Carolyn Perrucci (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), systemic cracks are painfully dissected—with true and actionable enlightenment, hopefully, to follow. The Perruccis’ thesis:

“We believe that the decline of hope, trust, and caring is the unanticipated consequence of the major transformation over the last thirty years in the kind of goods and services produced in America, in the technology that is used in production, and in the people who are involved in the production process. We call the composite of these changes the new economy.”

Their take on our current collective cachexia, all part and parcel of the “new economy,” makes for compelling reading, and the slender book (including index and notes it’s a mere 160 pages) offers up an array of solutions that deserves further exploration, certainly before we move from Cohen’s “Anthem” to Gibbons’ Decline and Fall … (for instance, from Gibbons: “If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honor”—just plug in “terrorists” in place of “barbarian conquerers” and “America” in place of “Rome,” and wait for the cookie to crumble).

SO WHAT EXACTLY CONSTITUTES THIS “MAJOR TRANSFORMATION” reported by the Perruccis? They see a troubling trifecta of globalized production, computerized production and flexible work organization as the primary perpetrators—with the greater populace thoroughly disempowered the distressing result. Globalized production—companies looking for higher profit margins shifted investment to countries with lower wages, less regulation and nonunionization—resulted in the loss of millions of U.S. jobs, that is, the deindustrialization of America. Computerized production—made possible by computer-assisted design and manufacturing, as well as “flattening” advanced telecommunications technology—eliminated many jobs and made it even easier to produce products abroad. Computerized production also created a demand for “knowledge workers” who competently handle the technology and “contribute to the growing income and wealth inequality generated by the new economy.”

Flexible work organization, finally, refers to the greater flexibility companies wield in the type of workers they hire and in their work arrangements. Old-school “social contracts” between employee and employer have been replaced by major restructuring, downsizing and outsourcing—resulting in greater job insecurity for blue-collar and white-collar workers. Privatization is another factor the Perruccis see at work here, the provisional shift of public services to private (including foreign) firms operating on a for-profit basis. The authors glumly report: “Thus, the expanded use of the private sector to deliver public services will continue to cut into the availability and quality of services to Americans and their communities, and it will undermine the unions that represent public employees and protect their wages, health, and pension benefits.”

With the stage set (or should that be wrecked?), America at Risk next tackles hope, trust and caring as they relate to our current state of affairs (and this book is post-Wall St. crisis, post-bailout and enamored with neither Democrats or Republicans). The Perruccis write:

“Recognizing that hope, trust, and caring are interrelated is especially important when we start to think about remedies to improve the lives of Americans. For example, it may be technically and politically feasible to develop strategies to improve hope by expanding public employment opportunities. But if the policy excludes Americans who believe that they also are deserving of help, then hope will have been extended at the expense of trust; that is, loss of trust in a political system that helps some but not all who are deserving. Thus, when we begin to think about remedies in chapter 8 [the book's concluding chapter, "Confronting the Crisis"], we will be mindful of the way that hope, trust, and caring can be part of an upward spiral of improvement, or a downward spiral of continued decline.”

The book sharply examines employment, educational, community and familial experiences as they vary across race, age, class, gender and geographic location. Illustrative, eye-opening facts and figures abound (always sourced), and are opportunely employed for maximum effect. For example:

• 750,000 Americans are homeless on any given night, with 20 percent of them considered chronically homeless
• $892 million—the average annual earnings of the top 25 hedge-fund managers in 2007; up $360 million from the previous year
• 2/3—the income level of Native Americans to that of white Americans; 23.2 percent of Native Americans were living below the poverty line in 2000—the highest percentage of any ethnic group
• 2,258,983—the number of prisoners in federal or state prison or in local jails on December 31, 2006—yep, we continue to incarcerate more people than other country in the world

Without belaboring the point (and this is not to contend that the book does!), America is very much at risk, so what’s to be done? Is there still time? Do we, collectively and individually, have the audacity? The Perruccis say yes. The book’s concluding chapter, “Confronting the Crisis,” offers up a number of suggestions, particularly around the plight of the displaced worker, going beyond merely “expanding the social safety net.” “The ideal solution to a societal problem,” the Perruccis write, “is one that can restore both hope and trust because the majority of Americans believe that it is good for the country and for them.”

Evoking JFK’s 1961 call for “a great new American enterprise” to put a man on the moon by decade’s end (not to mention FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society), the Perruccis call for the rebuilding of America’s deteriorating infrastructure, and share the D average of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2005 Infrastructure Report Card. How will this be paid for? Public money (taxes) and private money (individual and business contributions) will be required—a hard but necessary sell. Also, a “Jobs for America” program should be established, funded by private and public contributions, with additional funds shifted from the defense budget (read military-industrial complex) and potentially NASA. Workers in the program would focus first on rebuilding the country’s infrastructure (green-collar and green-tech jobs would fit nicely in here, I believe), and then on providing support personnel for schools, libraries, hospitals, nursing homes and prisons—all with enhanced pay and benefits.

The Perruccis also call for a national industrial policy that identifies critical sectors of the economy which require support in times of economic difficulty—”while it is too late now for some sectors, this would have meant helping the steel industry, auto industry, and textile industry in the 1970s and 1980s when they were facing competition from firms in other countries”—and an equal playing field when it comes to educational opportunities (instituting, for example, comparable per-pupil expenditures at all schools). The Perruccis contend that term limits and further accountability should be instituted in Washington and locally to restore trust in government. And finally, in-home and long-term care should get better support, as well as the rehabilitation of prisoners and push for less incarceration of nonviolent offenders. I kind of zoomed over these last points—sorry!—but wanted to show that a lot of ground is deftly covered in this imperative “Confronting the Crisis” chapter.

In the Perruccis’ closing analysis:

“Although America is the richest and most powerful nation in the world, nothing lasts forever, and for the last thirty years or so America has gone down a path that threatens its continued viability as the place where most people want to live and raise their children. We believe that the triple crises of hope, trust, and caring threaten to make America a very different country, one different in ways that only the privileged class of Americans will not recognize or understand. The privileged class will continue to enjoy high levels of income, wealth, and security, and their gated-community lives will protect them somewhat from seeing how the other 80 percent are living. But this kind of polarized society is not sustainable. Eventually those who are continuously excluded from the American Dream will submit a bill for payment of their real grievances.” [emphasis added]

It’s high time to heed the light and mend those cracks, and books like America at Risk, while certainly not pretending to have all the answers to society’s ills, can aid in starting a dialogue, if not actually getting things moving forward.

—Allen

“I LIVE IN A PART OF THE COUNTRY

An out-of-touch cranky neo-luddite screeching for a return to prelapsarian times? Hardly. Berry’s vision is that of a hardy-yet-hoary realist, tinged by both optimism and pessimism (ah, the foibles of humanity!), attempting to show us a path out of our befoulment, a steaming, festering swamp we teeter face-first ever closer toward. And Berry’s prose? Gracefully worn and weathered to a burnished beauty, like a glacier-cast erratic, transfigurative in its straightforward simplicity.

“NOW WE FACE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE that we are not smart enough to recover Eden by assault,” Berry continues in that same 20-year-old opening essay, “and that nature does not tolerate or excuse our abuses. If, in spite of the evidence against us, we are finding it hard to relinquish our old ambition, we are also seeing more clearly every day how that ambition has reduced and enslaved us.” Again, a harsh-yet-realist assessment of where we are today—and clearly observed two decades ago. Over the course of its 234 pages, Bringing It to the Table shows us how to get away from that “ambition,” how small farms and farmers are achieving this end, and how food, what we eat and how we eat it and where it comes from, can bring the vast majority of us who don’t and never will farm to the transformative table Berry has in mind. Consider it the taxonomy of a well-rounded meal.

The book is neatly divided into three parts, “Farming,” “Farmers” and “Food,” with essays and novel/story excerpts dating from 1960 to 2006. The “Food” section, which closes the book and primarily consists of excerpts from Berry’s fiction (all deal with eating, the “communal event” that meals represent), doesn’t quite cohere with the others—it seems a little force-fitted and concept-pushed—even with Berry’s accompanying contextual notes for guidance. I’ve never been a fan of reading short excerpts of larger works of fiction, especially when situated directly adjacent matter-of-fact essays. That said, this section does close with an excellent essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” again from 1989, which considers eating an agricultural-political act:

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

Berry makes an impassioned plea for us to (re)connect to the natural world—a powerful means to establishing empathy and rethinking our relationship to the environment per se. “A significant part of the pleasure of eating,” he writes, “is one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.”

“Farming” and “Farmers” make up the vast majority of the book—and choice observations and bon mots abound, easily appreciated no matter where you stand on the urban-rural divide. I don’t want to share all the folded-down pages and underscored passages from my copy of the book (I’d rather you go out, purchase your own copy and read it straight through), but Berry, time and again, essay after essay, has a firm grasp of what makes a compelling story (Border Cheviot hill sheep in “Let the Farm Judge”—see pic to left), an ideal anecdote (the practicality of a well-planned barn in “Elmer Lapp’s Place”) and the timely application of a necessarily sharp barb (“The factory farm, rather than serving the farm family and the local community, is an economic siphon, sucking value out of the local landscape and the local community into distant bank accounts” in “Stupidity in Concentration”).

I’ve posted previously on the growth of organic agriculture and need for more fair agricultural policy, and sincerely hope the work of writers like Wendell Berry, with books as vivid and telling as Bringing It to the Table, can and will reach a wider mainstream audience, including lawmakers and influencers from K Street to Hollywood and Vine, to help effect real change in matters of what and how we eat, where our food comes from and where we’re heading as a nation and as a world—let’s make “super-sized” and its ilk words and practices of a distant, unhealthy past never to be repeated. Let’s not leave Berry and Bringing It to the Table like Ovid and Sorrows of an Exile, where:

You’ll go, my little book—and I feel no envy—
Without me to the City where, alas,
Your master may not go. Go, but be shabby
As suits an exile’s book. In your sad pass
Be dressed to match our lot: no purple cover—
That color won’t beseem a grieving soul—

Extra Credit
Closing with a poetic extract I’d feel it remiss to not also mention and highly recommend Berry’s new collection of verse, Leavings (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009), which, while not exactly the Georgics, includes his latest “sabbath” poems (2005-2008)—observations on life, death, love, friendship and nature originating from contemplative Sunday wanderings. Berry, certainly not an exile, is also on Facebook, where you can become a fan and comment on a wide variety of sanctioned posts.

—Allen

“We need the tonic of wilderness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

I think this quote gets at the rather juicy heart of Gibson’s compelling and eminently readable Reenchanted World, published this spring by Metropolitan Books, a cautionary tale for the double aughts that judiciously includes a “Hope Renewed” coda.

GIBSON IS VERY GOOD at setting the scene, delivering tasteful slabs of environmental history, both politically and culturally speaking, from John Muir, Ansel Adams and Rachel Carson to Rick Bass, Julia Butterfly Hill and Whale Rider. With an eclectic selection of quotes and references, he paints a portrait of the great rift between those who believe in all beings living in harmony (kinship with nature) and those who believe in humanity’s dominance over animals and nature in general (e.g., “drill, baby, drill!”). The “culture of enchantment,” and increasingly “reenchantment,” Gibson says, strengthens this first group’s position and can bring others—those on the fence, indifferent or even on the other side—into the camp. Talk about a timely message!

A Reenchanted World covers a wide swath of turbulent ground: it’s more a choice sampler of battles-lines-drawn eco issues that you can further explore on your own, rather than a compendium of exhaustive inquiries into what went, and is going, wrong, who’s to blame and how we can make it right. I think this is a strength, and obviously a very conscious choice by Gibson, as it allows him to show you just what a wide array of opinions and viewpoints regarding nature have been out there, are out there and will be out there in the future; for instance, he considers the battle over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Earth First! and the Glen Canyon Dam, Kodiak Island’s Grizzly Sanctuary, Pat Robertson and the environmental “New World Order” (transitioning to the “Left Behind” books), damaging exurban communities, the commercial transformation that has “profaned” Mount Everest and its surrounding area, the flooding of Hetch Hetchy and Gary Snyder’s clarion call in verse, Turtle Island:

The USA slowly lost its mandate
in the middle and later twentieth century
it never gave the mountains and rivers,
a vote.
All the people turned away from it.

So enough already with the doom and gloom, strife and conflict, epic Manichean showdown between good vs. evil, etc. etc.! Gibson spends the last 30-odd pages showing how people are, under his rubric, “Fighting Back.” He points out how the proposal to open ANWR was defeated and other W-era challenges to the environment have been overturned by growing eco-conscious coalitions. Regarding the religious right, he observes how the Evangelical Environmental Network and National Association of Evangelicals have taken to environmental messaging with agendas such as “What Would Jesus Drive?” and “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” Public advocacy, Gibson reports, is also recording a sizable uptick: he sites the betterment of wetlands, grasslands, urban rivers and harbors, native wildlife and the buzz around biodiversity as prime examples.

Gibson also draws from the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, released in 2005. While its news was hardly a teddy-bear picnic, it did include this phrase of cultural enchantment: “Appreciation of the natural world is an important part of what makes us human.” And driving the point home, Gibson says, “The culture of enchantment is flowering now because it meets a human need for transcendence and connection to the natural world. [...] The culture of enchantment has kindled people’s interest in other creatures, helped them empathize with animals, made them want to see lands and oceans preserved. It has opened people’s imaginations, and in doing so it has changed the political climate. The spread of enchantment means that the environmental movement and its allies can now shift their strategy from defense to offense.”

I read this as a wonderful return to Thoreau’s idea of being “refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features,” and an inherent “need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” Bravo, Henry David Thoreau! and bravo, James William Gibson, with A Reenchanted World!

—Allen

Henry David Thoreau

James William Gibson