For those who want to take conservation seriously, there is no substitute for digging into the leading writings of our most important voices. For some years I have taught to graduate students from various disciplines a readings course on conservation thought, considered as a critique and proposed reformation of modern culture. My suggestions here draw on experiences with the many readings used in that course and on student reactions to them. Inevitably, the list reflects my own assessment; other observers would compile different offerings. My recommendations center around twelve key works, starting with the most important. I offer comments about each work’s value and add references to selected similar works.
1. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). Leopold’s classic is the most probing, wide-ranging work on the subject of conservation. In length it is short; in wisdom it overflows. A virtue and drawback of the work is that the words flow so smoothly and the stories are so engaging in narrative terms that it is easy for readers to underestimate the complexity of Leopold’s ideas and feelings. First-time readers, having heard of the book’s importance, frequently come away from it underwhelmed. The book deserves—and amply repays—multiple careful readings. Leopold was not one to waste words.
To properly understand this work we need to recognize Leopold’s chief aim in writing it: not to entertain or to inform, although those goals fit into the mix, but to fundamentally change the reader. Leopold speaks directly to the individual reader, one to one. His hope—implicitly conveyed in the opening essay, “January Thaw”—is that the reader, like the hibernating skunk in his tale, might awaken from slumber and see the land anew, appreciating its details, following up its mysteries, and contemplating the many ways that humans and other animals are alike. By late in life Leopold concluded that conservation required fundamental shifts in the ways people perceived nature and valued it. They needed new aesthetic standards, an enlarged sense of morality, broader senses of community, and more. Leopold’s Almanac, as a result, operates at various levels. Many readers find it useful to read the book through once with care, grappling with the issues posed in the final essays, and then to go back through the text to see how Leopold works on and with those same issues throughout each essay. “Show, don’t tell” was one of Leopold’s writing guidelines. Infect readers with your own love of nature; let them see the land through your eyes.
Best known among the Almanac’s many pieces is the ultimate one, “The Land Ethic.” Leopold wrote it not long before he died, and he doubtless would have revised it before publication, given the chance. (Leopold died one week after the book was accepted for publication; it came out eighteen months later.) “The Land Ethic,” in truth, contains far too many ideas in a form too condensed for any ordinary reader to assimilate easily. In its compactness and need for careful parsing, it draws comparison with tight religious texts. To understand the final essay, it is helpful to outline it carefully, identifying the steps in Leopold’s argument, and then to delve into each step one by one. It is interesting to note that Leopold intended to have “The Land Ethic” appear first in the book’s final section, “The Upshot,” not last (the decision to shift it was made by his son, Luna, and Oxford’s editors). To read the final four essays in their intended order is to gain a different sense of emphasis. With “The Land Ethic” first in “The Upshot,” we see it not as the ultimate answer but more as a point of beginning for serious inquiry, which the three following essays then pursue. Because of its title, many readers plow through the essay until they find the section describing the land ethic, as if all else were mere background. It is easy to pass by, or at least underestimate, Leopold’s comments about what conservation should be trying to achieve—the promotion of land health. With “The Land Ethic” first, we end the book with “Wilderness” and with his prophetic pronouncement that “all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.” Just such a search, just such a new beginning, was what Leopold thought necessary.
Another good entry point into the Almanac is to track down Leopold’s original longer foreword. Responding to an editor’s suggestion, Leopold wisely provided the much shorter foreword that the book now contains. The original foreword appears in J. Baird Callicott, A Companion to “A Sand County Almanac” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), and variations on the longer foreword are found in Leopold’s papers, held at the University of Wisconsin Archives in Madison. In it, Leopold comments on many of the book’s individual essays, linking them loosely to events in his life and to his own evolving thought. In his typically understated way, he tells us which pieces are most important. He particularly emphasizes the easily overlooked piece “Odyssey,” in which he probes what was for him the key land function (maintaining soil fertility) and the central way that humans were degrading land (by shortening food chains and disrupting the land’s ability to recycle nutrients). It is hard to overstate the importance of the ideas in “Odyssey” to Leopold’s mature conservation thought.
Leading Leopold scholars Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, in “The River of the Mother of God” and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), have put together an excellent one-volume sampler, chronologically arranged, of some of Leopold’s hundreds of shorter writings. The editors’ introduction provides a valuable overview, and the book ends with the best available Leopold bibliography. A shorter collection, focused on Leopold’s farmland-related conservation writings and including key essays on land health, is J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, eds., For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999). Another book, a collection of Leopold pieces (mostly journal entries describing hunting trips) published soon after his death, is useful chiefly because of the insights it offers on his early career and personal life: Luna B. Leopold, ed., Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). An Oxford cloth and Ballantine paper edition, carrying the title “A Sand County Almanac” and Other Essays on Conservation from “Round River” (first published 1966), includes all of Leopold’s Almanac as well as selections (some condensed) from Round River.
Leopold is the subject of an excellent biography, Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). His emerging ecological thought is considered in Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974). Callicott’s valuable essays on Leopold appear in two volumes of his collected works: In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), and Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Many of Curt Meine’s essays appear in Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004).
Even with this secondary writing, there is much about Leopold’s thought that is poorly understood. His perceptive ideas on conservation economics and private lands conservation, for instance, have received nothing like the attention they deserve. The vast scholarly gaps on his overall goal of land health and on Leopold as cultural reformer have been ably addressed by Julianne Lutz Newton, “The Commonweal of Life: Aldo Leopold and Land Health” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004; forthcoming from Island Press in 2006). Newton has investigated more thoroughly than anyone the science behind Leopold’s ethic and his idea of land health, showing the major ways in which he borrowed from others. She also probes the major nonscience influences on his thinking. In all, her work is both the culmination of a half century of Leopold scholarship and a major point of beginning for further study, particularly on Leopold’s cultural criticisms and his belief that conservation required major social change.
2. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). Berry’s work evokes widely differing responses among readers. Many are put off by the circumstances and choices of his life—he runs a small, hilly farm using draft horses rather than a tractor. They assume he is merely calling us to look backward, nostalgically, to some preindustrial era that is long gone, if it ever existed. For others, he is our supreme moralist, a true prophet who sees more clearly than anyone our cultural flaws and who variously encourages, cajoles, induces, and enjoins us to amend our ways. Berry is easily the most prolific writer on nature and culture at work today, with some forty books to his credit, including half a dozen novels and numerous collections of essays, poems, and short stories. He is a major conservation voice of the era, if not the most important one. Nearly all of his books are in print.
Berry’s work is wide-ranging and complex, posing a challenge for those seeking a place to enter. The Unsettling of America is perhaps his best-known individual book. It is a hard-hitting critique of the force that has wrought more change to our landscapes than any other: industrial agriculture. The flaws that he finds within agribusiness are more cultural than they are technological, and they appear, he tells us, throughout contemporary society. Berry’s style here and in many of his essays is pointed and polemical; he speaks in a strident tone that many readers find harsh and overconfident. Elsewhere, he is more ruminative, reserved, uncertain, and at times refreshingly humorous. In nearly all writings he draws upon the experiences of his own life and those of family and friends. The confidence and harsh judgment that Berry so often displays in his nonfiction is for the most part absent in his masterful novels and stories, all set in a fictionalized version of the region along the Kentucky River (Port Royal in real life, Port William in the fiction) where Berry’s family has lived for generations. In Berry’s fiction, one sees in action the same challenges, stresses, cultural impulses, moral dilemmas, and human foibles that weave throughout all of his work.
In my graduate course I typically use two of Berry’s shortest volumes: a story collection, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986) and an essay collection, Another Turn of the Crank (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1995). In The Wild Birds Berry offers narrative variations on the themes of membership, community, and belonging as lived by and among Port William’s residents, who vary from the responsible to the deviant. The traits and struggles of the model community member are presented here in the character of Mat Feltner, with lawyer Wheeler Catlett as his worthy if sometimes reluctant successor. Underlying every tale are senses of connection: between people and land, among family members and neighbors, and across the generations. Another Turn of the Crank includes some of Berry’s most valuable meditations on health, property, nature, and the common good; it provides a solid introduction to his conservation thought.
Berry’s short stories are now collected into a single volume, That Distant Land (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004). The book includes features that will delight Berry admirers: a map of the fictional Port William setting and a genealogical chart showing the familial links among the main characters over the 140-year-period covered in his fiction. The stories appear in the order of the time periods in which they are set. Interspersed among entries in the table of contents are the titles of his novels and the years in which they are set. It is thus possible for a devoted reader to proceed easily through all of his fiction in rough order of fictional chronology.
Berry’s two longest novels are masterpieces. The earlier one, A Place on Earth, rev. ed. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983; original longer edition, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), is set in the final year of World War II and centers around the Feltner family’s recognition that their son Virgil, heir to the agrarian tradition—and, by implication, symbol of the prewar world—will not return from the outburst of industrial destruction then taking place in Europe. The more recent one, Jayber Crow (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2000), is Berry’s most overtly religious book. The title character struggles to live a virtuous life in spite of the passions within him and the powerful forces that are dragging down his small town and native agrarian culture. Is it possible, Berry asks, to follow the Christian admonition to love one’s neighbor when the neighbor’s ways of living are bringing ruin to all that one values?
Many of Berry’s agrarian essays are collected in Norman Wirzba, ed., The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2002). Agrarianism, the conservation strand of which Berry is the acknowledged leader, is surveyed in two similarly titled collections of writings by leading practitioners and advocates: Eric T. Freyfogle, ed., The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001); and Norman Wirzba, ed., The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003). Of the secondary writing on Berry (of which there is little that takes him seriously as a conservation figure), the best is Kimberly K. Smith, Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). A good literary study that approaches Berry through the various personas he employs is Janet Goodrich, The Unforeseen Self in the Works of Wendell Berry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).
Throughout his writing Berry makes use of the literary technique of synecdoche, drawing upon the specific example and circumstances of his life to illustrate larger principles and claims. His skilled use of the technique helps make his writing vivid, exact, and appealing. It also accounts, though, for his dismissal by readers who assume that he is offering his own life as the one and true way to dwell. The truth is quite to the contrary. His life and community, Berry tells us, are a microcosm of the larger world, riven by the same tensions and challenges that are at work pretty much everywhere. If his life differs in outward details, it is much the same as all other American lives in the forces that press upon him and upon his natural home. To look beyond his particular case is to reap the intellectual harvest that Berry offers in abundance.
3. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Like Leopold’s classic, Worster’s magnificent essay collection is not so much a book as an entire library pressed between two covers. No academic discipline better situates a scholar to see the big picture than history, and Worster is a master of the craft. He takes in the full sweep of America’s story, paying particular attention to the ways we have shaped nature and in turn been shaped by it. Although the land appears prominently in every essay, American culture is Worster’s target, and his critical observations dig deep. Some essays introduce environmental history and its chief findings while chiding the American history profession generally for underappreciating the vital influences of nature-culture interactions. Other essays attend to our dominant form of land use, farming: what it has done to the land, what it says about us, and how it needs to change. Many essays address water use, particularly the ethos, practices, and social implications of large-scale irrigation. Finest of all, though, are Worster’s wide-ranging meditations: on private land, on soil, on environmentalism and religious fervor, on Leopold and Muir, and on our need collectively to develop modes of living that can last. A penetrating essay critiques the idea of sustainable development; another probes the ways that scientific ideas about ecology have been influenced by prevailing social and political values. Worthy of repeated readings are his explorations of the cultural origins of our environmental predicament, especially the concluding title essay, which plays on Adam Smith’s classic work, The Wealth of Nations.
Perhaps an easier place to enter Worster’s work is his award-winning study, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Better than any other occurrence in our history, the Dust Bowl brought into sharp relief the strengths and weaknesses of our culture: our entrepreneurial energy and commitment to individual initiative, and our denial of nature’s limits and our unwillingness to shape our lives to the land. Worster probes the cultural and natural reasons why the Dust Bowl occurred, recounts the ways the catastrophe was interpreted and how the public responded to it, and explains why much-needed major reform measures largely failed. The Dust Bowl offered opportunities for us to learn. By and large, we ignored them. To understand what we could have learned, and why we failed to do so, is to gain great insight into the challenges facing conservation today.
The serious student will want to take in Worster’s penetrating study of the cultural contexts of ecological thought, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also good is Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). There, Worster meditates on the ways that the control of water in arid places has led to, and helped solidify, hierarchical societies of unequal wealth; the control of nature too often has meant the control of some people by other people, with nature as the tool. Worster’s essays dealing with culture in the American West and the particular difficulties we have had adjusting to its natural harshness appear in Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). More recently Worster has turned to biographies. A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and a forthcoming biography of John Muir.
Worster has written little directly about the conservation movement itself. Studies by other historians vary greatly in quality. The most reliable observer is historian Samuel P. Hays, whose chief works on the past half century are Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); and A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
Readers interested in history would do well to read far beyond these works, for the literature is vast and insightful. In understanding our current cultural plight, environmental history is probably our most valuable academic discipline. A good one-volume introduction to the larger story about Americans and land is Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). In Steinberg’s view, the main cultural idea driving environmental change, for good and ill, has been our tendency to fragment nature and to view its parts as marketable commodities.
4. David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Admirers of Ehrenfeld’s classic work may not be huge in number but they are often intense in their appreciation. Ehrenfeld’s broad interests and unusual academic background have helped him view the human experience on Earth in all its physical, moral, and spiritual complexity. Holder of an M.D. degree and a Ph.D. in biology and well read in theological literature (among other fields), he encompasses a wide range indeed. Ehrenfeld traces our conservation challenges to the Enlightenment Era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when empirical data collection, human reason, and a human-centered view of the world gained dominance. We are less powerful than we think we are, Ehrenfeld tells us; reason is a wonderful tool, but we are prone to exaggerate what it can do; our technology is impressive but it has not solved, and cannot solve, all the problems that we are causing.
No true conservation can occur, Ehrenfeld claims, so long as we approach our problems strictly in terms of human needs and if we make judgments that rely solely on our senses and rational faculties. As do conservation’s other leading voices, Ehrenfeld urges us to enhance and make greater use of our moral and spiritual faculties. He ends his book with specific suggestions: We need to reduce our arrogance and endeavor to shape our lives to nature’s ways; we need to stop assuming that all problems are solvable by human reason and new technology. Ehrenfeld’s volume is particularly valuable for its comprehensive look at the values that justify species conservation (Ehrenfeld, a sea turtle researcher, was founding editor of the journal Conservation Biology as well as a longtime contributor to the journal Orion). In the end, concludes Ehrenfeld, we can argue for the protection of all life forms only based on aesthetics and morality; even a broadly defined assessment of human needs cannot get us there.
Ehrenfeld’s more recent books build on this base and offer penetrating observations on the events of our time: Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). They are made up mostly of essays, all well crafted, that first appeared in a periodical. Taken as a whole, his powerful body of work offers nothing less than a blueprint for a fundamental shift in the direction the Western world has taken over the past three centuries.
Also useful is a finely written presentation of “ecologism” (as the author terms it) as a coherent alternative to the dominant American culture: Charles Sokol Bednar, Transforming the Dream: Ecologism and the Shaping of an Alternative American Vision (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). This alternative cultural perspective toward nature has no home on the political spectrum. In Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), C. A. Bowers offers a penetrating critique of current political uses of the term conservatism. He offers a thoughtful plea for a perspective that he labels “mindful conservatism” and considers the changes that could be made in education to implement it.
5. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). Carson’s extraordinarily influential book is commonly thought of as a study of pesticides and their ill effects. It is such a study, as best she could undertake it at the time, under hostile circumstances and with the limited knowledge then available. But it is far more than that, and to focus only on the pesticide details is to miss its enduring value. When Carson wrote her work she was a well-known, best-selling author of science books about the sea and seashores. For years she had gathered information about the dangers of pesticides and the ecological implications of their widespread use. What most alarmed her, though, was the fact that the pesticides were being used with so little thought, with so little public disclosure, and with no attempt to obtain the consent of people affected by them. The larger problem, then, had to do with politics, power, the erosion of democracy, and the invasion of individual rights.
Much serious conservation writing embeds humans into larger ecological orders and speaks to the overall health or condition of that larger order. Carson was supremely ecological in her attentiveness to the ripple effects of tugging at nature in one place. Yet at the same time, she was a strong believer in the dignity and integrity of the individual human standing alone and in the fundamental political principles on which our nation was founded. All of these, she concluded, were endangered by the nation’s pesticide-use program. Government had largely been taken over by powerful commercial interests. The public had little say in fundamental decisions affecting their lands and lives. Caution was being thrown to the wind. Alternative approaches to pest prevention (what today is termed integrated pest management) were largely ignored in the name of corporate gain, despite considerable evidence of their effectiveness. Pesticides were being spread on people’s farms, yards, ponds, houses, even directly on their bodies, without so much as telling them what the dangers were and asking their consent. In her subsequent testimony to Congress, she posed the issue starkly. Widespread pesticide use abridged the fundamental, constitutionally protected liberties of the American people. It violated our individual rights.
Carson’s work today stands as the preeminent expression of this individual-rights perspective on environmental issues. Carson had one foot in community ecology and the other in America’s liberal tradition and its respect for individual integrity. As well as anyone she spoke of the need to exercise caution and to use sensible burdens of proof. Barely concealed was her outrage at how government had been abusing the public trust. Between the lines she diagnosed the problem—our cultural infatuation with science, our adoration of big business, our near single-minded utilitarian commitment to wealth creation, and our willingness to use immediate human utility to judge the rightness or wrongness of our acts. Her book is a testimony to the power of one person to effect change. It is usefully considered, too, as a damning critique of American culture and the political order. Where Ehrenfeld would later speak about general principles and tease out the precise cultural assumptions that required change, Carson did the same, just as powerfully, by showing how our arrogance had brought on massive death.
Carson’s best-selling nature books remain wonderful reading. Her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Paul Brooks, has pieced together an unusual book by and about Carson that offers an engaging introduction to her professional work. His The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972; reprinted in 1989 by Sierra Club Books as Rachel Carson: The Writer at Work) weaves the story of her life around lengthy excerpts from her major books.
6. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968). A decade and a half after his death, Abbey remains the intellectual leader of the more radical strand of the environmental movement. Although he was not an ecoterrorist himself and did not particularly endorse it (though he expressed sympathy with the impulse), his fierce commitment to wild places and wild things, and his willingness to lash out like a cornered animal at those who were despoiling his natural home, encouraged many readers to undertake direct action. Abbey’s popular novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1975), gave the ecoterrorist effort its all-purpose verb: monkey wrenching. So critical was Abbey of American culture that he saw little reason for hope. He expected the system to crash, and he tried to look ahead, particularly in his fiction, to what life would be like amid the rubble as the still-living remnant attempted to start life anew.
Desert Solitaire is Abbey’s most enduring work. Its title invites many comparisons, particularly to the early Christian founders of desert monasticism and to the forty-day pilgrimage of Jesus himself before he began his public ministry. Despite the subtitle, Abbey’s visit to the wilderness (mostly the Utah desert) took place over several years (in condensing the story to a single season, he followed the lead of Thoreau in Walden). Like spiritual pilgrims before him, Abbey went to immerse himself in his surroundings. What he encountered, though, was not a land infused with spirits and loaded with hidden romantic messages about how we ought to live. Instead, he found a natural world that was inscrutable and completely disinterested in human life: a hostile, haunting, terrifying, supremely beautiful land that humans could either adapt to or die. Like Thoreau and (even more) John Muir, Abbey craved for direct experience with nature, and he got it. He admired greatly the life forms that could thrive in the hostile environment of the desert. “The singleleaf ash in my garden stands alone along the path, a dwarf tree only three feet high but tough and enduring, clenched to the stone.” And thus Abbey himself: clenched to the big stone of the arid and mountainous West and intending to hold on with just as much toughness and tenacity.
Abbey’s book includes many of the messages that surface in other conservation writings about the vastness of human ignorance, our cultural decadence, our need to bend our ways to those of nature, and others. What stands out here so starkly is the sense of wildness and wild things as essential sources of life and vitality, for humans as well as other species. Much of our cultural decay, Abbey tells us, has come about precisely because we have become so detached from the wilds. We have become like so many domesticated animals: fat, slow, stupid, and utterly unable to look after ourselves without massive help. Abbey’s conservation ethic is usefully compared with that of Rachel Carson, despite their widely differing personal lives. Like Carson, Abbey boiled things down to the individual level-to himself, usually. His sense of liberty was strong, and he defined it broadly. Liberty was not just about keeping government off our backs. It was about the freedom of one man to live openly without interference from neighbors; it was about the ability to drink water from a creek without being contaminated by industrial and agribusiness pollutants. Bring back the predators, Abbey yelled. Get out of the car, grab a canteen, and head out to the wilds, before you go crazy.
Desert Solitaire is a carefully orchestrated drama that may or may not have much connection to events that actually happened to Abbey during his Utah years. It is laced with Old Testament references and with stark images and colorful characters, human and animal. In an early chapter, “The Serpents of Paradise,” he adds one of his many personal touches: two snakes, rather than one. “The snake story,” he tells us, “is not yet ended.”
Abbey’s many books are all worth reading, although his essays vary in quality. His autobiographical novel, written late in his life and published posthumously, The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), is the work of a masterful storyteller at the height of his form. Here as elsewhere Abbey shows his impatience with mere reform environmentalism that attends to little problems without addressing the big ones. Abbey famously would throw empty beer cans out the truck window rather than recycle them. Why bother, he implicitly asked, if we lack the courage to confront the industrial juggernaut?
An especially literate, passionate expression of the radical environmental “sentiment” is Chrisopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little Brown, 1990), itself a conservation classic.
7. Bryan G. Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). If one has time to read only a single book on environmental philosophy, this should be it. Like the best of philosophers, Norton has read widely in environmental literature—and it shows. In this book, Norton perceptively reviews the main strands of philosophical thinking about humans and nature. He then applies the ideas to the major categories of conservation challenges. As readers we sense that we are being led through the fog by someone who understands the ground thoroughly, who carries a powerful light, and who knows just where to shine it so that we can see where we are. In Norton’s view, the intellectual lay of the land is fragmented mostly because of the differing value presumptions that people bring with them when they engage in policy debates about nature. His aim, which he succeeds in achieving, is “to challenge the suggestion that environmentalists hold no common ground, and the associated suggestion that environmentalists represent at best a shifting coalition of interest groups.” Norton’s refreshing desire, in short, is not to point out how all other philosophers have things wrong and he has them right, or to take something already complex and make it even more so. It is to simplify, to bring together, to make ideas accessible and useable, and to help in the great work of healing the land and its people. Norton urges all of us who consider ourselves conservationists or environmentalists to focus on what we are trying to accomplish and then get together and do it. We shouldn’t get bogged down arguing about the details of our value schemes or about the precise reasons why we want to achieve our goals. Too often environmentalists cannot get beyond their disputes over values and explanations, even when they largely agree on the actions they want to support.
Norton is a forceful advocate for a philosophical value scheme that emphasizes the ethical links among generations more so than ethical obligations that humans might have to nature directly. He is not, that is, merely a moral relativist who can get up in the morning, look in the closet, and don whatever ethical garb seems appropriate for the day. Ideas count for him, a great deal, and they are by no means all equally sound. Still, he is passionate in wanting to see the land regain health in ways that make it a good home for people. We need to get on with that work, he tells us, even as we keep thinking and arguing about values and aspirations.
Norton’s other works are also filled with wisdom, though none is quite so accessible to the general reader. They include Why Preserve Natural Variety? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) and Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8. David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004). Orr heads the environmental studies program at Oberlin College. Before then, he and his brother ran an experimental learning center in rural Arkansas. He is passionate about education and just as passionate about reforming it, dramatically and soon. In this collection of brief, jam-packed essays, Orr’s fertile mind roams widely through our culture and our chief institutions, finding much that is amiss. He is the son of a preacher, and his discourses tend to come in sermon-sized bites, loaded with punch. Orr’s work is most valuable and most deserving of a high place on any reading list because he has attended particularly to the problems and possibilities of formal schooling, including higher education. He proposes that we turn it inside out, literally, so that we connect students to the local lands and get them to see their fundamental dependence on nature. His call for a core ecological curriculum for all students is ambitious. Equally ambitious has been the architectural design effort that he propelled at Oberlin, which has created one of the most environmentally advanced institutional buildings in the world. The project itself was an educational effort by and for students; the resulting building, Orr proclaims, is an important, continuing part of Oberlin’s curriculum, as are the nearby gardens and the advanced waste-treatment capabilities.
Orr’s other writings include Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) and his exploration of the many conservation possibilities that attend the use of nature as design template, Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Orr’s prose rises to an even sharper, more penetrating level in The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004). Here Orr lashes our sagging civic culture. He calls for a revitalization of our senses of citizenship, patriotism, and democratic rule. As does Wendell Berry, Orr traces much of our confusion to our sloppiness in using words, particularly those that describe our political life and public choices. (“By some strange alchemy, the word ‘conservative’ has been co-opted by those intending to conserve nothing except the rules of the game by which they are greatly enriched.”) Echoing Aldo Leopold, he condemns the conservation cause for its fragmentation and inability to act in concert. (“The public, I think, knows what we are against,” Orr rails, “but not what we are for.”) Recurring messages in his writings are the need to respect connections, to seek systemic and holistic solutions, to honor nature’s produce by ensuring that it returns to the land to make new soil.
9. Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). One of the central claims of conservation thought is that people need to bend their ways so as to come into greater alignment with nature, in the process making use of nature’s embedded wisdom. No conservation figure has better framed his work around that principle than plant geneticist Wes Jackson, cofounder and head of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Jackson’s book is overtly about agriculture and the radically different approach to it that he embraces. Yet, like other conservation masterpieces, the book is far more than its ostensible subject. Woven into the factual narrative, in a way similar to Silent Spring, is Jackson’s proposal for a redirection of American culture. Jackson, a first-rate scientific researcher, believes that research can help us find vastly better ways to live on land. At the same time, he is powerfully affected by how little we know and by the benefits we would gain if we acted more humbly and took lessons from species that have been around for millions of years longer than we have. His approach to agriculture, then, is best understood as a design methodology of wide applicability.
Jackson’s other books, also brief and to the point (as befits his manner of speech), are every bit as good: Becoming Native to This Place (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994) and Altars of Unhewn Stone (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), along with a collection coedited with William Vitek, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). A more thorough explanation of the research methodology used at the Land Institute is offered in Judith D. Soule and Jon K. Piper, Farming in Nature’s Image: An Ecological Approach to Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992).
10. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Like Worster, Cronon is one of our leading environmental historians, and just as Worster moved from an eastern university back to his Kansas homeland, so, too, Cronon gave up a position at Yale to move to the city of his youth, Madison, Wisconsin. Cronon’s book long has been a staple of a variety of university courses, including many quite distant from American history; in several law schools, for instance, it is part of the readings in property law. What makes Cronon’s study so valuable is the juxtaposition it offers of two radically different orientations toward the same natural landscape (seventeenth-century New England): the approach of the native Indians and that of the incoming English settlers. Cronon recounts how the Indians made use of the lands and the ecological effects of their uses (as best they can be discerned). He then contrasts them with the far different land-use practices employed by the colonists. Along the way we learn what aspects of colonial practice brought the greatest change (domesticated animals, above all). What arises out of this history is far more than just a new installment in the colonial American story. We get an exceptionally clear look at the links between culture and environmental change and thus an enhanced ability to see how nature and culture are complexly and dialectically intertwined. Augmenting Cronon’s formal comparison of Indians and colonists is a further comparison brought to bear by the attentive reader: that between the seventeenth century and American society today. History is at its most valuable when it enables us to stand back and look anew at the world in which we live; it is the centerpiece of Cicero’s educational aim to enable students to escape the tyranny of the present. In that educational task, Cronon’s book is invaluable.
Also valuable is Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), which considers how Chicago’s rise to importance was linked to its role as a hub for the flow of diverse natural resources, from the timber in the North to the grains and hogs from the South and West. Cronon’s particular comments about ecological degradation caused by colonial land-use patterns should be read along with Brian Donahue’s far more detailed study of a particular corner of New England, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Donahue concludes that while colonial settlers altered the land significantly, ecological degradation largely arrived in the nineteenth century under the pressure of social and economic forces that undercut earlier modes of farming.
One reason why Cronon’s Changes in the Land deserves a place on the list is because of its rare critical look at the institution of private property, American style. Aldo Leopold called for a new understanding of land ownership, but few conservationists since then have grappled seriously with the institution. For many, it appears, property is largely a given: an obstacle on the path that we simply need to deal with as best we can. Cronon’s book does not examine American law, but by contrasting the Anglo-American approach to owning land with the far different ownership arrangement of the native Indians, he jars us out of our complacency. Far more serious conservation writing on private property rights in land is needed.
Historian Adam Rome considers the institution of private property in the course of discussing an otherwise overlooked strand of environmentalism in The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). He tells about the rising (if faint) call for a more ecologically grounded understanding of what it means to own land, particularly ecologically sensitive lands. The issue also appears in historian Brian Donahue’s provocative study, Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), which explores the possible ecological and cultural values of working community-run farms and forests as ways to attach people to their surrounding landscapes. I offer comments of my own on the past and possible future of private property as an institution in The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003).
11. David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (New York: Scribner, 1996). Any sensible land conservation strategy will include as a central element a call to promote and revive wildlife populations. Wildlife is not just another issue on the conservation agenda; it is perhaps the key issue, both because of its intrinsic and ecological importance and because wildlife can usefully serve as a goal for management aimed at the broader target of healthy, beautiful lands. To understand serious land conservation one needs to understand the biodiversity component, particularly in terms of population dynamics, evolutionary change, and the causes of both speciation and extinction. The subject is complex. Thankfully, one of our most gifted science writers has taken it up—David Quammen—in a highly readable inquiry that pays particular attention to islands, so important in the evolution of planetary life over time. So engaging is Quammen’s work that the reader hardly realizes how much science it contains and how widely it roams. Having set forth the biological basics in his engaging stories about islands, Quammen turns inland to show how and why habitat fragmentation on mainlands creates biological conditions similar to those on islands—including the same threats to species survival.
A more nuts-and-bolts book on biodiversity conservation that translates biological principles into land-use applications is Reed F. Noss and Allen Y. Cooperrider, Saving Nature’s Legacy: Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994). The fact-filled Noss and Cooperrider volume points out in detail what it would take in land-use terms to protect all life on wide geographical scales. The same material is covered in more detail and with many valuable asides in a highly readable text, Gary K. Meffe and C. Ronald Carroll, Principles of Conservation Biology, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates, 1997). These volumes and others set forth the basics of the essential discipline of conservation biology. Even land conservationists who have little connection to wildlife-related work would do well to read these eye-opening books. To see what wildlife conservation would entail in terms of land-use planning is to see how radically we need to rework the mechanisms for making decisions about land.
Biodiversity conservation is the kind of conservation activity that requires coordinated action on large spatial scales. Tract-by-tract work, when not done pursuant to a clear land-use vision, is unlikely to get it done. Indeed, conservation work without a clearly stated goal is not going to bring it about. Particularly in the case of wide-ranging wildlife species, conservation requires collective action across present-day boundaries as well as a new understanding of private landownership that entails an obligation to share land with wild things. All of this is clearly presented in these useful works. David Wilcove, another skilled wildlife scientist, gives us a much-needed status report on American wildlife in The Condor’s Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994).
12. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). The dominant vocabulary used today to talk about land and resource use is economics, or economic science, as its practitioners sometimes like to call it. Behind the blizzard of numbers and formulas there exists, most people presume, a solid, incontrovertible methodology for assessing how well we are doing, economically speaking, in getting ahead in the world. The truth, though, is quite otherwise, or rather the truthfulness of what economists conclude is dependent (as all conclusions are dependent) on the assumptions that are used in their work. Economists tend to like the market, they like individual liberty, and they embrace a constellation of human-centered, empirically based values and assumptions that conflict directly with important elements of conservation thought. Given the assumptions that they use, it is little wonder that they reach conclusions that many conservationists find misguided. To varying degrees economists realize that the market is technically flawed and needs corrective measures for it to work right (although the extent of needed correction is often understated greatly because of their limited attentiveness to nature). They are less prone, generally speaking, to realize that the market is a highly distorted and distorting lens through which to see the world, nor is there much recognition that the market solidifies a way of perceiving nature that is itself a cause of degradation. As critics have long said, it is astonishing, for instance, that calculations of gross domestic product ignore the consumption and degradation of nature. Thus, according to economists, when we cut down a tree the wood is pure economic gain; we need not include in our calculations the fact that we no longer have a living tree.
Taking the lead in promoting an economics that takes ecology and ethics into account is economist Herman E. Daly. His chief work, coauthored with theologian John B. Cobb, is a wide-ranging look at some of the flaws of contemporary neoclassical economics seen from the perspective of an insider who knows and cares about the land. The book offers an eye-opening look at how economics could be radically changed in ways that would make conservation appear less costly and more sensible. Many of the presumed costs of conservation arise largely because the measurement methodologies used are so skewed against it; more accurate accounting methods would yield far different conclusions. A more systematic coverage of the subject, with careful attention to the market’s flaws in taking care of land, is Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004). Even readers with little background in economics would benefit from this book, so clear is the writing and so well do the authors succeed in presenting their ideas simply.
The most spirited, penetrating critique of economic growth theory—that is, of the progressive, progrowth religion that largely dominates our culture—has been penned, surprisingly, by an ecologist, Brian Czech, in his Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop Them All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). A useful, easy-to-read introduction to the subject is Eric A. Davidson, You Can’t Eat GNP: Economics as if Ecology Mattered (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000).