NOT JUST A CITY but a whole landscape of good people contributed to the writing of this book. Indeed, a whole lifescape: people from across the sweep of my sixty years show up in various ways in its pages, many explicitly, many more implicitly.
My greatest thanks go to my editor at Princeton, Meagan Levinson. She gave the manuscript a very close read—something I fear many editors no longer seem to find time for. Meagan’s reading was immensely helpful, at every level: sentence, paragraph, chapter, and the argument of the whole book. Thank you, Meagan.
Also at Princeton, I want to give sincere thanks to my copy editor, Joseph Dahm. It’s a bit of a phantom experience, working with a copy editor these days. We’ve never met. But his careful eye, his sensitivity to my narrative style, and his gentle way of prodding me along were models of the copy editor’s craft. I hope we do meet one day. Thank you, Joseph.
The rest of Princeton’s staff were also great to work with. Thanks especially to Jenny Wolkowicki, my production editor, and to Eric Schwartz, the former sociology editor at Princeton who initially recruited me and talked me through a lot of issues at the early stages of my writing. He’s at lucky Columbia University Press now.
I was lucky too with the two excellent anonymous reviewers that Princeton arranged for the book. One of them subsequently identified himself: the environmental author Jules Pretty, who is also professor of environment and society at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Jules and the other reviewer helped me immensely in figuring out where the book was heading and how to get there.
I also had the benefit of many readers whom I arranged from among my own friends and colleagues. I especially want to thank Samer Alatout, James Knight, Katherine Scahill, and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan for their help with my understanding of, respectively, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. As well, Brad Brewster pointed me to St. Augustine’s parallels with Thoreau. Barbara Decre helped me research the ecological dimensions of the Qur’an. And Abby Letak gave the references a thorough, much-needed polishing. Thanks to you three, too.
I had a lot of reading to do myself, exploring some five thousand years of writing on nature, religion, and the good. Many highlights of that writing appear in the text of this book. I thank Liverpool University Press for permission to quote liberally from their translation of Aristophanes’s play Wealth (Sommerstein, 2001 trans.) and Oxford University Press to quote liberally from their translation of The Qur’an (Hallem, 2008, trans.).
I wrote the book in part by teaching a lecture course on it at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for five years: Community and Environmental Sociology 541—“Environmental Stewardship and Social Justice (Special Topic: Nature, Faith, and Community).” My students over those many years tested and contested these ideas, sharpening my thinking immensely and helping me find better ways to express my points. I owe an equal debt to the five wonderful graduate students who in turn served as the teaching assistant for the course: Alex McCullough, Amanda McMillan-Lequieu, Valerie Stull, Loka Ashwood, and Kerem Morgul. I learned a great deal working with them on how to present the material—which often entailed collectively rethinking it a good bit too! Thank you Alex, Amanda, Valerie, Loka, and Kerem.
And thanks to the people of Wisconsin who have had the grace to employ me at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2002, both to teach courses like that and to do the research and writing that continue the growth of the society and ecology we share. Long live the “Wisconsin Idea” that makes the borders of the university the borders of the state and the world—indeed, the universe, the universe being what a university is about.
One of my greatest teachers about the universe of nature and religion is my friend and colleague Mpumelelo Ncwadi. Through our work together on the LAND (Livelihood, Agroecology, Nutrition, and Development) Project in South Africa, he has guided my learning in so many ways relevant to this book, but especially about the continuing vitality of ancestor veneration to the amaXhosa people. He graciously agreed to allow me to share some of his explanations and stories in this book. But let me add one more here: Mpumi’s motto “you don’t know if you don’t go,” which is his translation of a traditional isiXhosa saying. I did go, and I certainly can’t say that I now fully know, but I do think that I understand a lot better. I hope I’ve been able to communicate in this book some of what I’ve learned from Mpumi and the villagers of KuManzimdaka. Thank you, Mpumi, and thank you to the villagers, especially MamBhele Ncapayi.
Frederico, even though it was decades and decades ago, and I fear you may have long since passed on to the company of your Cabécar ancestors, let me offer my sincere thanks to you as well. The week I spent in your company in the Talamanca Mountains rainforest in Costa Rica was one of the most transformative of my life. I’m sorry I lost track of you soon afterward, and I regret that you will likely never read or learn of these words. You too were one of my great teachers. Gracias sinceras, or, in your own tongue, wi’ktebala.
But for sure my greatest teachers have been my own family. My wife Diane Mayerfeld and our children Sam Bell and Eleanor Mayerfeld were especially vigorous testers and contesters of my ideas and interpretations. We do not eat in silence. Dinner together is always a feast of the mind. Our many family adventures often make an appearance in this book. Plus Diane gave the entire manuscript a complete reading, catching many annoyances and mistakes large and small. My mother, to whom I dedicate the book, also long ago cultivated in me a fascination and enchantment with both nature and religion, addicting me, like her, to gardening, rowing skiffs, walking in the woods, gathering wild blackberries, reading Biblical Archaeology Review, and lighting candles once a week. Hugs to you all.
These, then, are among the many logics in this book, the many hands who helped cut something that I hope is at least decently reflective from the rough stone of my experience and what I have gathered from theirs. May the cutting, and the recutting, never cease.