The Soul Unearthed: Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal Through Nature (New Consciousness Reader)

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing, compelling, a "must-read"
Review: I love this book. It's all about the link between ourselves and nature. I find its well-crafted essays deeply inspiring and eye-opening. Read this book and go on a wilderness trip in your armchair.

Rating:
Summary: Shaping consciousness for a new world-view
Review: This is a selection of reactions to the encounter of self and wilderness by contemporary (living) writers, poets, educators, philosophers, theologians, boatmen, healers, and a hunter (Ted Kerasote). As a hunter I review it. There's no dearth of intelligence here, of reflection, of solid writing and even the occasional glint of humor, as in Doug Elliot's "Night of the Living Skunk" or Heilig's "A Walk with the King." The book stands at the beginning of an axiological recovery effort. If you look at Daniel Quinn's "The Story of B," you are presented with the philosophical underpinnings of an ecologically-based discontent, an alienation, a dissatisfaction with the place we've reached after 15Ky of totalitarian agriculture, property rights, scientific nature-penetration, and human-centered, gods-replacing decisions. Quinn sees the birth of a paradigm, a world-order, but he sees few details, he offers very little prescience about what's going to have to arise. I see most of the selections in this book as first efforts toward roughing out that new order. The writers are joining a conversation, debate, or exploration of the shape of what must come if we are to be here to see it. Thus a lot of this book is centrifugal. Strength/weakness: you don't get a lot of unmediated experience here: Judith Minty's dense and disturbing short-story "Killing the Bear" with its foiled-rape suggestions, Ted Kerasote's tale of killing a female elk from Bloodties, a couple of anecdotes from Rod Nash. What you do get is intellection, a kind of centrifugal direction of the prose. Time and again, writers in this anthology start with an incident, and mediate it through quotations from Thoreau, Muir, van der Post, Abbey, Lopez or Roszak. When these writers experience, they describe first, but then almost gratefully retreat into opening the intellect, the collective intellect of 19-20th century nature writers; they enter the great conversation about wilderness as soon as they want to understand. So a lot of these writings start in immersion, and abstract themselves a little nervously into thought. It's a lion, but somehow not really a lion until van der Post and Barry Lopez get cited about lions and the reverence-fear for lions. Or maybe it's too real as a lion until we raise the wordscreen. Again, weakness/strength, mine as well as some of the writers: even when pleased or delighted by a selection, I found myself muttering "Thus I refute Berkeley" and thinking about gutting a moose.