Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth

Rating:
Summary: The End of Nature's Sequel
Review: Hope, Human and Wild is a kind of sequel to The End of Nature in which Bill McKibben highlights some positive, hopeful examples of sustainable human activity. He quotes Al Gore as saying, essentially, that our environmental problems now exceed our political ability to solve them. This is a deeply disturbing statement, so McKibben profiles a pair of cities in Brazil and India where sustainability and quality of life movements have taken hold and are actually succeeding. The implications are obvious: if two Third World cities can pull this off despite long odds, both political and environmental, then why can't we?

McKibben's studies of Curitiba, Brazil, and Kerala, India are both informative and uplifting, containing concrete examples of what creative thinking and political courage can achieve. We long, then, for a chapter or so in which these examples are applied to American urban centers; we long for a roadmap of possibilities applied to our culture of greed and consumerism. We long for an idea-or even the hint of an idea-we can use to break our cycle of destructive consumption. Instead, McKibben returns to his beloved Adirondacks and editorializes about the need for community, local economies, and so on. He demonstrates (I believe correctly) that sustainable agrarian communities beget sustainable wild lands and open space as well as a healthier human psyche. Trouble is, though, succeeding on this small scale will not make a dent in the larger problem.

McKibben does not use this book to explore a more global vision. The seeds are there, but once the harvest begins he falls back upon his mountains and the good, community life one is often able to achieve when living on an urban income in a rural area. He begins to proselytize and sound more like a politician: we need to do this, and we should do that-these are obvious goals, but how do we get there? McKibben's Jeffersonian ideals are just that, ideals, and the idealistic will make them work. What we need now is a program of ideas that can build toward a sustainable world while countering the effects of the tragedy of the commons.

Despite this, McKibben's work is vitally important and should be read. His body of work will one day define our era.


Rating:
Summary: Good portrayal of Kerala
Review: I didn't read the whole book, but just the section on Kerala. It gives a pretty good picture about Kerala society for the outsider. Tells you why you don't need a high per capita income to have a high standard of living.

Rating:
Summary: Another Thoughtful Book By Bill McKibben
Review: In a time when many people finally accept the fact of global warming and of continuing human assault on the environment, Bill McKibben has launched this wonderfully written, inspiring, and informative book, another in his continuing series of important essays on the complex relationship between humankind and the planet we inhabit. McKibben, a former writer for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, transplanted himself and his small family in the Adirondack region of upstate New York in the late 1980s, from whence he has come once more to deliver a healthy dollop of insight, whimsy, and wisdom concerning the way we continue to walk not so lightly on the earth.

Like most environmentalists, McKibben is deeply concerned about the continuing onslaught on the skin of the planet, and about our continuing disregard for the welfare of everything within the natural environment we most depend upon to have a continuing quality of life. Yet he is also propelled by aspects of his own experience with the ecology of his local area to set off on what he terms to be an exploration of hope, in the sense that he was searching for examples of recovery and progress in the natural landscape. One wonderful example he uses is that of the recovery of the amount of land reforested since the signal journey of one Timothy White, who in traveling in the early 1800s found very little land not cut and turned to the plow. Yet some two hundred years later, much of the Northeast forest is once again covering the landscape, and all of this in spite of the vastly increased population over the landmass in question.

Of course, as McKibben admits, must of the reforesting took place based on the gradual abandonment of the lands of the Northeast in the so-called western migration as we fulfilled our "Manifest Destiny", and this migration also spelled further deforestation efforts in those area under active migration. Once again, part of the genius of the natural environmental processes can be viewed in such a way, requiring not so much in the way of human intervention as in a kind of purposeful benign neglect (my own hackneyed term, not McKibben's). Left alone long enough, natural processes are underway that are restoring the Northeast forests to their primordial glory. And, like McKibben, I wonder at the good fortune some of us have to live in relatively sparsely developed and populated areas, where we can enjoy nature on amore personal level, where deer and bear and moose and all sorts of birds are free to live and roam. I sit in wonder with my friends the Labradors and watch, enraptured as the geese soar noisily above me this time every year.....

Moreover, one must share his frustration and sadness at the prospect of such massive forces denuding and despoiling the ecosystems even as we read and write. While he offers some reasons for hope, the truth may be that things will have to become much worse for human beings to begin to act more responsibly in following his advice to find many more ways to walk more lightly on the earth. It is imperative for those of us who understand the magnitude of the dangers confronting us act to continue to try to inform others, while also preparing to gradually break our own bonds to this culture of waste and wanton destruction. This book is more fuel for our own sustenance as we begin the long journey back to what Joni Mitchell once called "the garden'. See you there! Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Great, but many missed opportunities
Review: This book's descriptions of Curitiba Brazil, and Kerala India are priceless, and unavailable most anywhere else. If you're not a botanist, the third of the book that talks about the reforestation of the U.S. may be a little tedious.

What irks me is that this stuff is very important if we're serious about "living lightly," but McKibben doesn't do such obvious things as include photos. The entire book could use a serious edit just for readability...

Don't get me wrong; the book is definitely worth reading, especially for the account of Curitiba. We're deprived, here in the U.S., compared to those third-worlders.

A real eye-opener about civic possibilities.