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

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Summary: "Tantalizing, infuriating, and intelligent." Library Journal
Review: "McKibben, a master in the naturalist/essayist tradition, lives up to his book's title, finding hope for the environment in a world that usually offers little." --Minnesota Monthl

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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.


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Summary: Hope -- Human But a Little Glib
Review: Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth Bill McKibben (Little, Brown, 1995) 239 pp; $ cloth The book under review here I the author's third. It follows The End of Nature, which argues that human society has now become big enough to alter "the most basic vital sign of the planet, its climate," and The Age of Missing Information, a book in which two dramatically divergent experiences are juxtaposed: watching 2,000 hours of consecutive cable television broadcasts, and spending 24 hours camped beside a pond on a mountain. McKibben aspires to write a kind of essay that is journalistically vivid, but also very personal - even, to use an old-fashioned phrase, "soul-searching." The search in this new book is reactive as well as affirmative. Like many of his likely readers, McKibben is deeply distressed by his knowledge of the damages human beings have visited upon the natural world. As a writer who has covered political and social issues for dozens of national magazines, he has gone to some effort to grasp the scientific analyses by which contemporary ecology measures the dimensions of our catastrophe. The other primary factor in setting McKibben's new book in motion, as he explains lucidly in the first chapter, is love for the landscape and people of his Northern Forest home, a very small town in the Adirondacks. Having found himself "depressed" by the writing of his previous books, McKibben deliberately set out to find occasions for hope, beginning with the astonishing recovery of the forests of the northeast. He recalls the observations of Timothy Dwight, who in the early 19th century traveled from Boston to New York City and passed no more than twenty miles of forest on his 240-mile journey. Of the denuded New Hampshire landscape, Dwight wrote, "The forests are not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope they will ever grow again." McKibben responds: "Less than two centuries later, and despite great increases in population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered by forest. Vermont has gone from 35 percent woods in 1850 to 80 percent today, and even Massachusetts has seen its woodlands rebound to the point where they cover nearly two-thirds of the commonwealth." McKibben deftly recounts the haphazard settlement process whereby the northeast was virtually abandoned for more easily subdued agricultural and forest lands further west. In presenting the reforestation of northern New England and the Adirondacks as an ecological success story, the author stresses that this rejuvenation was the result of careless historical displacements, not conscientious human endeavor. And yet: "If you're looking for hope, this unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal represents the great environmental story of the United States - in some ways, of the whole world. Here, not far from where 'suburb' and 'megalopolis' were added to the world's vocabulary, an explosion of green is underway. In the therapeutic terms of the moment, this is the first region on earth to hit bottom and then, blessed with adequate rainfall, go into recovery." Again, like many of us, McKibben has been asking himself the very personal question of what it means to live in such a gorgeous and relatively unpopulated place, where seeing seeing bear or bobcat is always a possibility, and where one can walk or even drive for hours and never leave the woods. What are the responsibilities that our residence here presents to us, day by day? The most moving sections of this book, chapters 1 and 4, are those in which McKibben describes the tensions between this region's mesmerizing beauty and his awareness of impending disaster around the globe, as we risk exhausting forever our potable water, our topsoil, even our very atmosphere. Part of the force of these chapters is the candor with which McKibben describes those sometimes awkward, improvisatory ways in which people in the northeast are coming to terms with one another and with their landscape - finding new ways to be neighbors, new ways to log and mill wood, new ways to grow and market vegetables. Far less effective are chapters 2 and 3, in which McKibben attempts to provide some perspective and corollary for the ecological recovery of his "home place" by including the rather amazing examples of Curitiba, a Brazilian city that has transformed its relationships to transportation and garbage, and Kerala, a state in southwestern India that has a per-capita income of $330 per year, yet a life expectancy, literacy rate, and healthy birthrate as high as our own. What's frustrating about these chapters is how interesting they could be; sadly, McKibben's writing in the middle of the book loses much of its vigor and depth, as the prose settles into breezy mannerisms, more reminiscent of a press release or grant proposal than of the rest of this book. Curitiba and Kerala are sketched out superficially in anecdotes and summaries, and these chapters lack the intensity of detail and probing narrative that would yield lessons both unforgettable and applicable. McKibben's failures here are hardly unforgivable. Anyone who has ever attempted to deliver good news while fully acknowledging the gravity of an ongoing emergency will recognize the difficulties he faced. As readers, we want to know that the gambit isn't over yet; we need to know about worldly instances where contemporary people - our neighbors in the much-lauded global marketplace - are inventing ecological solutions to problems we share. But for such reportage to be useful, we need specificity and detail. Yet McKibben's evocations of the northern forest will be welcomed by readers of this magazine. And its missteps notwithstanding, McKibben's book will touch readers who have been trying to find words for those ligatures between our home in the woods and the world at large.

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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.

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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!

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Summary: Read it!!
Review: This book is essential reading for environmentalists.

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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.