John Yunker

One island, two women, and so many mysteries. Floreana Island is home to one of the rarest species of penguins on the planet and a haunting history. When Mallory arrives on Floreana, she finds herself torn between past and present, and then she discovers a hidden diary that reveals a century-old secret. And we, the reader, are in for a breathtaking adventure; prepare to be transported to the Galápagos.

Love Story with Birds, by Derek Furr, is a work of literature that defies easy categorization, which is partly why I enjoyed reading it. By way of poems, essays, stories, and asides I spent a great deal of time alongside Furr, as he watched birds, endured Covid, and cared for a dying dog.

Birds play a central role in this book, as do many other species. And we witness the author's struggle to be one who does no harm yet, on occasion, harms. After an accidentally fatal encounter with a mouse Furr comes to terms with feelings of remorse as well as the larger question of why any animal, large or small, must be killed by the human animal:

Killing it without good reason (and such a reason would be hard to produce under the circumstances) is marginally different from slaughtering a pig and worse than squashing a bug – itself an act that should not be automatic. We're not automatons, and neither are insects.

I was fascinated by how Furr deployed, defined and then examined, seemingly ordinary words such as watch and wait and depends. Furr writes about how his family's dying dog depends on him but that this is far from a one-sided relationship.

The roots of “depend” in Latin communicate an essential aspect of the relationship, for in its earlier usage, “depend” suggested to hang from or upon. Our animals are connected to us — sometimes literally by a leash, but always for their wellbeing. “Our” should suggest not ownership but responsibility, as it does in “our children” or “our aging parents.”

Furr then expands the relationship to include all non-human animals.

It is easy enough to accept all of this in reference to pets, but it should extend, at the very least, to all domesticated animals — for instance, the cows, chickens, pigs, and other creatures that people cultivate for food. ... Put simply, many species — many more than we generally wish to acknowledge — are not merely sentient but also have the capacity to desire things and seek them out. In a sense, they set goals and work toward them. These may be immediate and simple, but they are substantive from the creature's point of view, and they are the basis of its moral status. On what grounds, therefore, do we justify removing the creature's capacity to pursue its ends? That is, how can we justify caging it, let along killing it?

When people ask me how I define “new environmental literature” I might suggest they read this book. As it captures the inherent anxiety of sharing a planet with creatures who have no choice but to endure, as best they can, humankind. But it also points to a brighter future, one in which we depend on animals not for food but for a higher sense of fulfillment and purpose.

NOTE: This review first appeared on www.EcoLitBooks.com.

We have the pandemic to thank for this eye-opening, empathetic and long-overdue tribute to one of our most misunderstood and widely despised relatives.

The rat.

And I use relative intentionally as I learned from the book that the human species descends from rats.

During the early days of Covid, while so many people were out adopting puppies, author Joe Shute and his wife adopted a pair of rats which they named Molly and Ermentrude. The author had always had a fear of rats and viewed lockdown as an opportunity to get up close and personal with an animal that has outsmarted humans for centuries.

As Shute gets to know his new companions he takes us on a journey across England and around the world as he demolishes common myths and, no, there are not millions rats underneath manhole covers just waiting to burst through and invade human civilization. The truth is that they are far less populous than most media (and pest control companies) would have you believe. One study estimated there were fewer than seven million rats across all of England (there are more dogs). And maybe instead of trying to eradicate rats (a futile task) the author suggests a more practical and less violent next step: Coexistence.

He writes: “After centuries of largely futile efforts to rid cities of rates, adopting a more benign approach is beginning to gain currency. One intriguing anthropological study recently conducted in Amsterdam, considered the rights of rates to belong in a city. ... If left along, with with access to food, urban rat populations with remain entrenched in the same locations for many generations, if not centuries.”

But it is also true that rats have an insatiable need to chew through things, sometimes things we'd rather they not. Like our homes and automobiles. Rats can even gnaw their way through concrete. Their jaws are more powerful than bears, hyenas even sharks — and 20 times more powerful than the bite of a human. But they also need to keep chewing as their front incisors never stop growing. Without continuous nibbling, their teeth would extend out and curl back inside their skulls, killing them. So perhaps we who have suffered from a rat's gnawing should know that it wasn't personal, but partly out of survival.

And did you know that rats laugh? Rats are capable of altruism, regret, and possess impressive powers of memory as well as being able to judge the passage of time. We know this through numerous studies which, ironically, led to the deaths of these same creatures.

Which underscores just how poorly treated rats are in society. They have no rights to speak of in the US. In fact, we have no data on exactly how many rats are killed within research labs because no such records are required. The EU, at least, requires a scientific justification for research, which has led to a decrease in the use of rats in studies.

Across Asia, rats are not so demonized. A rat occupies the first sign of the Chinese Zodiac and rats are featured in Japanese art. Yet in the West, rats are synonymous with pests and disease. And God help any criminal who dares ‘rat' out his or her colleagues.

Another irony, because rats are loyal to loved ones and will often risk their lives to protect them.

Rats are widely associated with carrying diseases and this is still sadly true in many emerging countries. Shute takes us along to Africa as he observes researchers trying to eradicate rats in certain villages. It's not a easy scene to witness, the killing of hundreds of rates, but Shute stresses that industrial agriculture, such as monoculture sugar plantations, has fueled the problem, placing poorly housed employees and their families in close proximity to virtually endless supplies of food and the rats who feed on it. If society only did a better job of caring for the human species — better housing and infrastructure — these horrible rat encounters would be far less common.

But for all the negative publicity surrounding rats, it should also be known that rats save lives. Shute introduces us to an organization that trains rats to identify land mines. These rats have helped clear mines from 33 million square meters of land in Cambodia. One rat, Magawa, made global headlines in earning the PSDA Dickin Medal for serving bravely in conflict zones.

After reading this book one might wonder what species will be left for us to kill with impunity.

Perhaps that's the point.

If rats are worthy of respect and even love, what does that mean for the many other species that we ignore or, worse, kill and eat without a second thought.

This book gave me a reason to reconsider rats and, hopefully, it will do the same for you.

NOTE: This review first appeared on EcoLitBooks.com.

Imagine it is 1866 and you are strolling the streets of New York City.

The first thing you might notice are the hundreds upon hundreds of horses pulling people in packed trolleys up and down the streets and avenues, the closest thing at the time to subway cars. You may find yourself suddenly surrounded not only by people, but by herds of cows and pigs and sheep as they are led to the slaughterhouses that dot Manhattan. If you head north to the affluent stretch of Fifth Avenue you may pass society's elite as they parade their pure-bred dogs (the latest fashion statement at the time). If you look closely you will see birds, or the remnants of them, decorating women's hats. Feathers from ostrich, heron, egrets, even the Carolina parakeet (a bird well on its way to extinction).

You may also witness a curious scene: A man standing on his stopped carriage in the middle of an avenue, holding up traffic, as he upbraids a passing carriage driver for whipping his horse. If you had seen this man, whose name was Henry Bergh, you would have witnessed the earliest manifestations of the American animal rights movement.

In Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do about Animals authors Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy take us back to the second half of the 19th century, when the animal rights movement sprung to life and quickly spread across the United States.

You'll first meet Henry Bergh, a man born into wealth with a burning desire to attack “cruelism” wherever he saw it. He would not hesitate to confront anyone abusing a horse or any animal, stopping traffic in New York City if needed. But he was also a savvy tactician, working with politicians and other leaders to push through laws that his newfound organization, the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, would eagerly enforce. The ASPCA, inspired by and modeled after England's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was soon replicated across other cities. By 1871 there were more than a dozen organizations, from Boston to St. Louis to San Francisco.

Up until this point in American history, animals had no rights, no protections and, as the book documents, no veterinarians. It was common to see carriage drivers abusing their horses. Dog fighting and bear baiting matches were popular forms of entertainment as well as bullfights. But standing up to them was Bergh and his growing army of animal protection soldiers.

Up north in Boston we meet George Angell, the founder of the Massachusetts SPCA and equally driven to bring about change though on a much larger scale. While Bergh was arresting animal abusers across New York City, Angell was looking for ways to build a nationwide movement of enlightened Americans.

What Angell wanted, what he believed was possible, was nothing less than a moral revolution in America, one carried along by human emotion in rebellion against suffering of all forms. “Some of our friends most deeply interested in animal-protection societies are frequently charged with being sentimental,” he wrote ... “To protect the weak, bind up the broken-hearted, defend the defenseless, raise the downtrodden, give liberty to the enslaves, — these are all sentiments.”

While reading this book I was reminded of a Brigid Brophy quote from her essay published in The Sunday Times in 1965. She wrote: “Whenever people say, ‘We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel.”

But Angell embraced sentimentalism and smartly used it to his advantage.

He founded a magazine called Our Dumb Animals, which, despite the name, was one of the most progressive animal rights magazines one could read, expanding to a circulation of 75,000 in 1890. Angell worked with schools to inspire children into becoming animal protectors. And he published (stole, actually) the novel Black Beauty, which had been published years earlier in England to much success. Angell had been hoping to find the equivalent of an Uncle Tom's Cabin for the animal rights movement. By pricing the book at just 20 cents a copy, he indeed created a bestseller — selling nearly 400,000 copies in its first year. Sadly, author Anna Sewell never lived to see her novel become so successful.

In Philadelphia, we meet Caroline White, who founded the American Anti-Vivisection Society, a group that fought against the doctors and surgeons who thought nothing of operating of non-sedated animals. The legacy of animal testing is with us today and is no less contentious.

We head east to Chicago where we witness the rise of animal industries — mass-production slaughterhouses that raised animal cruelty to a level we have yet to reckon with today. But back then, the mass production of killing was viewed with awe the way one might view the mass production of automobiles.

The Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga — whose notes that local schoolchildren were taken to the slaughterhouses for decades, as recently as the 1950s — has described the purpose of this spectacle as “the presentation of the modern,” reflecting the rising attitude that brought hundreds of thousands of people to witness the miracles of the World's Fair and the savagery of the meat industry nearby: the knowledge of what so-called progress looked like, but also a desensitization to its less salubrious side, and to the idea that some level of violence might be necessary for its continuance.

The slaughterhouses that emerged during Industrial Revolution and were bigger and, in many ways, far crueler than anything that came before. And despite the efforts of so many activists over the past 150 years, it is frustrating to see so few changes for the better. The authors note that despite the amazing progress we have seen in protections for some animal species (dogs, cats, endangered species) there are some species deemed unworthy of protection even today:

As of this writing, America is home to roughly 99 million cattle and 74 million pigs: populations that exceed those of dogs and cats ... It's not that they're less intelligent, or less capable of suffering. It's not that we owe them any less; our patterns of consumption lead to their existence and their treatment. We simply don't care enough about them — at least not yet.

To right a wrong, one must first see a wrong. In the 1860s, a handful of Americans awoke to the plight of animals and gave rise to the animal rights movement, a movement that has accomplished so much and still has so far to go. We are overdue for a second awakening.

This enlightening, engaging and occasionally shocking book is a must read and a testament to the empathetic and fearless Americans who did so much for “Our Dumb Animals.” You will finish this book inspired to pick up where our animal activist ancestors left off.

NOTE: This review first appeared on EcoLitBooks.com.

Funny the difference a word makes.

Restaurants generally don't advertise “fungi” on their menus.

But “mushrooms” and “truffles” are a different story. Even though they are the same thing.

Which leads me to a book that took me out of the animal kingdom and into the fungi kingdom, a far more populous and less understood kingdom and one upon which the plant and animal kingdoms depend upon for their (our) survival.

In this amazingly thought-provoking book, author Merlin Sheldrake guides us around this strange kingdom, getting to know a number of fungi species.

Fungi are decentralized organisms, with no heads, nor hearts but the uncanny ability to successfully navigate mazes and punch their ways through pavement. Some glow in the dark. Others emerge from the earth periodically in the form of mushrooms, the fruiting bodies that we humans prize.

Reading this book will make you question the nature of intelligence, for many of the accomplishments of these nearly invisible creatures is hard to comprehend. Sheldrake writes:

Biological realities are never black-and-white. Why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the world–our investigative tools–be so? Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might now always require a nervous system? Are we able to do this without smothering other life-forms with prejudice and innuendo?

Sheldrake takes us along with truffle hunters in Europe and Oregon, relying on the noses of dogs to sniff out truffles, which have evolved scents intended to attract, well, strong-nosed animals. Animals, and, yes, even pigs, eat truffles and spread them to new locations by way of poop.

We learn about how so many of our modern medicines are created by fungus, including the increasingly popular psilocybins. And I did not realize the extent to which our ancestors enjoyed the occasional magic mushroom.

And while fungi are small, they work together in ways that blur the divide between singular and plural. The largest fungi, in the Malheur National Forest, stretches for more than 2,000 acres, making the largest living organism on the planet.

Fungi is the connective tissue of soil. It lives on us, within us and we could not live without it.

But we're also doing a pretty good job of trying to kill it — by way of dumping poisons into the soil in the name of fertilizer and pesticide. Sheldrake writes:

Mycorrhizal fungi increase the volume of water that the soil can absorb, reducing the quantity of nutrients leached out of the soil by rainfall by as much as fifty percent. Of the carbon that is found in soils–which, remarkably, amounts to twice the amount of carbon found in plants and the atmosphere combined–a substantial proportion is bound up in tough organic compounds produced by mycorrhizal fungi ... Besides the hundreds or thousands of meters of fungal mycelium in a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are more bacteria, protists, insects, and arthropods than the number of humans who have ever lived on earth.

If we humans wish to stick around on earth we had better become better stewards of the soil and the fungi holding our world together. If you want to expand your mind — without magic mushrooms — I highly recommend reading Entangled Life.


NOTE: This review first appeared at EcoLitBooks.com.

In Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive author Daniel Vandersommers explores the evolution of the National Zoo as well as the far more limited evolution of society's empathy for the animals within its walls.

The National Zoo opened in 1891, thanks in large part to the advocacy of William Temple Hornaday, whose life as a hunter had taught him that the American bison were at risk of going extinct. He urged his employer, the Smithsonian, to purchase a few bison in order to help save the species. And that's just what they did, keeping six bison on the back lawn of the Smithsonian Castle.

Soon after, people began dropping off animals, some wild, some domestic, and Hornady worked to get funding to build a zoo, under the auspices of conservation, education and science.

The National Zoo was not the first zoo in the US (Philadelphia came about nearly two decades prior). By 1901 the author notes that there were 56 zoos across the country. While this book is about one zoo, it could in many ways be about any zoo. As Vandersommers writes, “The zoo always produced opposing experiences, as well as sublimated ones.” Indeed it is very difficult to read the many stories of animal captivity, escape and premature death at the hands of inept handlers, not to mention the many horrible ways that visitors treated animals. I used to think that the occasional stupid visitor story was more a product of our selfie-driven world; but there were stupid visitors doing stupid things to animals long before portable cameras.

It's not surprising that animals wanted out of zoos. Within the Zoo's first year we witness the first escapee — a brown bear. The bear was soon killed and the news made headlines, which, as the author notes, actually fed into the aura of the zoo itself. Vandersommers writes, ” ...by running away, zoo animals gave the public that dose of ‘the wild' that it craved, as well as, upon capture, the relief of control that it was programmed to want. Runaway animals accomplished all of this as they sought to escape the zoo.”

It feels as though any animal who could escape from a zoo eventually did. Escapees from the National Zoo and other zoos included prairie dogs, lemurs, panthers, snakes, beavers and one particularly sad ostrich who escaped the Lincoln Park Zoo only to jump to death from a nearby bridge.

Which leads us to animal suicide. “There are many accounts of captive animals committing suicide in the historical record.” Vandersommers writes. “We should, of course, recognize the impossibility of ever truly knowing the experience of an ostrich. Yet we should also accept that trying to understand the ostrich experience by seeing that experience through our own might also be the first step in recognizing that ostriches and humans share a biology and being and are not aliens to each other.”

Throughout the book Vandersommers does an excellent job of never letting us lose sight of the animals' perspectives. And while these perspectives are acutely painful, they are part of what makes this such an important book.

Science is often cited as a major reason for why zoos are worth having around. We as a society learn a great deal about animals through their captivity and have used animals to learn about issues of great importance to us, like how birds fly and how diseases spread. But could science have been accomplished without so much suffering and tragedy along the way? Vandersommers writes: “Zoo stories used science to legitimate the zoo. And they played an important role in structuring the experience of zoo goers, allowing them to feel as though they were taking part in a refined ‘civic zoology.'”

Thus a trip to the zoo can be justified by for school field trips, despite the harm it might do to the children who witness animal suffering. Where science occupies the front seat empathy is forced into the back seat.

If there was one positive outcome of zoos over the years it is in how they have given rise to animal activists, such as myself. One need only watch a wild cat pacing in a too-small enclosure to know there is suffering, that a grave injustice is at hand. And I was heartened to read about the efforts of activists more than a hundred years ago who fought to free elephants from chains (they were chained 24/7) and to give all animals more room.

In 1920, Miss M. Gunderson sent the zoo director a letter that was a powerful as it was sad to read, because the letter is just as relevant today.

In closing, Gunderson predicted that the “shameful garden of cruelty and wrong will not longer exist... because the more enlightened children of the coming day” will not support “twentieth century barbarisms.”

Sadly, we slipped into the next century without significant progress on behalf of animals. Yet there is hope that the rise of animal sanctuaries and continued pressure from activists will one day force zoos to reinvent themselves, without animals. And I hope this book will stir more souls to fight on behalf of those animals who will never see a day of freedom.

NOTE: This review first appeared in EcoLitBooks.com

Perhaps it is human nature to rank things. We rank cities and states and countries. We have the best restaurants and best movies; we even have best friends. And when it comes to our relationships with animals we share this planet with, there is a fair amount of ranking there as well, with the human animal emerging on top. Always on top.

In How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human, Melanie Challenger tactfully dismantles the pervasive myth that the human animal is more evolved than all other animals. In doing so, Challenger has created a book that will go a long way in reconnecting ourselves with our animal selves and, hopefully, becoming better versions of ourselves.

Early on Challenger writes: “The truth is that being human is being animal. This is a difficult thing to admit if we are raised on a belief in our distinction.”

Indeed, most of us have been raised to believe humans are more evolved than other creatures. And this belief helps us rationalize the extreme cruelty and disregard we inflict upon the world's animals. Which is no doubt why we cling so tightly to this world view of superiority.

But Challenger does an excellent job of deconstructing this world view, by taking the reader on a journey through history, anthropology, biology and neuroscience. She points out that Darwin himself was careful not to use words like higher or lower to imply that any species was better than the other. Or that evolution necessarily moves in one direction.

This “tree of life” that has been inculcated into us was not Darwin's intention at all. Challenger writes:

We convince ourselves that our beliefs have little to do with the rest of the living world. After all, animals don't have minds or intentions like ours. Yet relying on this old idea saddles us with a moral system that is inconsistent to a fault. And the inconsistency is beginning to show.
What's troubling these days is not just our dysfunctional relationship with animals and nature as a whole, but the eagerness by which we ascribe intelligence to computers while withholding it from animals. We treat Siri and Alexa with more respect than we do the birds outside our window who exhibit far more intelligence every hour of the day.

And then we have a handful of billionaires who think we (they) should colonize the solar system and, while they're at it, extend human life a few hundred years. Challenger diagnoses the symptoms of this disease, a mind in conflict with itself and an unhealthy fear of death and dying. Perhaps because death reminds us, even the most wealthy of us, that we are more animal than not. Just as Hamlet wrestled with his mortality when he held Yorick's skull, we wrestle with it (or desperately try to avoid it) today. But there are a new urgency today, with the planet in crisis and billions of animal lives in the balance. Our behaviors need to change, which minds our minds need to evolve.

Challenger writes:

Our value systems place constraints on our behavior. To help us to stop over-utilizing our planet in a way that is detrimental to life as a whole, we may need to light on the feelings, sensations, intelligence and intentions of the other lives around us. And, as we see into these lives, there's nothing to stop us extending intrinsic value to them. Perhaps intrinsic value is only a human concept. Or perhaps it's the way an animal comes to care for another animal without conditions.
Challenger has given us a book that not only breaks down old myths but paves the way to a more compassionate, more optimistic future. One in which our minds and bodies are no longer in conflict. One in which we no longer have to try to explain to our children why our pet dogs and cats deserve love and care but pigs and cows and chickens deserve not one once of empathy. Children don't understand this, nor should they be required to.

It is time to move on, to evolve. We owe it to our children. We owe it to ourselves. And we owe it to the animals.

NOTE: This review was first posted on www.EcoLitBooks.com

I'm not sure how I heard about this novel, only that I had heard that there was an animal rights element to it. Yet in the early pages I struggled to find that element. This is a novel set in 1913 on a British estate in which a group of upper-class couples have gathered to participate in a shooting party.

And yet there is very much an animal rights element to this book, in the persona of a vegetarian named Cornelius Cardew.

When we meet Cardew, a socialist and anti-vivisectionist, he is making his way to the Sir Randolph Nettleby estate, intent on interrupting the hunt. As nears the estate he encounters Tom Harkin, the head-keeper. Tom attempts to make small talk but then realizes he has stumbled across someone with very curious questions about the upcoming hunt.

“Must we kill our brothers and sisters in order to eat?” said [Cornelius].
“I should hope not indeed,” said Tom stoutly but in total bewilderment.
“Until we can recognize the universal kinship of all living creatures we shall remain in outer darkness. In outer darkness.”
Tom dismisses the man as “bloody barmy” but they will meet again under very different circumstances.

Along the way, we get to know the participants of the party, the troubled marriages, simmering tensions as well as the children navigating this barmy world. Like young Osbert, who has befriended a duck and attends to her like a pet. When a guest threatens to shoot the duck during the hunt Osbert threatens to kill the man, which the adults find humorous but, later, two adults share the following dialogue:

“...[Osbert] will have to be educated and taught the ways of the world and made to be on the side of the guns and against the ducks. It seems such a pity.”
“We all have to learn to school our emotions to some extent.”
“Of course, but who invents the rules of manly behavior? Who says it's the height of heroism to kill? For every hero does there have to be a living sacrifice?”
Sacrifice is a recurring theme of this novel, of the world that Colegate describes, one about to be torn apart by World War I. And yet how familiar is this dialogue even today? How many husbands tell their wives that they must take the boys out hunting to learn how to kill. To be tough. To be “on the side of the guns.”

On the final day of the shooting party, Osbert's duck gets loose.

Elfrida Beetle is her name and Osbert, and his caretaker, go looking for her. And, yes, we will spend quite a few pages worried over the fate of Elfrida.

Colegate astutely contrasts the drama over the life of one Elfrida Beetle against the lives of hundreds of pheasants and other collateral victims.

Colegate captures the costumes, the suffocating small talk, and contrasts it with the lives of the laborers and one activist. By the end of the novel one can't help but see World War I as not only inevitable but perhaps somewhat of a relief. To give these poor birds a break and let the men direct their pointless violence at one another.

Sadly, shooting parties did not end with the wars.

And as Cornelius thinks to himself at the end of the novel, after a tragic scene that I won't spoil:

What the ritual was that required the sacrifice he could not exactly say, only that he was outside it, condemned by something in himself, some cowardice, some over-cerebration, only to watch, to comment, scold, diagnose, analyze, but not to cure; the cure could not come from a non-participant, from someone who was not part of the game, for how could a mere spectator be expected to be listened to when he wanted to tell the players not just that they were using the wrong rules but that they were playing the wrong game?

NOTE: This review first appeared on www.EcoLitBooks.com.

I didn't plan to read the nonfiction book Dark Emu shortly before reading the novel The Yield by Tara June Winch.

But I couldn't think of a better pairing. While Dark Emu deconstructs colonial myths about Australian Aboriginal civilizations, The Yield illustrates how these myths were used to justify tearing apart families and cultures.

In the novel, August Gondiwindi reluctantly returns home for the funeral of her grandfather Albert “Poppy” Gondiwindi, who had been creating a dictionary of his people's language, a dictionary suddenly gone missing. As August revisits her past relationships and painful memories she also begins searching for this manuscript.

Meanwhile, a mining company is days away from forcing her family from their ancestral home in western New South Wales. Environmentalists are not about to go down without a fight, a fight that August initially believes is not her fight.

“August had always thought important events happened in every other country expect for Australia. That the tremors of their small lives meant nothing. But at that moment ... she felt as if she'd awoken from a stony sleep to find herself standing on the edge of something larger than she'd ever been able to see before.”

What I loved about this novel is the central role language plays within it. In alternating chapters, the reader gets a firsthand look at a dictionary in the making, one word at a time, narrated by Poppy. This device could have pulled the reader out of the story; instead, the words and their descriptions send the reader on a hundred different brief journeys, while propelling the narrative forward. For example, the phrase giya-rra-ya-rra (afraid to speak) leads to a painful story about August's grandfather and his wife when they tried to take a class of college students to the local swimming pool and the racism they met along the way. And garrandarang (book) sheds light on where the elusive manuscript had been taken.

The Yield tells the story of a people and a culture torn from the land and one another. But it's also a story about remembering and resistance. Ultimately, August must look backwards before she can move forwards and, in doing so, realize her passion and purpose in life.

Along the way, you might pick up a few words from the Wiradjuri language. Winch notes that before Europeans arrived there were 250 distinct Australian languages, subdivided into 600 dialects.

Wiradjuri is one of these reclaimed and preserved languages, a language that is with us today (even if we don't fully realize it). As Poppy writes about the word bila (river): Now you know where the word billabong comes from.

NOTE: This review was first published in EcoLitBooks.com

In the first chapter of Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era, Sarat Colling tells the story of Emily, possibly the most famous cow to have escaped a slaughterhouse.

It was 1995 and Emily was being led to her death when she hopped over a five-foot high gate near the killing floor and disappeared into the New England woods. The daughter of the slaughterhouse owner gave Emily her name and she became a local celebrity as authorities searched for her; she eluded capture for 40 days and was ultimately adopted by Peace Abbey where she lived out her too-short life and where a statue of her now stands.

Colling writes: “In her act of resistance, Emily crossed both physical and conceptual borders. ... She was no longer one of the ten billion animals sent to slaughterhouses in the United States each year, but an individual whose name and face was recognized.”

The book tells the stories of dozens of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, whales and other species who, based on their heroic actions, are given names and histories by the people who bore witness to them. And it is these stories that have the power to wake up the world to the suffering of billions of animals who never have the opportunity to have their stories heard.

And while many of these stories end tragically, others end with animals finding their way to sanctuaries like Woodstock or Farm Sanctuary, sanctuaries that are playing a growing role in not only providing a haven for animals but a place where the public can learn the stories of these animals and see them as individuals.

Colling writes: “When animals who resist are witnessed, viewed as individuals, they can have the positive effect of inspiring people to live in closer alignment with their values.”

Animal resistance takes many forms, not only escapes, but acts of coming to the aid of other animals, or fighting back against the humans who hurt them. Tilikum the tragically imprisoned Sea World orca fought back time and again, killing three humans. And this from a species that has never killed a human in the wild. Animals don't want to hurt humans; they simply want to be left alone. and this too is getting more difficult in world that has less open space in favor of space taken for animal agriculture.

Colling notes:

Since 1970, the Earth's wildlife population has been cut in half, yet the farmed animal population has tripled. More farmed animals than human beings now inhabit this planet, with approximately 17 billion land animals alive at any given time.
Colling notes that animal resistance has much in common with human resistance, particularly the labor movement. The human working class are often the first in line to speak up for animals because they see themselves in the plight of these animals.

In the end, each act of resistance gives us a moment to resist in kind. To donate to a sanctuary. To speak up at a city council meeting. To attend a protest. To stop eating animals.

Collins writes about a bull named Frank, who escaped in 2016 from a slaughterhouse in New York City. The celebrity Jon Stewart stepped in to help Frank find a home at Farm Sanctuary.

In a video about Frank's story, Steward remarks that because of the nature of Frank's escape, “This time I paid attention.” When animals break free, we take notice. While animal farmers, researchers, auctioneers, hunters, breeders, and trainers have always known firsthand about animals' revolts, the concept of animal resistance is reaching a wide audience in the twenty-first century digital mediascape.

Indeed. Here's hoping this book helps other people sit up and pay attention.


PS: I should also mention that this book builds on another powerful book worth reading: Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance by Jason Hribal.

NOTE: This book review first appeared on EcoLitBooks.com

Who were the first humans to bake bread?

If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have probably guessed the Egyptians.

But what if it was the Aboriginal Australians? And not by any small margin. There is evidence to suggest that Australians were cultivating grains and baking bread more than 30,000 years ago, a good 15,000 years ahead of the Egyptians.

In Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, author Bruce Pascoe writes:

And this baking was not a one-off occurrence. Archeaologists found a 25,000 year-old grindstone at distant Kakadu in the Northern Territory: the bakers of antiquity. Why don't our hearts fill with wonder and pride?
Why indeed?

As Pascoe illustrates again and again, the Europeans who first arrived in Australia had preconceived notions about the people who lived there. They assumed that Aboriginal Australians were not sophisticated so they conveniently overlooked all evidence to the contrary. He writes:

It is clear from the journals of the explorers that few were in Australia to marvel at a new civilization; they were there to replace it. Most were simply describing a landscape from which settlers could profit. Few bothered with the evidence of the existing economy, because they knew it was about to be subsumed.
The evidence of advanced societies was not hidden away; it was there all along in the many diaries that Pascoe quotes from repeatedly. Aboriginal Australians cultivated fields, constructed large, permanent dwellings, stored large quantities of food and water, and developed ingenious systems for catching fish — all the qualities that scientists use to define advanced cultures. And yet the world today still largely views these people as nomadic hunters and gatherers.

But as we have seen with the Europeans who set foot in the Americas, it was more convenient to assume the natives were nomadic when you were busy stealing their land.

Dark Emu is a fascinating and painful history of Australia. Yet Pascoe did not write this book simply to assign blame, but to point a way to a better future.

For the Indigenous Australians knew quite a lot about gardening, soil management and fire management. While Europeans were importing seeds that were difficult to grow in the country, the locals had cultivated species that thrived, species that could solve significant food and water challenges. The natives used controlled fires as a tool for enriching the soil and preventing more destructive fires — a practice that is now in demand throughout Australia (as well as here in the Western US).

Knowing the truth about Indigenous Australians isn't just an academic exercise. Learning how they coexisted with the land and the animals poses important lessons for our path towards a more sustainable and compassionate future.

My only issue with this profound book is Pascoe's insistence that we will always eat meat, and that Australians should turn toward harvesting kangaroos. While I understand his motivations (moving away from conventional animal agriculture), I think he could and should aim higher. Just as it's vital to understand our history, it's equally vital to evolve. Just because our ancestors ate meat does not mean our descendants are bound to a similar fate.

NOTE: This review first appeared on EcoLitBooks.com.

I live in an old house. So old that it tilts off to one side and you can feel a winter breeze coming up through the floorboards. When we had it renovated several years ago, I wondered if it would have made more sense, environmentally, to tear it down and build a LEED-certified (whatever exactly that means) house.

It would have been less expensive to build a new house than restore an old one — our contractor said as much.

But would rebuilding have been better for the planet?

Apparently not.

According to Kathryn Rogers Merlino in the beautiful and enlightening book Building Reuse, the more environmentally sound approach to old buildings is to stick with them and restore them as efficiently as you can, rather than tearing them down and starting over.

I was heartened to read that old houses are not quite the thermal sieves I had assumed. Yes, they do cost more to heat and cool than something brand new. But you have to look at the larger picture. You could buy a Tesla and feel good that you're not using gasoline, but think of all the heavy metals that were extracted to manufacture the battery when you could have stuck with your gas-powered car for another few years.

Merlino cites US government research that finds that commercial buildings constructed before 1920 “use less energy per square foot than buildings from any other decade of construction in the twentieth century.” Single pane windows, she writes, are also not the heat sinks we have been led to believe by, who else, the window industry.

And then there are the massive environmental costs of tearing down buildings and extracting and transporting building materials. Merlino draws from a number of studies that look at the benefits of reusing existing buildings versus starting over with more energy efficient buildings. And the studies repeatedly confirm that it takes a very long time for those new buildings to justify themselves. The most recent study, by the Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, found that “a new building that is 30 percent more efficient than an average existing building takes 10 to 80 years to overcome, through efficient operations, the negative climate-change impacts related to the construction process.”

Building Reuse includes more than a dozen real-world case studies, all in the Pacific Northwest, including old warehouses, retail buildings and an old Washington bungalow.

Merlino also sheds light into the process governments use for valuing “historically significant buildings,” and points out how it leaves vast numbers of buildings and homes vulnerable to destruction. Should a house that is, say, only 50 years old be more vulnerable to tear down versus one built a hundred years ago? This is where the environmental argument carries significant weight.

Merlino writes:

Looking at buildings as environmental artifacts, rather than simply as cultural artifacts, creates a stronger argument for viewing building reuse as a critical part of our sustainable design future, given the considerable carbon savings and other avoided environmental impacts they represent. Since buildings are the greatest consumers of energy and producers of carbon emissions in the country, strategy building reuse can be a significant way to meet carbon reduction goals in the future.”
The book includes a number of old brick buildings that clean up beautifully (and not inexpensively). I would have liked to have seen more homes included for readers like myself.

But what I most appreciated was reading about how an old Sears building in Bremerton, Washington was repurposed into a beautiful multipurpose building. As well as the Days Inn in Portland that was reborn into a hipster hotel. In both cases, it would have been so easy to tear down those eyesores, but the architects put a great deal of imagination into making the most of what was already there. Also worth noting was how an old Portland high-rise was made seismically sound simply by removing the concrete cladding on the front of the building, a less-is-more approach to renovation.

If you are unsure over what do to with an old(ish) home you've purchased, this book might give you the facts you need to make a more informed decision regarding renovate vs. rebuild. And the case studies will surely inspire you.

As Merlino notes: “The greenest building is the one already built.”

NOTE: This review first appeared on EcoLitBooks.com

The cover of The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson features a nearly complete St. Louis Arch, known as the Gateway to the West. It was completed about six years before my family moved to St. Louis and my memories of it consist of squeezing into an egg-shaped elevator and tilting our way up to the top, then gazing down at the muddy Mississippi: Missouri on one side, Illinois on the other.

I loved visiting the Arch, but I never thought much about the land underneath the arch. I did not know that the land was once known as the Greenwich Village of the West, a dense neighborhood of manufacturing, dive bars and cheap rentals. Home to the poor, minorities, creative types and those agitating for social and political change. An area that the leaders of the city saw fit to bulldoze in 1939 under the auspices of progress. The Arch itself, which came about many years later, was more afterthought than motivation.

The Broken Heart of America tells a sobering history of St. Louis, beginning in 1764, when fur traders first set up shop along the Mississippi, through to 2014, when Michael Brown was fatally shot on the streets of Ferguson.

While this book may not seem at face value to be a book about the environment, it is very much a book about the land. The story of St. Louis, and America as a whole, is the story of land taken and land denied. And how land functions as a foundation for structural racism.

Structural racism, unlike so many other structures that comprise a city, is not so visible to the eye; it can be found in exclusionary deed covenants, capricious zoning laws and, when all else fails, eminent domain.

To be fair, exclusionary covenants were by no means unique to St. Louis. But St. Louis does have a unique and fascinating history, first as the staging point for the fur trade, followed by countless homesteaders. It was also the city from which the US Army waged its brutal war against Native Americans. A city that saw some of the first battles of the Civil War, including one that featured the future generals Grant and Sherman as spectators. And a city that in 1877 separated itself from the county, a divorce that remains to this day, and has fostered massive inequalities between those who live in the city and those who simply work there. And, today, as the Missouri governor does battle with St. Louis over the prosecution of the gun-waving McCloskeys, I am reminded that in the early days of the Civil War the governor went to battle, quite literally, with the city of St. Louis.

What we don't resolve we reenact.

Walter Johnson, was inspired to write this book after the death of Michael Brown, noting in the introduction:

“From the Lewis and Clark expedition to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and the launch of Black Lives Matter, many of the events that we consider central to the history of the United States occurred in St. Louis.”

Johnson does an admirable job of covering (and uncovering) hundreds of years of history. For example, many Americans are now well aware of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921. But there was a race massacre in East St. Louis in 1917, one that left 6,000 blacks homeless and as many as 250 dead. And it was corporations that actively inflamed white versus black hatred, all in the interests of suppressing wages. At the time, companies such as Monsanto and Alcoa had established their own private towns along the banks of the Mississippi, free from environmental regulations, taxes, as well as any qualms over pitting white workers against black workers. Johnson documents again and again how racism was used not only to suppress minorities but laborers as a whole.

As one raised in St. Louis, I can't help but wonder why so little of the history in this book was not taught to us in school. I was told many things about William Clark but I was not told that he was complicit in stealing vast swaths of land from the natives. I was not taught that in 1916 St. Louis became the first city in the country to pass a racial segregation ordinance by voter referendum.

Details like this matter. Because structural racism is all about the details. And it is by knowing these details we can begin righting the wrongs.

Johnson documents the many ways that St. Louis neighborhoods used rules and blurry legal maneuvers to punish and exclude people they did not want around. There's the 1956 case of Dr. Howard Venable, an African American doctor who built a home in Creve Coeur, a white suburb of St. Louis. The neighbors hired lawyers to try to buy him out, multiple times, but each time he refused. So the locals formed a committee, led by John Beirne, who got the city to threaten to condemn his property unless he sold it, which he ultimately did. The land was turned into park, named after, who else, John Beirne.

The park was renamed the Dr. H. Phillip Venable Memorial Park just a year ago. Better late than never.

But I also believe that small steps such as this really do matter. We cannot change the past, but we can learn from it and we can resolve to do better.

And there are many hopeful moments in this book. Stories of resilience and persistence, stories of blacks and whites uniting in the first organized strike in the history of the United States. Stories of Dick Gregory, Chuck Berry, Maya Angelou and others who grew up in the city, persevered and succeeded. Stories of activists like Ora Lee Malone, a woman who led a successful rent strike against the ill-fated Pruitt-Igoe complex in 1969. And Percy Green, who fought tirelessly to create a more equitable city; he and a white accomplice, Richard Daly, climbed the under-construction Arch in 1964 to protest the lack of minority hiring on this federally financed project.

And, yes, local issues sometimes have national enablers. Time and again Johnson documents instances where St. Louis leaders used federal dollars in the name of eradicating “blight” only as an excuse to line developer pockets and raze poor neighborhoods. The federal government, in its lack of oversight, is just as complicit in maintaining this toxic structure.

Sometimes I think the best thing to come out of smartphones was that little camera. A camera that has shed light on the violence toward minorities that so many white Americans had long believed was a relic of the past.

Like those cameras, this book shines a light on the darker recesses of our history, but in ways that can help us move forward. Like paying close attention to what goes on in our city council meetings. Asking who benefits and who loses when a new development is proposed. Asking if the police are incentivized to write tickets simply to help pay the city's bills (a major factor behind the deep-seated issues in Ferguson). These are questions that people in St. Louis (and many other cities) are asking. And there are many people in St. Louis working to unite the city and county once again, which will go a very long way toward not just erasing a border but erasing long-held misconceptions about neighborhoods and one another.

This is a book I wish I had when I was living in St. Louis and I hope it becomes required reading now. Because it would go a long way towards righting the wrongs of this city and, perhaps, our country as a whole. It's long past time we resolved to do better and to stop reenacting the past.

NOTE: This review first appeared on EcoLitBooks.com

Dandelions. Bull thistle. Kudzu. Japanese knotweed. Himalayan blackberry.

From front lawns to woodlands, these are among the most despised of plant species. Species that, we are told, are hell-bent on taking over every square inch of soil, crowding out native species, ruining ecosystems, giving gardeners ulcers.

But what if everything we know about weeds is wrong? What if the invasive species we have grown to hate, have spent millions of dollars on fighting, are not so awful after all? What if they have something important to tell us about our soil, our ecosystems? What if these species have something to offer these ecosystems, something restorative, even beneficial?

Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration by Tao Orion will open your eyes to the plants we have long viewed as weeds and inspire a permaculture-based approach to gardening.

And don't let the subtitle intimidate you — this is a book that any gardener will find well worth a read. Frankly, it's a book everyone should read before running out to the store for pesticide.

Tao Orion opens the book on her experiences in wetlands restoration outside Eugene, Oregon and the invasive species they battled, sometimes with chemicals, in an effort to restore native species. In doing so, they learned that invasive species thrived where reintroduced native species struggled. She came to realize that these invasive species were there for a reason, and they were serving important purposes: “The bees didn't appear to mind that the nectar they sipped came from a flower that originated in Europe nor did the frogs seem to care that the low-growing thatch of rattail fescue hailed from the same region.”

She took a step back and began to take a “big picture” look at restoration, at the history of the land, disturbances, changes in climate, introduced chemicals. All of these factors play a role in which species thrive in an area and which do not. Labeling a plant “invasive” creates an unhealthy dynamic of viewing plants in good and evil terms. She writes: “The presence of invasive species is not necessarily a problem to be solved, but rather an invitation to delve deeply into understanding the complex ecosystem dynamics to which they are intrinsically related.” In other words, before reaching for the Roundup, take a moment to study your own ecosystem. Better yet, skip the chemicals entirely.

Orion writes about how poorly regulated and understood pesticides are. How we almost always use far more chemicals than we should and how there is no way of knowing exactly what all these chemicals are doing to our bodies over time. It's safe to say every American has some amount of glyphosate in their systems by now.

Orion challenges the notion that invasive species have made other species extinct. While invasives can be quite aggressive, there is little evidence that they alone destroy other species. There are a host of reasons why native species may be in decline; invasive species are more often correlative than causative.

She cites many examples of how we vilify these species, none more ironic than spartina (or cordgrass) a grass that grows along salt marshes. Over the past few decades, spartina has been labeled an invasive species in bays from San Franscico up north to Wallapa Bay, in Washington. Government agencies have dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of pesticides on the plants. But on the East Coast, spartina is viewed as a critical member of the coastal system, home to birds and a barrier that helps minimize storm surges. But spartina strands have been on the decline, leading researchers on the East Coast searching for ways to save spartina while researches on the left coast search for ways to eradicate it.

I appreciate how Orion places our experiences with nature in historical terms, focusing on the natives who tended to the land long before Europeans arrived. In a section titled “The Myth of Wilderness,” she writes: “America's most celebrated wilderness areas were once peoples' homes, and many of the most prized native plants are remnants from gardens and orchards.” In other words, humans have been gardening from the very beginning and our ancestors did a far better job of it than we are today.

My only criticism of the book is in how the author sidesteps around the destructive forces of animal agriculture. Instead of offering up ways to minimize the damage of grazing animals, it would have been nice to see her question the industry entirely, an industry completely at odds with any permaculture-based worldview.

Scotch broom, widely reviled in these parts, is a nitrogen fixer. Like so many invasive, it plays a critical role in creating healthier soil. And this is what a permaculture-based approach to gardening is all about. In fact, Orion documents numerous examples of so-called invasive species that play a critical role in improving our soil and water.

In truth, we are not at war with invasive species. This war was manufactured by companies trying to sell chemicals. The only war we should be fighting now is with the government agencies and politicians who would maintain the status quo. It's time to rethink everything we know about how we relate to the land and this book provides the insights and inspiration to get started.

Beyond the War on Invasive Species
Tao Orion
Chelsea Green

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLit Books at www.ecolitbooks.com.

As an architectural enthusiast, I have long admired Louis Khan. When I first visited San Diego years ago, I made sure to visit The Salk Institute. To see how concrete was used as both structure and frame, guiding my eyes toward the ocean. Kahn inspired me to dream about one day building a home made of concrete.
But then I began reading about the environmental impacts of cement production. I had grown up believing cement was a simple blend of sand, stone and lime. The truth is more complex, messy and corrupt. The production of cement requires baking in 1000-degree kilns and this heat (and the energy required to dig up and transport the ingredients) result in significant amounts of carbon. As noted in this BBC article: If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world — behind China and the US. Concrete production accounts for anywhere from 6% to 10% of all carbon emissions.

And concrete production is increasing globally. The world is now facing a sand shortage and emerging markets are suffering for it. In India, there is now a “sand mafia” that is literally stealing sand from poor villages. What is it about organized crime and cement?

So, needless to say, I've put away my concrete dreams. Fortunately, they have been replaced by dreams of a home built of earth, thanks in part to this monumental book, curated and edited by Jean Dethier, The Art of Earth Architecture: Past, Present, Future.

Raw earth has been used for nearly ten centuries as the basis for homes, villages, entire cities across all continents. A portion of China's Great Wall. The Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. And, in Yemen, the old walled city of Shibam, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a place I hope to one day visit.

Jean Dethier spent fifty years researching this book and it shows in the more than 250 sites profiled within, complete with full-color photographs and architectural renderings.

Raw-earth building has never really gone out of style, but it has never gone globally mainstream, despite its many advantages over concrete. The obstacles to the raw earth industry are many, beginning with the well-established concrete and steel industries, who rightly see this industry as a threat. And the fact that there is no “earth” lobby doesn't help matters. There are also building codes that make raw earth contruction more expensive to pursue — not necessarily because these structures are less safe, just that they don't easily conform to existing methods of measurement. The fact that there are 7-story structures standing in Shibam.

Paris produces 18 million tons of earth each year due to various construction projects, earth that is sent to landfills. India needs 40 million homes to accommodate its population. There are not enough trees, there is not enough sand to produce the concrete. But there is plenty of earth.

Contributor Martin Rauch, who has lived in a three-story rammed earth home for a decade, writes:

“It is said that a third of the human race still lives in earth houses, but sadly this figure is falling day by day. If everybody lived in housing typical of industrialized countries, three planet Earths would barely be sufficient to provide all the materials necessary. In further industrializing construction worldwide, we are going down the wrong path. I am convinced that in three generations' time, half of humanity will be living in comfortable earth buildings.”

And as this book clearly shows, this ancient technology is as relevant today and even more so. And the results can be as striking as any building made of concrete, even one by Louis Kahn.
As contributor Patrice Doat writes: The universal right to build out of earth requires nothing less than a cultural and educational revolution.

This book provides an inspiring step in that direction.

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLitBooks.com.

The Bering Strait is probably best known these days for the 50-mile thin stretch of Pacific Ocean that separates Russia from the United States. But it is also one of the most ecologically abundant waters in the world, attracting whales and seabirds from around the world. As well as people who come to hunt these creatures. Which is what led to a great collision of cultures, European and native, in the 1840s, and where this enlightening, thorough and sobering book begins.

Written by environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast begins when whalers first discovered the bowhead population, a whale species that was easy (initially) to hunt and seemingly limitless in numbers. As more whaling ships arrived, the indigenous populations (the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia) realized that their livelihoods were quickly becoming, like the whales themselves, endangered.

A bowhead whale can live 200 years, which is both awe-inspiring and tragic. Because in the course of just one generation, they were hunted nearly to extinction. As early as the 1880s people warned that they were at risk, but the whaling continued for another seventy years.

A bowhead is highly intelligent, social and is, in many ways, a keystone species of the ocean. But to the whalers, a bowhead whale represented little more than 200 barrels of oil. Demuth writes:

A whale for the men on the Citizen had no soul or country. But a whale had value. If reduced to oil and baleen and shipped to New England, bowheads were commodities, natural objects just one sale away from currency.

The natives also killed bowheads, but sparingly (40-60 a year) and for food and supplies only. In the late 1840s, whalers were taking thousands of whales a year from the waters. But the numbers soon began to plummet, partly because the bowheads learned how to evade the whalers. But whalers did not leave all at once. Some turned their eyes to the walruses, even though it could take 250 walruses to equal one bowhead in oil production.

The natives saw their food sources disappear in rapid succession and, in desperation, some began working on the whaling ships. Natives who had long viewed whales and walruses as relatives were suddenly forced to view them as commodities. And consumers around the world saw only commodities. As Demuth writes:

Far from Beringia, walruses were a minuscule part of imagining a prosperous, mechanized future: as fan belts on power looms or grease in factory cogs, or as the luggage for a train journey from San Francisco to New York or the tip of a billiard cue. Consumers saw no death in their ivory buttons, unaware of the former creature that helped enrich its ocean and might have expired defending its young. The buttons were just one more sign of new wonders for purchase, of rising plenty. In Beringia, the tide pulled the other way, exposing a bare shoreline.

The author focuses not just on the Alaskan side of the strait, but also the Russian side. What makes this book particularly fascinating are the parallel stories of emerging ideologies on either side of the strait: socialism and capitalism. Time and again we witness beauracritc socialist hubris fail against the realities of frontier natives who have their own (far more practical) ways of living. And on the Western shores, American gold seekers arrived and quickly deciminated the land and rivers before returning home broke and broken.

In the end, neither ideology did anything to prevent the demise of the landscape and the native people and the animals they lived among: more than two million whales, countless walruses, foxes and caribou.

And now, just as a number of species find themselves granted some degree of legal protection, another threat looms: climate change.

Demuth does not take issue with the fishing of salmon or the hunting of caribou (a serious blind spot given that these activities are no less extractive than any other). But the whales occupy a special place in her writing, and the writing is worth repeating here:

There is not a history yet that puts in human terms the cetacean experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this great annihilation of generations of whale minds: minds that listened as their seas grew quiet, watched as their clans shrank, fled as their families were consumed year after year in the adrenal chase, the strike, the final gouting blood. Perhaps the whales, in their songs and clicks, teach this past; perhaps they tell each other that the peculiar and terrifying work of humans is to compose a world without whales.

This is not a feel-good book, because these stories have no happy endings. But they are stories that need to be read and shared. So that we can work together to protect the lands and waters and animals from the next wave of idealogues — because these people are still at it.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
By Bathsheba Demuth
Norton

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLitBooks.com.

If I asked you to picture a “cow town,” you would probably picture a small town, surrounded by pasture, set far away from the big city.

Yet in the 1800s, cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco were also cow towns. It was not unusual to see herds of cows squeezed through downtown streets, as this was where the slaughterhouses were located. Sheep were also common, as were horses, dogs and pigs. Charles Dickens visited New York City in 1842 and was surprised to find free-roaming pigs among the well-healed locals strolling down Broadway. At that point in history, animals were as common on the streets of New York as people. As Andrew A. Robichaud writes in the introduction to his remarkable book Animal City:

For much of the nineteenth century, American cities were ecologically diverse places, invariably made up of a multitude of domesticated, semidomesticated and undomesticated species. Indeed, animals were so commonplace in American cities that, at times, their presence seemed not worth mentioning at all. Observations of the “animal city” were often left to visitors or tourists from places where urban livestock had already been largely regulated or excluded.
So begins a much-needed and brutally fascinating history of major American cities, seen through the lens of our relationships with animals.

The book opens on New York City in 1858 after the death of an infant named Martha who perished from malnutrition from a steady diet of cow's milk, a necessity for the growing number of working women who took jobs at wet nurses. Martha might have lived if the milk she was drinking was actual cow's milk, but dairy producers, eager to maximize profits, fed their cows leftover swill from distilleries, resulting in a “swill-milk” product that was tragic on many levels.

Cows did not live very long on a diet of swill, and were horribly treated along the way. As stories emerged in the media, a growing number of people began calling for the better treatment of animals. Horses, the animals that powered so much of the city, were also frequent and visible victims of abuse, and in the 1860s, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). The ASPCA focused on slaughterhouses, the transportation of animals, the treatment of horses. It's sad to think that many of the issues that Bergh focused on back then are still with us today — and that the scale of animal abuse has only grown exponentially.

We move to San Francisco, a gold rush boomtown with aspirations of becoming one of the world's great cities. Doing so, civic leaders believed, required pushing the slaughterhouses out of the downtown so residents no longer has to see (or smell) the source of their meals. An area that became know as Butchertown was located south of the city along the bay near Mission Creek, where the slaughterhouses were built on stilts over the water under the misconception that the offal would be cleanly swept away.

As slaughterhouses found themselves unwelcome in city centers across the country, zoos found a welcome audience. Between 1859 and 1920, 46 public zoos were established across the US. One of the earliest American zoos was Woodward's Gardens, a private estate in San Francisco that was opened to the public along Mission Creek, just a mile or so from Butchertown. Robichaud notes that, though the gardens were popular, many visitors noted the ennui displayed by the animals confined to small cages, a reaction that many people experience today (that cages may be larger, but they are still cages).

In 1874, back in New York City, residents of New York were entertained by the sight of a dog in the window of a cider shop, leashed to a treadmill, powering a cider press. Dog power was not a novelty at the time — dogs were often used on farms (as were children) to power butter churns.
Henry Bergh filed suit against the owner setting off a very public battle between the ASPCA and the owner. Dogs may be viewed as family members today but, back then, they were just another power source for most people.

The court case also touched on the idea of animals as entertainment, a particularly painful subject of this book, as Robichaud writes about P.T. Barnum, Grizzly Adams and the ugly demise of Woodward's Gardens. There is one horrible incident in the book involving a boat and Niagara Falls that I would not have believed if it were not true.

So much of American history centers around this idea of “civilization.” San Francisco city leaders wanted a civilized city, so they banned bullfighting, ticketed horse abusers and opened zoos.

But civilization is a tricky word, because the author makes it clear, again and again, that just because slaughterhouses are ushered out of sight and out of mind does not mean they do not exist. They most certainly do exist and we currently kill more animals per year today than ever before. And while dogs now have legal protections, so many species have no legal rights. Horse-drawn carriages still ply many urban streets and SeaWorld continues to keeps orcas (and other mammals) in tight captivity.

It is vitally important that we remember the stories of how animals were treated and mistreated and killed during the early years of this country's urbanization. And Animal City is a testament to progress made and progress deferred.

Robichaud sums it up perfectly:

Animals are appearing more often in the stories we tell of the past. They have always been there, but only more recently have we recognized their ubiquity and centrality. Animals deserve a place in our scholarship not only because animals lives and perspectives have inherent value, but because understanding changes in human-animal relationships yields insights into questions that have long interested historians, while raising new questions of our past and present. At the very least, animals also deserve a place in the stories we tell because their ghosts still haunt the places in which we live. Our cities still bear the scares and legacies of an urban world where animals once lived and died by the millions.

Animal City: The Domestication of America
By Andrew A. Robichaud
Harvard University Press

NOTE: This review first appeared on EcoLit Books: www.ecolitbooks.com

A decade ago, not long after moving to Oregon, I traveled to Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park where I entered an old-growth coast redwood forest for the first time. To say it was a moving experience is an understatement. The photographs I took were also an understatement; no picture can capture the enormity of these ancient trees. But perhaps it is the sound, or lack thereof, that best captures the experience. As author Darren Frederick Speece writes at the beginning of Defending Giants:

To walk into a stand of two-thousand-year-old redwoods is to enter deafening silence. It is rare to hear songbirds, or the sound of a squirrel scampering in the canopy, or the condensation of the think fog dripping off redwood needles like rain. It's not that those noises are entirely absent; it is just that the shade, the moisture, the fog, the deep bed of soft needles on the ground, and the ropy red bark of the trees seem to absorb all sounds before they can radiate outward from their source.

There are only 5% of these forests remaining. The California gold rush led to their demise in the latter part of the 1800s. But as Speece illustrates in his thoroughly researched and all-too-relevant book, the tragic death of so many of these trees also helped give birth to the modern environmental movement. It is comforting to know that there were people in the 1800s who were so enraged by wholesale logging that they mobilized to do something about it. And we owe these people a great debt. This book tells their stories.

The Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in 1892, was not initially focused on saving the redwood forests. But one of the founding members, William Dudley, urged the group to prioritize these forests. As Speece writes:

Dudley believed the coast redwoods also needed the Sierra Club's “immediate attention” because redwood was the highest valued timber, it was the “loftiest species of confier,” and like its Sierra relatives, it needed protection from the “rapacity of men and scourge of fire.”

Fundraising combined with government lobbying resulted, in 1902, in the formation of California's first state park: Big Basin. This environmental protection template would be employed again and again in the following decades.

Save the Redwoods was formed in 1918, an organization that I've supported over the years. I was surprised to learn that the founders of this group were member of the Bohemian Club and proponents of eugenics (which you can learn more about here). While eugenics has been rightfully relegated to history's trash bin, I'm happy to see that Save the Redwoods has not only survived but is stronger than ever. They also work to protect giant sequoias (which grow in the Sierras). Speaking of which, they are raising money right now to purchase the 530-acre Alder Creek property.

While men may have been on the forefront of the logging industry, it was women who were on the forefront of the anti-logging movement.

In 1924, Laura Perrott Mahan was leader of the Humboldt County Federation of Women's Clubs, a powerful voice in forest conservation. When Pacific Lumber violated a court order preventing it from logging the Dyerville Flats, she and her husband alerted the media and recruited a group of women to occupy the grove. The redwoods' first “occupy” direct action occurred nearly a hundred years ago, and it was led by women.

And while one might think this protest would be enough to stop Pacific Lumber, it took seven long years of fighting and fundraising for the group to purchase the land and form what ultimately became the Rockefeller Forest in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, “the largest contiguous ancient redwood forest remaining in the world, named after the league's 1924 anonymous donor, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The league paid more than $3 million for the 13,629-acre Rockefeller Forest: $2 million from Rockefeller, $1 million from the state, and smaller donations from the Humboldt Women's League.”

As citizens mobilized to protect old-growth forests, the logging companies mobilized to clear cut these forests more quickly and to lobby governments more aggressively. Activists turned to the Endangered Species Act as an important tool to block logging efforts, by filing claims on behalf of the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. Speece documents the evolution and expansion of the Redwood Wars and the many players involved — as well as the importance of old-fashioned, grass-roots organizing to the success of the movement. And, as with so many movements, compromises were made, alienating activists, leading some to form more aggressive offshoot organizations. It's not easy to keep track of all the names and places involved, but it's important to remember that any social and environmental movement is messy, chaotic even, as everyone has different goals and different ideas for how to achieve them. And, infighting often threatened progress at critical points in history. But progress did happen.

While anyone can hike through the Headwaters Forest Reserve today and enjoy the peace and the beauty, it is equally important that we not overlook the many personal and financial sacrifices made by people who wanted protect something that could not protect itself.

Perhaps the best way to honor those who fought to save the redwoods is to keep up the fight, not just for the redwoods but anything and anyone who could use protecting. This book will inspire you.

NOTE: This review was first posted in EcoLit Books: www.ecolitbooks.com.

The fact a garden can be so many things made me curious as to how we got to this particular point in history. I recently built enclosed, raised-bed gardens due to the poor soil I inherited and because of the deer that frequent my neighborhood. Since then, and because the raised beds reside near the sidewalk, I've been fascinated by the number of people who have stopped by to have a look, ask about the materials, or tell me how they intend to build their own. Twenty years ago, one might gather to admire someone's sterile green lawn, but those days appear to be behind us (at least in this part of Oregon). Now, more and more people aspire to organic gardens, xeriscapes and pollinator habitats.

Which was why I was curious to read Gardenland, to learn how garden writing has evolved over the past century or two. Author Jennifer Wren Atkinson does an admirable job of taking us on a chronological journey from 19th century industrial revolution America to pre-dystopian America today. Along the way, Atkinson quotes such writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee and Robin Wall Kimmerer (whose book Braiding Sweetgrass is also well worth reading).

According to Atkinson, you only need look back a few hundred years to see clear social and economic divides between people who gardened for a living and people who gardened for pleasure. In early America, the worlds of gardening and farming did not mix, not the mention the economic classes centered around these pursuits.

But this began to change in the late 19th century. In 1870, Charles Dudley Warner, the editor of the Hartford Courant, published My Summer in the Garden, a book Atkinson notes “reinvented the genre of garden writing not only by integrating production and pleasure but also by opening a space to bridge our divided notions of nature and culture, exertion and reflection, physical and philosophical activity and more.”

As an aside, Warner, who was a close friend of Mark Twain, was the source of this much-cited quote “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

Dudley's book was wildly successful and opened to the door for more writers to venture into the garden for the sheer pleasure of it.

Atkinson stresses how one person's version of progress (such as the spread of sunflower seeds around the word) may be another person's version of exploitation (it was European invasion and exploitation that led to the spread of this and other seed crops).

Atkinson also devotes attention to those gardeners who were never given the credit they were due, such as the slaves who toiled on Thomas Jefferson's famed test gardens. The dichotomy between gardening for pleasure and gardening for labor is still very much with us, as an entire undocumented workforce toils every day to maintain so many lawns and gardens. Atkinson quotes Jamaica Kincaid who criticizes the pastoral style of portraying agricultural workers when in fact they were forced into the work. Kincaid writes that in the West Indies “You cannot see any heroic cane-cutting, or any heroic cotton-picking. It's associated with conquest. It's associated with hell.”

One person's garden may represent something very different to another, which is one reason this book is such an important read. Gardens reflect society, in all its inequality and irony. I was fascinated to learn that the creation of New York's Central Park meant forcing the lower classes off land they had been subsisting on for years. By creating New York's great “garden” thousands of people lost their homes. And, after the park was opened, the designers of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, felt they needed to train New Yorkers to experience it properly. Atkinson writes, “Indeed, not only were visitors prohibited from gathering, cultivating or eating the vegetation found here; in many cases they were forbidden from playing sports or even walking on lawns beyond designated pathways.” I'm guessing they would not approve of the myriad ways the park is used today.

While this is an academic book, I found it accessible to general readers and an important addition to any garden writing library. And the title is apt, because gardens exist as much in the mind as they do in the real world.

NOTE: This review was first published on EcoLitBooks.com.

What in the world could be inhumane about gardening?

Plenty, it turns out, thanks to this beautifully produced and incredibly important book by Nancy Lawson: The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife.

The Humane Gardener makes a persuasive case for rethinking conventional knowledge about what a garden or yard should look like and how we should care for it. That is, maybe we should stop using chemicals and other artificial pesticides, start supporting native and pollinator-friendly plants, and start letting nature do its own thing. Lawson rightfully blames the critter industrial complex for fostering an adversarial relationship between humans and specific non-human animals such as deer, raccoons, and any number of insects that we may not even realize are actually trying to eat the insects eating our vegetables.

But there is more to it I think. We were raised to view our gardens and lawns as exterior versions of our homes: orderly, clean, and something we visibly control. But truly organic and native gardening and agriculture requires embracing a bit of mess, a bit of chaos. And that's okay. What we see as disorder and chaos is often nature doing what it does best.

Lawson includes a half-dozen profiles of gardeners across the US, along with photos, which provides a range of inspirations for how we might work with our yards. I love the profile of Charlotte Adelman — a retired lawyer based in Illinois who fights for wildlife of all species. She even successfully banned leaf blowers in her town — an inspiration to us all! My platform for my imagined mayoral run will be built on banning these vile instruments of torture.

Lawson challenges many gardening conventions, challenging us to rethink how we relate to our plants and animal neighbors. Here are a few conventions she challenges:

That all weeds are horrible and must be pulled, such as dandelions (I've allocated a large section of yard to letting dandelions do their thing. I have come view them as one of the easiest pollinator gardens to grow. They bloom early in the season, which is hugely important to bees who are desperate for nutrition in these early days.)
That leaves must be raked up like yesterday's trash. Leaves are nature's mulch. They help soil retain water and they provide much-needed organic matter. Try letting them be, despite your urge to clean them up (I have battled that urge myself). I know a gardener who asks neighbors to give her their leaves instead of bagging them so she can use them for her extensive vegetable gardens. Leaves are a terrible thing to waste.
That many perennial plants and shrubs must be dead-headed at the end of the summer. Let those bare branches be. They can provide shelter to animals and they also help the plants survive tough winters.
Lawson lives on the East Coast, so I did find some of her plant recommendations a bit out of my “zone” here in the inland “Mediterranean” climate of Southern Oregon. But a few of her profiles include gardeners in the western half of the country, particularly a wonderful story of a San Diego gardener who transformed his property into an environmental reserve.

On a much larger level, this book is about setting things right with the world. The chemicals and other pollutants we have dispersed over the past hundred years have exacted a toll on nature, a bill that is coming due in the form of mass extinction and climate change. Yes, this is hugely depressing, but not hopeless. Every yard, every square foot of ground, presents an opportunity for us to make a difference for animals and for the planet. It adds up. And it feels good to know you're doing good.

I highly recommend this book to any and all gardeners. It might challenge your assumptions about what constitutes a “pest,” but what is gardening without challenges?

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLitBooks.com

Funny how a word can change on you.

When I moved to Oregon nearly a decade ago, I first heard about the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about the Steens mountain range, and the diversity of bird species that migrate through this region.

Back then, Malheur meant wilderness.

But in 2016, after group of armed men held the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge hostage, Malheur took on a very different, much darker meaning.

But after reading Edge of Awe, I am reminded that 2016 was just a blip in time in a region of the world that has been home to humans and animals for many thousands of years.

Edge of Awe, edited by Alan Contreras and featuring illustrations by Ursula K. Le Guin, is an anthology of prose by writers recounting their experiences with the Malheur-Steens Country.

Peter Walker takes us back more than 14,000 years, when the Paiute, the first human inhabitants, lived in the region. The Paiute were largely nomadic, following food sources and seasons. When the Europeans arrived in the nineteenth century, they viewed this way of life as not only foreign, but less civilized. And it's no surprise that the fate of the Paiute followed a familiar template across so much of North America. The eradication of the natives left the region wide open for the hunters and other extractors, such as those in search of colorfully feathered birds to fuel the insatiable demand for feathers to adorn women's hats. William Finley, witnessed the near-extermination of white egrets and used photographs to lobby President Teddy Roosevelt to protect this area; in 1908, Roosevelt created the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a major migration byway for birds. A short essay by Tom McAllister notes that on one day in 1942 he saw 76 bird species. Even today the diversity of wildlife one can see in these parts is amazing. Malheur today draws birders in flocks to witness the birds it draws in the millions.

Harry Fuller provides a wonderful essay on the common nighthawk, which, as he notes, isn't a hawk nor is it nocturnal. But boy would I love to see one in flight.

Ellen Waterston writes about the the occupation, the tensions that did not leave with the news vehicles, a tension that preceded so many other tensions.

But what strikes me about Malheur is that birders (and other wildlife watchers) are the only people drawn to this region who are not extracting something from it. The ranchers, the miners, the sheep herders, this is their office, their source of income. An income born on the backs of so many species of animals. Grazing rights. Federals lands. Regulations and redoubters. This occupation could have taken place at any number of refuges or wilderness areas. But they chose Malheur.

Birders are now a major revenue sources for this region, so it's important we keep visiting, to remind the world that refuges such as this one, are for animals. And we are merely bystanders.

Edge of Awe provides a literary foundation for a region of the world that has seen great violence and tragedy but also stands as a beacon of hope for anyone who believes that humans can (and should) coexist with wildlife.

I'll leave you with an excerpt from a poem by Oregon poet William Stafford titled “Malheur Before Dawn” in which he writes about birds and other creatures:

Frogs discovered their national anthem again
I didn't know a ditch could hold so much joy.

Edge of Awe
Oregon State University Press

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLitBooks.com.

Published in 1969, The Edible Woman is Margaret Atwood's first novel.

As a vegan, I was curious to read this book because it features a protagonist, Marian, who discovers one day that she can no longer eat meat. While at a fancy restaurant with her fiancé...

She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and at and was killed, knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it.

Unfortunately for Marian, she could not stop thinking of animals every time she looked down at her plate. Beef soon gave way to pork and then to chicken...

“I'm turning into a vegetarian,” she was thinking sadly, “one of those cranks; I'll have to start eating lunch at Health Bars.”

As one might guess from the title, consumption is the dominant theme of this novel, not just consumption of animals but the many products that define modern society. Marian works for a market research firm, creating and administering surveys on behalf of consumer brands. She is both a consumer and observer of those who consume (and one who is consumed by a male-dominated culture).

Everything we might construe to be normal about society in the late 1960s, Atwood is questioning and ridiculing, and for good reason. Consider a work lunch with her colleagues when Marian gazes around the restaurant to take in a scene that is both dated and, in our mad rush of modern society, still quite relevant:

...stolid, breadfaced businessmen most of them, gobbling their food and swilling a few drinks to get the interruption of lunch over with as soon and as numbly as possible so they could get back to the office and make some money and get that over with as soon as possible and get back through the rush-hour traffic to their homes and wives and dinners and to get those over with as soon as possible too.

In the late 1960s (as is today), to consume animals is to be a normal member of society. Once you stop eating animals, you find yourself standing off somewhere on the outside of society looking in.

But Marian, despite her best efforts otherwise, remains an outsider. She views clothing as “costumes” and children as “its,” and a trip to the beauty parlor is compared, hilariously so, to undergoing a surgical operation (without anesthesia).

There are so many fascinating aspects of this novel, like the switching from first person to third and then back again. And Marian's roommate, who is trying to trick a man into impregnating her so she can be a single parent. And the graduate students who provide momentary escapes from adult society.

For Atwood, feminism and food are so finely woven together that it takes a magnifying glass to see the many ways that animals and women have suffered in a patriarchal society.

How does Marian rectify this desire to both fit in and not remain fully in? By taking a degree of control over consumption. By creating that thing that is consumed, by her fiancee, who says after eating, “It was delicious.”

“It” again.

This is not some dystopian future, it is our dystopian past. A past that remains all too present.

NOTE: This review was first posted on www.EcoLitBooks.com.

At the ASLE conference earlier this summer I heard this book referenced in a number of sessions.

And now, having read it, I realize why.

Braiding Sweetgrass is a rich collection of essays about plants and animals, indigenous and scientific awareness, and our tenuous relationship with nature. But more than that, it is the story of one woman's journey, from a childhood of conflicting cultures to a scientific career of conflicting world views.

Along the way, Kimmerer, teaches us about how native cultures understood and interacted with nature and one another, contrasted against our current society, and its shortsightedness and recklessness.

She contrasts the Pledge of Allegiance her children were compelled to recite with the Onondoga Nation Thanksgiving Address and finds the Pledge of Allegiance sadly lacking:

As I grew to understand the gifts of the earth, I couldn't understand how “love of country” could omit recognition of the actual country itself. The only promise it requires is to the flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land? What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?” And, later: “In the Thanksgiving Address, I hear respect respect toward all our nonhuman relatives, not on political entity, but to all of life. What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?

My favorite essay is titled Learning the Grammar of Animacy and it concerns languages and how languages both reflect culture and reinforce it. In the essay, she is struggling to learn the Potawatomi language. She writes:

English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent. Which means that 70 percent of the words have to be conjugated, and 70 percent have different tenses and cases to be mastered. European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs are both animate and inanimate.

And despite the immense challenge of keeping this language alive (there are only 9 speakers left) the effort is well worth it. For the language has much to teach us about how we (Western language speakers) have grown up seeing and interacting with the world.

In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kingship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are family.

And this applies not just to nonhuman animals but any living thing.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. if a maple is a her, we think twice.

Kimmerer writes that “English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy.” Indeed.

In an essay about her adventures as an instructor, it's fascinating and frustrating to follow her field trip with a group of students (some of whom do not believe in global warming, let alone evolution) and her efforts to open their eyes to nature. She is the sort of hands-on, passionate and playful teacher that every student should have the benefit of knowing.

There is also great sadness in this book, in remembering the violence done to people and land, in our society's seeming indifference to the mistakes we could so easily learn from. And yet she documents example upon example of people who are doing their very best, against great odds, to right the wrongs, to turn this sinking old ship around.

I did find one essay, titled The Honorable Harvest, curiously inconsistent. In it, Kimmerer profiles an animal trapper and fishing guide who is (to be fair) more humane and conservation-minded that most anyone around. But to call what he does honorable is a disservice to animals. True, he (and others) do protect land and animals, but must we sacrifice a portion of animals in return? I don't see honor in killing animals, no matter what emotional or philosophical counterbalance is employed. Kimmerer is an excellent wordsmith which is why I find it odd to see “honorable harvest” used in place of a more accurate phrase, “sustainable slaughter.”

But I must admit that if most people were to read and embrace the lessons of this book that this planet and its creatures would be so much better off.

I can see why this book came up in so many ASLE sessions, because it touches on so many issues — family, native peoples, land stewardship, our conflicted relationships with animals and one another.

While so many nonfiction books I read these days lead me from one bleak conclusion to another, this book left me feeling hopeful. Because the author is hopeful, and stubborn, and smart and one hell of writer. Robin Wall Kimmerer doesn't just point out the many challenges we face as a planet but she points a way forward.

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLit Books.

Dominion: A Christian writes about hunting, factory farming, and other sins against animals

Several years ago, I heard about a Republican, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, who had written a book in favor of protecting animals. I also heard that he was vegetarian (now vegan).

I initially wondered if hell had frozen over.

I'm joking, but only slightly. Because it was just a few months ago, at the Republican CPAC conference, that a former aid for Donald Trump warned that democrats wanted to take your hamburgers away. And Rep. Mark Meadows (North Carolina) warned that Democrats were coming for your cows.

All this despite that fact that most Democrats eat cows too.

That this issue over beef and hamburgers is becoming an issue (driven more by climate change than animal rights) led me to finally get around to reading this book: Dominion, by Matthew Scully.


And while I disagree with a few aspects of the book (Scully's off-putting obsession with abortion and Peter Singer), I would dare anyone to read this book — Democrat or Republican, Christian, Muslim, Jew or atheist, and not come away a vegetarian.

As a devout Christian, Scully goes back to the Bible and calls into question this idea that the Bible says it's okay for humans to eat animals. He points out that after that much-cited line in Genesis about man having dominion over animals, comes this line:

And God said, Behold. I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat.

If you read this line as advocating a plant-based lifestyle, you read it correctly.

Scully writes: “Indeed there was a time when Christians fasted from animal products throughout all forty days of Lent, a form of self-denial still found among the orthodox and matched in Islam by the prohibition on killing game while on pilgrimage.” Scully continues:

The next step seems obvious to me. If sanctity is the goal, and flesh-eating a mark of the Fall, the one is to be sought and the other to be avoided. Why just say grace when you can show it? Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the life of a pig or a cow or fowl of the air isn't worth much. But if it's the Grand Scheme we are going by, just what is a plate of bacon or veal worth? The skeptical reader can write me off as misguided, if not mad. I am betting that in the Book of Life “He had mercy on the creatures” is going to count more than “He ate well.”

Scully is a powerful writer. I admire the courage it took him to write a book that flies counter to the worldview of so many of his colleagues.

As the subtitle of this book states, this is a book about mercy. And chapter after chapter we are confronted with scenes of great violence to animals, scenes utterly devoid of mercy.

Scully takes us with him to a conference for Safari Club, a grotesque affair, in which people win awards based on how many exotic animals they kill. Scully writes of ranches in the US, where animals are fenced in so that hunters on busy schedules can have guaranteed kills. If there is karma in the afterlife, well, you can imagine what I wish on hunters.

As a prominent Republican, Scully was welcomed to this event and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with him. He destroys the myth of hunting as conservation, something I hear often in this part of Oregon, where hunters talk about their duck stamps and license fees as a form of love for animals and the environment. He quotes one such “conservationist” who tells this story about elephants in Namibia:

...we have a road that divides the hunting area from the protected area. The water is in the hunting area. And I see the elephants come into the area, rushing, to get a drink. And then they rush back. And when they're across the road you can see them relax. You can see the relief. They know.

Yes, elephants know all too well what monsters we can be.

Scully moves on to factory farms and spends a great deal of time touring pig enclosures, or prisons, as they really should be called. I won't recount the horrors he witnesses on his tours — led by docents who are too numbed by it to apparently care — but I will say that this is some of the most powerful writing about pigs in captivity I have read. And, like the Safari Club, I suspect it is because the author is welcomed into these private areas by the executives who view him as one of their own. He is not one of those crazy vegan protestors, so he gets the personal tour. And when you see the disconnect between the executives who have convinced themselves they are treating the animals well and the author who sees the truth, you get a feeling for just what a massively awful system we have constructed, one that few people ever see, protected by laws and money as well as our allegiance to traditions and habits. A system that abuses and murders billions of animals every year. Not millions. Billions.

And we are all complicit. As Scully writes, “Everyone is wrong.”

It may be adamantly objected that I am equating injustice to animals with injustice to human beings, a sign of my own misplaced priorities and moral confusion. This rejoinder only cuts the other way. It is only further evidence of our own boundless capacity for self-delusion, especially when there is money involved. For if so many wrongs once thought right can fill our human story, such unbounded violence and disregard of human life, how much easier for the human heart to overlook the wrongs done to lowly animals, to tolerate intolerable things. Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide. “We had stopped short at Comfort, and mistaken it for Civilization,” as Disraeli remarked in another context. Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to MercySeveral years ago, I heard about a Republican, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, who had written a book in favor of protecting animals. I also heard that he was vegetarian (now vegan).

I initially wondered if hell had frozen over.

I'm joking, but only slightly. Because it was just a few months ago, at the Republican CPAC conference, that a former aid for Donald Trump warned that democrats wanted to take your hamburgers away. And Rep. Mark Meadows (North Carolina) warned that Democrats were coming for your cows.

All this despite that fact that most Democrats eat cows too.

That this issue over beef and hamburgers is becoming an issue (driven more by climate change than animal rights) led me to finally get around to reading this book: Dominion, by Matthew Scully.


And while I disagree with a few aspects of the book (Scully's off-putting obsession with abortion and Peter Singer), I would dare anyone to read this book — Democrat or Republican, Christian, Muslim, Jew or atheist, and not come away a vegetarian.

As a devout Christian, Scully goes back to the Bible and calls into question this idea that the Bible says it's okay for humans to eat animals. He points out that after that much-cited line in Genesis about man having dominion over animals, comes this line:

And God said, Behold. I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat.

If you read this line as advocating a plant-based lifestyle, you read it correctly.

Scully writes: “Indeed there was a time when Christians fasted from animal products throughout all forty days of Lent, a form of self-denial still found among the orthodox and matched in Islam by the prohibition on killing game while on pilgrimage.” Scully continues:

The next step seems obvious to me. If sanctity is the goal, and flesh-eating a mark of the Fall, the one is to be sought and the other to be avoided. Why just say grace when you can show it? Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the life of a pig or a cow or fowl of the air isn't worth much. But if it's the Grand Scheme we are going by, just what is a plate of bacon or veal worth? The skeptical reader can write me off as misguided, if not mad. I am betting that in the Book of Life “He had mercy on the creatures” is going to count more than “He ate well.”

Scully is a powerful writer. I admire the courage it took him to write a book that flies counter to the worldview of so many of his colleagues.

As the subtitle of this book states, this is a book about mercy. And chapter after chapter we are confronted with scenes of great violence to animals, scenes utterly devoid of mercy.

Scully takes us with him to a conference for Safari Club, a grotesque affair, in which people win awards based on how many exotic animals they kill. Scully writes of ranches in the US, where animals are fenced in so that hunters on busy schedules can have guaranteed kills. If there is karma in the afterlife, well, you can imagine what I wish on hunters.

As a prominent Republican, Scully was welcomed to this event and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with him. He destroys the myth of hunting as conservation, something I hear often in this part of Oregon, where hunters talk about their duck stamps and license fees as a form of love for animals and the environment. He quotes one such “conservationist” who tells this story about elephants in Namibia:

...we have a road that divides the hunting area from the protected area. The water is in the hunting area. And I see the elephants come into the area, rushing, to get a drink. And then they rush back. And when they're across the road you can see them relax. You can see the relief. They know.

Yes, elephants know all too well what monsters we can be.

Scully moves on to factory farms and spends a great deal of time touring pig enclosures, or prisons, as they really should be called. I won't recount the horrors he witnesses on his tours — led by docents who are too numbed by it to apparently care — but I will say that this is some of the most powerful writing about pigs in captivity I have read. And, like the Safari Club, I suspect it is because the author is welcomed into these private areas by the executives who view him as one of their own. He is not one of those crazy vegan protestors, so he gets the personal tour. And when you see the disconnect between the executives who have convinced themselves they are treating the animals well and the author who sees the truth, you get a feeling for just what a massively awful system we have constructed, one that few people ever see, protected by laws and money as well as our allegiance to traditions and habits. A system that abuses and murders billions of animals every year. Not millions. Billions.

And we are all complicit. As Scully writes, “Everyone is wrong.”

It may be adamantly objected that I am equating injustice to animals with injustice to human beings, a sign of my own misplaced priorities and moral confusion. This rejoinder only cuts the other way. It is only further evidence of our own boundless capacity for self-delusion, especially when there is money involved. For if so many wrongs once thought right can fill our human story, such unbounded violence and disregard of human life, how much easier for the human heart to overlook the wrongs done to lowly animals, to tolerate intolerable things. Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide. “We had stopped short at Comfort, and mistaken it for Civilization,” as Disraeli remarked in another context. Sometimes tradition and habit are just that, comfortable excuses to leave things be, even when they are unjust and unworthy. Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the cranks and radicals turn out to be right. Sometimes Everyone is wrong.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

This review first appeared on EcoLit Books.

I thought I knew a thing or two about gardening. But since undertaking a rather intensive gardener training program I now know just how little I actually knew about gardening.

I'm not alone. It turns out that so much of what we've been told about gardening and farming over the past few decades — from the usage of pesticides and fertilizers to the annual tilling of soil — has turned out not only to be bad for the soil but bad for the planet.

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka (translated by Larry Korn) is the story of one person who saw what was wrong with industrial agriculture (in the early days of industrial agriculture) and completely reinvented agriculture. Mr. Fukuoka was a Japanese plant scientist who came of age after World War II as Japan was adopting Western agricultural practices and their associated chemicals. Dissatisfied with the increasing emphasis on science over nature, he quit his job, returned to his family farm and set out to do things differently. He began doing less of what so many other farmers had been doing. As in no chemicals. No tilling. No excessive watering. And no neat and tidy rows of plants and trees like we have grown accustomed to seeing on conventional farms. Twenty years of trial and error later, he ended up with one of the most productive farms in Japan and, in the process, became known as the “father of natural farming.”

We need natural farming, now more than ever.

My mom lived on an Iowa farm surrounded by miles upon miles of productive farmland. But when I visited years ago I learned that nobody could drink the well water. It was contaminated from all the chemicals and minerals sprayed on the crops. Local rivers and streams were becoming more and more toxic, particularly after the rains, as nitrates leached from the soil and into the water supply, finding their way into Gulf of Mexico where we now have a dead zone the size of Delaware. And yet when you drive through Iowa you see miles of seemingly healthy corn crops. Everything neat and orderly and green. But it's an illusion, and an unsustainable illusion.

Mr. Fukuoka was trained as a scientist, so he knew the risks of chemicals. He also believed that there were better, more natural, ways to fertilize the soil. He gradually developed a system of planting clover (which is a nitrogen fixing plant, also known as “green manure”) and laying down rice stalks as ground cover. And he did not till the soil, not because he was lazy but because he didn't want to damage the soil and its billions of microscopic creatures that were living within it.

And this brings me to the most compelling idea presented by Fukuoka — that humans, in our efforts to control nature, have only made things worse. Fukuoka wrote:

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface.

If you want to get an idea of the natural fertility of the earth, take a walk to the wild mountainside sometime and look at the giant trees that grow without fertilizer and without cultivation. The fertility of nature, as it is, is beyond reach of the imagination.

In other words, if our soil is doing so much of the agricultural “heavy lifting” for us, why are we killing it?

He cites the massive pollution caused by runoff from overfertilized and overwatered fields.

The most commonly used chemical fertilizers, ammonium sulfate, urea, super phosphate and the like, are used in large amounts, only fractions of which are absorbed by the plants in the field. The rest leaches into streams and rivers, eventually flowing into the Inland Sea. These nitrogen compounds become food for algae and plankton which multiply in great numbers, causing the red tide to appear ... My modest solutions, such as spreading straw and growing clover, create no pollution.

The good news is that I'm reading more and more about famers embracing cover crops over chemicals. Even some of the research I'm seeing out of Iowa is showing a small (but growing) number of farms adopting cover crops. And, yes, the demand for organic produce is pushing farmers to try new approaches. But there's also a general sense of unease with all these chemicals we were told would improve our lives. And this is the most revolutionary aspect of the book and natural farming, that it challenges us to question practices and beliefs and so many of us were born into, that we were raised to think of as right.

As far back as I can remember tilling was considered an essential farming practice. You fire up the tractor and turn over the soil. And yet, according to Mr. Fukuoka, tilling is simply not necessary. He has a field that he hasn't tilled in more than 20 years, one that is more productive than any other farm in the region. So how does he get the seeds into the ground? He just tosses them onto the ground (Nature works in much the same way). And what a “mess” this ground is. There is nothing neat and orderly here. Just clover and rice stalks and no exposed soil, which is another rule of thumb: never let the sun touch the soil.

To be honest, I still appreciate the orderly nature of traditional farms — everything in parallel lines and perfectly in sync. Like so many of those Old McDonald children's books. And yet I also know there is something intrinsically wrong with massive mono-crops, for soils, for pest control, for the quality of the food itself.

I appreciated Fukuoka's focus on simple living, as in simple diets. He noted that Japanese were eating more meats because rice was considered a lower-class food. And he argued in defense of plain old rice. And it was nice to see that way back then he saw the environmental impact of so many people giving up grains for meat:

Meat and other imported foods are luxuries because they require more energy and resources than the traditional vegetables and grains produced locally ... Brown rice and vegetables may seem to be coarse fare, but this is the very finest diet nutritionally, and enables human beings to live simply and directly.

This book is as much about establishing a relationship with nature as it is about growing vegetables and fruit trees. Ultimately, as the title attests, this book is about revolutionizing the way we treat the land beneath our feet. Even if you have no intentions of tossing a seed onto the ground (though I recommend a few showy milkweed seeds for the monarchs) you'll enjoy this book.

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLit Books. Join us!