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First Review of The Future of Nature

August 24, 2007, by Scott Walker

The first review of the forthcoming book of Orion essays, edited and with an introduction by Barry Lopez.

Lopez has as much respect for language as he does for the living world, so when he uses the word terracide to describe what we’re committing via unchecked industrialization and “hypercapitalistic aggression,” it is no mere hyperbole. Lopez hasn’t been alone in his attempt to understand the relationship between humankind and the rest of life on Earth. For a quarter of a century, Orion magazine has been publishing well-wrought essays of inquiry by diverse writers. Lopez has now assembled a compelling mosaic of prescient, incisive works published over the last 15 years that wrestle with questions of environmental sustainability and social justice. Clarion essays by such innovative and now prominent thinkers as Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Rebecca Solnit nestle against two-dozen other arresting dispatches, including Loren’s chronicle of a grassroots effort to halt unnecessary commercial development in Colorado and Sandra Steingraber’s report on the trouble with vinyl. Each essay has been brought up-to-date, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, adding up to a thought-provoking ecological primer.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist