Reader’s Corner

I’ve been mulling this, and am tempted to mention *The Hobbit* and Tolkein’s Trilogy—those Ents are related to me, I swear; but I think that Hesse’s *Siddhartha* was even more influential. That “riverman,” ferrying people back and forth, connected to time and the flow of the river… With me still.

A friend noticed that I had a light bulb going on over my head when I was 18, and gave me an original copy of Frances Moore Lappe’s ‘Diet for a Small Planet’. I immediately stopped eating beef, which led to pork, most fish, and I now seek out organically raised, free range chicken, twice a month. I’m a 90% vegetarian. The connection between food, energy, and waste were nicely shown in Lappe’s book, and it launched me into another world that is possible.
The next book I believe that would be wonderful for someone looking for their introductory book is ‘Developing Ecological Consciousness’ by Christopher Uhl.

It was “Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water” by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke. That really opened my eyes. And before that, the Aztec myth about the four worlds before this one. Really.

Thomas Berry’s “The Dream of the Earth”. Everything written by Thomas Berry is crucial and beautiful. A lifetime can be spent internalizing his insights.
I read this book when I was 21, after seeing a program on TV, ‘Befriending the Earth’, where Berry was a participant at an ecological colloquim. Brian Swimme’s “The Universe is a Green Dragon,” “The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos,” and “The Universe Story” co-written with Thomas Berry - are treasures. These books possess the ability to shift our consciousness and are establishing a new ecological paradigm around the world.

Dont ‘member nuffin about environmentally enhanced bookish bits in my Hessian childhood. Probably a bad sign, memoryloss-wise. But visiting a friend in Berkeley in 1998 I stumbled upon Neal Stephenson’s ‘Zodiac’. Reread several times those racy eco-stunts with cyclist/engine addict (and parttime asshole) Sangamon Taylor around Boston Harbor and its fictional garbage island, fighting deadly pollution (and maybe some boredom, too?) are nestled deep into my brain stem. Hopefully.

Very often an awareness of the rape of nature is preceded by a love of nature which I found in my childhood with wildlife and wild flowers and the poets Wordsworth and Dickinson. Living in an agricultural state meant an awareness of “crop dusters”—the small planes spreading farm checmicals, including DDT. And then the book: Silent Spring.

The Dying of the Trees by Charles Little

My interest in the environment and ecology began from a little known book that seemingly had nothing directly to do with the environment. “Nerve Cells and Insect Behavior,” written by, Kenneth Roeder, the world’s eminent pioneer in discovering how the function of individual nerve cells affected the behavior of whole organisms, propelled me into the study of animal behavior, specifically insects. Anyone who studies these creatures is bound to develop an appreciation, even a reverence, for their finely choreographed relationships with the surroundings, elegant connections that rely on a faith in environmental and climatic consistencies. We seem hell bent on compromising that faith.