American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

by Bill McKibben (Editor)

As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries.

Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America’s greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of “nature” join ecologists’ memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

Genres: Environment, Nature, Nonfiction, Essays, Science, History, Anthologies

1047 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Bill McKibben is the author of Eaarth, The End of Nature, Deep Economy, Enough, Fight Global Warming Now, The Bill McKibben Reader, and numerous other books. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming. In 2010 The Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist," and Time magazine has called him "the world's best green journalist." He studied at Harvard, and started his writing career as a staff writer at The New Yorker. The End of Nature, his first book, was published in 1989 and was regarded as the first book on climate change for a general audience. He is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He has been awarded Guggenheim Fellowship and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/billmc...

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the dozen or so most impactful books that I’ve ever read. This book was so interesting that I briefly contemplated changing careers to do something that could benefit the world. Nope. Probably too late in my career for that.

Anyway, this is an extraordinary compilation of more than 100 essays on nature and the environment starting with Thoreau until the present. Full disclosure. My family thinks that many of the essays in this volume that I find so interesting and inspiring are just simply depressing to them.

Some are fun and silly exercises. Did you know that if our planet’s population keeps doubling at the current rate of 37 years then by the next millennium the earth’s population would be 160,000,000,000,000,000 people? Yes that’s 160 quadrillion people or about 40 people per square meter. The author of that essay pointed out that it would take a 300 story building covering the entire earth to house everyone. You get the point. But many of the essays that focus on nature showcase some beautiful writing.

As an engineer I’ve spent many cycles conducting root cause analyses which is just some fancy terminology for troubleshooting. I find the truth is always better than sticking one’s head in the sand like an ostrich. Unfortunately most people don’t share my opinion. On a flight a few days ago I was discussing with a fellow passenger about how my daughters were joining the climate change walkout. What’s that she said? It is basically young people recognizing that climate change is a real and urgent problem. I then casually mentioned that we ‘humans’ are destroying the planet. The conversation did not go well at that point because who wants to hear depressing talk like that from a stranger. She was getting agitated and probably thought I was blaming her. It was kind of surreal since I live in a 1st world country, travel all the time and also admitted that I have a bigger carbon footprint than most people. But that’s how it goes with topics like the environment, the discussions and solutions often require so much nuance, education and [gasp] honesty that it’s hard to puzzle through them collectively.

The articles in this book address or discuss most of our current environmental challenges and conundrums. I came away convinced that without an educated public and some incredible leaders, and we are currently lacking in both these areas, finding solutions to our bigger challenges is daunting at best. Climate change, pollution, population control, food supplies, species extinction and so on.

I highly recommend reading the essays from the back of the book and working your way forward as they are more current than beginning with Walden.

5 stars. 6 stars if I had a 6 star non-fiction shelf.

[Ken-ichi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me over a year, but I finally finished reading this tome, squeezing in a few pages here and there between other books, and it was well, well worth it. McKibben has assembled a fantastic list of writers, from those I'd read (Thoreau, Muir, Carson, Dillard, Pollan) to those I've been meaning to read (Aldo Leopold, Jane Jacobs, Edward Abbey) to those I'd never heard of (Barry Lopez, David Abram) and all the way to the completely unexpected (P.T. Barnum, R. Crumb, Philip K Dick). There were so many voices and ideas that despite a bunch of notes, I'm having trouble extracting singular strands of meaning aside from the very basic pleasure of reading the words of generations of Americans who thought and continue to think about the natural world in the same terms that I do (not surprising, of course: they helped create the culture in which I was raised). I'll just try and pick a couple things from my notes:

I noticed a handful of significant connections in the pieces McKibben chose. For instance, in the essay "Huckleberries" Thoreau writes, "[...:] for at the same time that we exclude mankind from gathering berries in our field, we exclude them from gathering health and happiness and inspiration, and a hundred other far finer and nobler fruits than berries" (p. 29). McKibben describes this piece as the "modern nature essay being born," referring to its formal qualities, but its literal focus on the link between food and our relationship with nature draws a clear connection to Michael Pollan and today's nexus of food, health, hedonism, and the environment.

Another fairly literal connection is the choice of John Muir's "A Wind-Storm in the Forests" and an excerpt from Julia Butterfly Hill's The Legacy of Luna. Muir, the legendary Californian rambler and conservationist, found himself in the woods in 1878 with a storm coming, and figured he'd weather it at the top of a 100 ft spruce, just for kicks. His prose is exultant, joyous, and slightly mad: pure Muir. Hill, an Earth First protester, climbed a redwood twice as high in 1997 and stayed there for 2 years to prevent loggers from chopping it down. She has her Muir-ish flights of fancy too (though she's no poet), but far from howling with mad joy, she feels her sanity slipping and her life ebbing as storms repeatedly batter her. The two selections are such great contrasts: Muir's elegance vs. Hill's plain speech, his romantic motives and her practical ones, his joy and her suffering. They make good bookends, even if they're not actually at the ends.

A third interesting parallel I noticed was between Calvin B. Dewitt's choice of "fruitfulness" as a Biblical value Christians should apply to the land (keep life abundant and diverse) and Annie Dillard's completely secular fascination and horror with the teeming, breeding, writhing, eating fecundity of life. Contrasts like this reminded me how differently we all see nature, and how it so often confounds us with simultaneous comfort and revulsion. Actually, pieces like Dillard's made me wish for some colonial pieces in this collection, or anything from pre-Romantic Americans, when horror was the predominant response to the wild.

Alright, enough blabbing. There are a million veins to trace through the decades in this collection, and that's partially what made it such a pleasure to read. I'd say if you're the kind of person who's already read pieces by at least 5 of the authors collected here, you should pick it up to peruse now and then. I would certainly *not* recommend it to those who like keeping a nicely pruned to-read list, because boy, this is just a smorgasbord of tiny, tantalizing tidbits for the bookavore. Now I have to read William Cronon, Terry Tempest Williams, Jane Jacobs and Wendell Berry at the same time, The End of Nature and Second Nature at the same time! Agh!


(just a few) WORDS

weal (n): well-being, happiness. p. 44

tophetization (n): I'm assuming Muir (who had memorized the Bible) was referring to Tophet, legendary (mythical?) site of child sacrifice and carcass disposal, and apparently synonymous with Hell, so I guess "tophetiziation" is synonymous with "damnation." p. 89

logcock (n): after a cursory bit of searching, it's unclear as to whether this is a synonym for the Pileated Woodpecker or the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Here's a reference suggesting the former (http://www.jstor.org/pss/4154522), and here's one for the latter (http://www.ubio.org/browser/details.p...). Roosevelt writes, "How immensely it would add to our forests if only the great logcock were still found among them!" which certainly suggests the (probably) extinct Ivory-billed. p. 130

[Pearl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most important book I’ve ever read. It changed me as a student but more importantly as a person. I don’t know that I would ever recommend just picking it up but, reading this for class was a journey I’ll remember forever. While it’s not perfect- in the time sense I’ve read it I have learned more about just how white-male dominated mainstream American environmentalism has been- it is had such a profound impact on me that I need to give it 5 stars.

[Chris Komatz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me 4 years and 5 months to read this book. This is longer than I was in college. And about the same amount of time I have been working as an environmental professional.

The reason it took me so long to read this book was not because it was boring or verbose, but because the ideas presented in the passages inspired deep thought, introspection and reflection. This book led me to discover new authors and books that have become favorites. It challenged me to re-define what I thought environmentalism meant and represents. This book should be in the hands of every environmental student, and american. It is worthy of a capstone course in any natural resource college in the world, and is one of the most important collections I have ever read.

[Trenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sweeping look at environmental writing from 1837 - 2007, this book engaged with a multitude of voices, perspectives, and topics. Tiny print on a 1000+ pages leaves lots of space for impact, and man oh man was this impactful. My copy is now bookmarked and underlined in both a testament to the months I spent with these gorgeous pages, but also as a guide for future me in my inevitable returns and references. This is, at present, in the top 10 most important books I own.

[Korin: A Crone Running Amok · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different”
A very easy to read and understand contemplation on what is currently happening to the planet & what we can & should do about it.

[Lydia Shestopalova · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book-lover's book, the kind that's as pleasurable to hold and merely flip through the delicate, neatly formatted pages as it is to read. I picked up the heavy, 1,000-plus-page tome in preparation for teaching a community college course on environmental ethics, a field in which I am no specialist. It quickly became *the* source for a number of my syllabus selections and I provided the chronology - which correctly begins over 10,000 years ago - as background material.

At the risk of being overly broad, the anthology is a decent attempt at being comprehensive. I would encourage more emphasis on indigenous perspectives, which I suppose calls into question the meaning of "American" in the title. The contents certainly overwhelmed by white, male voices, suggesting the definition is more national/political than continental/geological. The introduction by former US Vice President Al Gore also attests to that. Though it makes a noticeable attempt to represent writers of color and women after the turn of the 2oth century, it could stand (many) more of those essential readings.

For my course, I go to the original, complete texts by Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, and many others, but commend the editor for including them all and more, as well as having the discretion to only choose one of his own writings. I also appreciate the inclusion of fiction, songs, and poetry. Lastly, a teacher's dream: preliminary biographical sketches of each author to give some context and draw links between the selections.

While I didn't get through the entire anthology, having read many of the contents elsewhere, I'm taking credit for doing so. After all, I carefully studied those I decided against and the following favorites:
> John Burroughs' "The Art of Seeing Things"
> N. Scott Momaday's "A First American Views His Land"
> William O. Douglas' "Dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton"
> Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"
> César Chávez's "Wrath of Grapes Boycott Speech"

[Bidisha Banerjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful essay in American Earth, Jack Turner's "The Song of the White Pelican" quotes Dogen:

"That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion;
That the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment."

Turner says that the Japanese word translated as 'enlightenment' can also be translated as intimacy, and he goes to describe the elusive sounds of white pelicans soaring amongst thunderheads in Yellowstone.

He writes, "I believe the clacking in the sky over the Grand Teton is the song of the white pelican. I believe they sing their song in ecstacy, from joy in an experience unique to their perfections. I know climbers who whistle, sing and yodel when they are up in the sky. William Blake died singing to the angles he knew were leading him to heaven. Some sing, some whistle, some yip, some clack in the sky, some make love to a violin. Why saw at strings of gut stretched over holes in burnished wood? Why sing cantatas and masses and chorales?

All life contains its anguish, even a trout-eating pelican's life--the Buddha's first noble truth. But all life must occasionally experience a release. In passion and ecstasy, all life lets go--of what?

**

Terrific to follow the essay above with Carl Anthony & Renee Soule's essay "A Multicultural Approach to Ecopsychology."

[Jason Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I get older, I've grown to lament what industry and myopic urban sprawl have done to the natural world, all of which I find both preventable and fixable. I'm becoming obsessed with wilderness and in turn have grown increasingly aware of all the damage we've done and how unnecessarily and fearfully we have simultaneously built into the wilderness yet closed it off and pretend to shield ourselves from it, enabling a false sense of ease and comfort. So in that sense I am right at home in this book.

I would also like to see a counter anthology put together, because anyone who enthusiastically reads American Earth should also develop a better sense of what they're up against.

A global version of this book would also be nice. Not every culture views nature the same, so a comparative environmentalism would benefit a lot of us. Maybe this book exists already, but I haven't found it.

Lastly, not every entry in American Earth is great. Off hand, one of the later pieces on ecopsychology reads like some tryhard wannabe postmodern rubbish. But the bits on ecotourism, the supreme court justice who insisted that somebody needs to stick up for nature, and dumping in Dixie are exactly the types of tracts that motivate me to do better and demand better of policy-makers.

[Lois · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book jacket calls this anthology of environmental writing "unprecedented". My initial reaction was skepticism (there have been many anthologies of nature writing after all), but as I read I realized that the breadth of source material in this anthology really is remarkable. McKibben differentiates between nature writing and environmental writing, which is the focus of this book and which he defines as writing about "the collision between people and the rest of the world." Topics include city spaces, economics, alternative lifestyles, activism, among others, in addition to specific environmental concerns and classics of environmental writing. Modes range from comics and editorial cartoons to poems to lyrics to photos and paintings to newspaper and magazine articles to a dissenting Supreme Court opinion to literature to speeches to excerpts from full-length books. The book is huge (1047 pages), but very little of it is dry or hard to read. Kudos.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only gave this 4 stars because it's a collection of writings rather than a singular piece of writing. That being said it's a 5-star collection. I was required to read this book for an intro to environmental philosophies class in college, and the book perfectly serves that function. It contains a wide variety of environmental thought and exposes the reader to many different (and sometimes opposing) environmental philosophies.

Some highlights for me off of the top of my head were the following writers:
Michael Pollan, Rachel Carsen, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Wes Jackson and Denis Hayes .

[Beau Daignault · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of authors ranging from Henry David Thoreau to R. Crumb, each commenting on the howling (and reduced) landscape of the American Earth.
Foreword by Al Gore.

Very well Illustrated, with examples from A.B Durand, Ansel Adams, Vint Lawrence, Crumb & many other photo documents.

I am very fond of this book and recommend it to anyone interested in a condensed yet thorough survey of environmental writng.

[Ashley Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is rare that I read an anthology in full. However, this is a wonderfully constructed collection. I learned something from every included excerpt. McKibben was also careful to include a wide range of genres that emphasize environmental activism- nonfiction, poetry, song, cartoon, science fiction and religious writing all make an appearance. I was as interested to follow the changing environmental concerns as I was to notice the shifts in American writing style since Thoreau. Masterfully done.

[Stacia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm really starting to feel bothered about the fact that "important" essays about nature usually dwell on how bad we're fucking it up, and not so much on just how awesome it is. I know that the first point is important, especially if the second one is going to stay true, but some of the pieces in this collection are real downers. More Mary Oliver, please! The collection is useful, though.

[Prooost Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) put together a massive collection of environmental writing, from Thoreau in the 1830s, to Rebecca Solnit's essay about Thoreau in 2007. There are 100 or so authors, coming at the environment from many different angles. It's a great experience reading through the anthology and getting to know some very fine thinkers.

[Rose Murray]

Fantastic! I can't say I've actually read it from front to back, because the short time allowed from the library to actually read it is insufficient. But, one of the best compilations of this sort I've read or even seen. It's all there! Definately a permanent collection book.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me 6 weeks to read this because I wanted to go slowly to better appreciate and comprehend what I read. There are over 100 works by various scientists, authors, poets, and others. Mostly these are essays or chapters from longer works, but there are poems, a cartoon, and a couple of songs. It contains writings about nature in general and about smaller issues such as flooding a specific canyon. The works range from extracts from Walden to letters by Teddy Roosevelt to a chapter from The Grapes of Wrath to an essay about whales by Barry Lopez. There are authors that almost anyone will be familiar with such as Rachel Carson to the much more obscure environmentalist such as Julia Butterfly Hill. Each author and their work engage the reader in some different way about issues with the environment and they were fascinating.

Like any long and varied collection of essays, some are not as interesting but every reader will find much to contemplate. This book was published in 2007 and now it is easy to see that some of the predictions of climate change are coming true potentially earlier than anticipated. These are rarely hopeful essays although some are meant to provide answers to issues. The hard thing is to know we had some solutions for certain problems decades ago if we had only listened and made real changes. Some progress we made such as banning DDT were positive, but we still have hundreds of chemicals in our daily lives that affect us in similar ways. These are hard subjects because we have made a mess of things and it continues to happen. The book is well worth reading, but it isn't an uplifting book to read.

[Sierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as a required textbook for my Intro to Environmental Thought and Philosophy in university, and it turned out to be a very good read. This extraordinary compilation of more than 100 essays on nature and the environment starting with Thoreau (1817–1862) until the present day offers readers a wide variety of environmental thought and exposes the reader to many different (and sometimes opposing) environmental philosophies.

This book really demonstrated the fact that even among a community of people who deeply care about protecting the environment, everyone has their own approach and philosophy on how best to make this world a better place (e.g., conservation vs. preservation). There isn't one ultimate right way to do things, and we, readers - learners, need to know to embrace just that.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was assigned this book in an American Literature course for university, and it ended up being one of my favorites I've ever read. It spans centuries and centuries of American nature writing, from the awesome wonder of John Muir to the devastating affects of human activity on wildlife. Intensely inspirational and beautifully organized.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology is quite good. It was my textbook for my ecocriticism class and I think overall it has a great selection of environmental writing. Couldn't read the whole thing because it's very, very long.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

On par with other Library of America collections. Some inclusions are excellent, others could be a bit harder to get through. The writing is mostly good, and most of the pieces were educational and well worth reading.

[Terry Cyr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful and inspiring sampling of the historical best of environmental writing. This anthology includes excerpts and essays that, right or wrong, helped shape the environmental movement.

[Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely collection of some of the best of environmental writing. A touchstone to many incredible writers and lovers of the natural world.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my grad class. Didn't read all of the stories

[Eleanor Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the greatest things I've ever read in my whole life.

[Audrey Blandford · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO COOL!!! Read it for my summer class on American Environmental Writing!!

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as poetic as I would have liked

[Anna Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did enjoy parts of this read, obviously this book is comprised of sections of essays so the quality will vary. Though, if you enjoy nature and american history I suggest the read.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging read while living in Trump’s America and the effects of climate change and over-consumption become increasingly apparent. It took me a while to read this worthy collection as a result.

[Leonard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Excellent 1,000 plus page collection of the best environmental writing, compiled by one of the finest and most prolific current environmental writers. This volume includes well known writers like Abbey, Leopold, and Kingsolver, as well as lesser known authors such as Robert Marshall, Jane Jacobs, and Rebecca Solnit. It includes the works of at least half a dozen poets, a couple ex-presidents, a former Supreme Court justice, a former governor, songwriters, photographers, and a cartoonist. I really appreciate McKibben's editorial skills and his own opinions. For example, in the introduction to Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," McKibben writes, "Were I in charge of such matters, it could aternate weeks with "America the Beautiful" as our nation anthem. Great idea! It's past time that we replace our current bloody and war-glorifying national anthem with a song that shows some respect for humans who may live in a nation currently designated as an enemy nation by the US government. We also need a song for national anthem that fits the times we live in, that is an anthem that encourages us to protect the environment, which war and preparation for war certainly does not. We also need an anthem that encourages us to resolve our differences with other peoples in a humane, civilized, non-violent manner. Why not follow McKibben's suggestion and use two or three songs for national anthems, or have a national song-writing contest for a new and better anthem, or perhaps several new anthems? In any case, American Earth is an inspiring and timely collection of excellent writings.