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Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is
From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis.
Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. “Sentience and sunderance,” Ehrlich writes. “How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all.” As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.
Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. “Sentience and sunderance,” Ehrlich writes. “How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all.” As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 5, 2021
60 people are currently reading
771 people want to read
About the author
Gretel Ehrlich
57 books351 followersGretel Ehrlich is an American travel writer, novelist, essayist, and poet born on a horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California and educated at both Bennington College in Vermont and UCLA film school. After working in film for 10 years and following the death of a loved one, she began writing full-time in 1978 while living on a Wyoming ranch where she had been filming. Her first book, The Solace of Open Spaces, is a collection of essays describing her love of the region.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
March 28, 2021
Beautifully written, and heartbreaking personal story connected to and reflecting on heartbreaking stories of climate breakdown.
Everything about this book is amazing, except for the author's (and some of her acquaintances', as told in the book) repeated assertions that the root causes of climate breakdown are loss of albedo in arctic sea ice and soil degradation. It should go without saying that this is not true; you could do everything possible to restore soils (and should anyway for a variety of reasons) and this would not do more than briefly pause the climate crisis, and there is no earthly way to stop the loss of albedo in arctic sea ice without stopping the combustion of fossil fuels. But fossil fuels barely come up, and oil extraction--the one related anecdote that does appear in the book--is never tied to carbon emissions or the climate crisis. In all fairness, this should have docked the book more than one star, but the writing is so breathtaking and her stories of her travels are told with such compassion that I couldn't do it.
Read this book for intimate, first-hand stories of what it's like to already be facing the climate apocalypse; but then, read scientists to figure out why and what we need to do about it.
Everything about this book is amazing, except for the author's (and some of her acquaintances', as told in the book) repeated assertions that the root causes of climate breakdown are loss of albedo in arctic sea ice and soil degradation. It should go without saying that this is not true; you could do everything possible to restore soils (and should anyway for a variety of reasons) and this would not do more than briefly pause the climate crisis, and there is no earthly way to stop the loss of albedo in arctic sea ice without stopping the combustion of fossil fuels. But fossil fuels barely come up, and oil extraction--the one related anecdote that does appear in the book--is never tied to carbon emissions or the climate crisis. In all fairness, this should have docked the book more than one star, but the writing is so breathtaking and her stories of her travels are told with such compassion that I couldn't do it.
Read this book for intimate, first-hand stories of what it's like to already be facing the climate apocalypse; but then, read scientists to figure out why and what we need to do about it.
February 6, 2021
Disappointing. I love her deep descriptions of nature, but this felt like a series of disjointed thoughts and stories rather than a coherent narrative. Though it was somewhat interesting (and mostly depressing) to read her firsthand observations of climate change, I wish I would have read the tepid NYT review before I bought it and spent the time on something else.
October 31, 2021
Yet again, Gretel Erlich has written a mesmerizing prose poem and disguised it as a memoir. When Beryl Markham wrote her 1942 memoir, West with the Night, about her east-to-west transatlantic solo flight, Hemingway remarked that “she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers.” The caliber of writing in Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is assures Gretel Erlich membership in that very exclusive club alongside Beryl Markham. Her succinct prose is crisp and spare, but breathtakingly evocative when describing nature’s flora and fauna of the many places she visits. She may occasionally send readers to dictionaries for desertification, gyre, rondavel, glissade, revetment, peristalsis, and cambium, but they are worthwhile diversions.
And yet if her previous book, The Solace of Open Spaces, was about “finding something,” then does Unsolaced hint at having lost what was found? Or does it, at least, express a yearning for something not yet grasped? If the former work was about restorative healing, does the latter suggest an untreated wound? Indeed, I think it does, though ironically, not when she was struck by lightning!
After she spent a couple of years at her parents’ home recovering from that injury, Erlich seemed to hunger for travel, which she satisfied by going to far-flung places to witness and then embrace the climate change catastrophe. Unsolaced then becomes the story of other people rather than of Erlich herself. In Zimbabwe, for example, she visits Allan Savory and tells of his efforts to reverse “desertification” by keeping and moving livestock in a way that mimics nature. There is desperation in Erlich’s narrative, for Savory’s task seems hopelessly monumental.
Erlich favors Greenland with multiple visits. Her friend, Jens Danielsen, describes a way of life that is vanishing in direct proportion to the vanishing ice. Ice that in the past would measure ten feet thick now barely measures ten inches. Multiyear ice, a reliable metric that sea ice survives at least one melt season, is all but disappearing. Concomitant with the melting ice is rising sea temperature, which jeopardizes the survival of everything from polar bears to guillemots. An unexpected victim of the climate change turns out to be Greenlander culture, which is driven by omnipresent ice. So when the source, the very life-blood for survival of everything begins to disappear, then even the stories that pass from one generation to another evaporate.
And Erlich uncovers in her explorations odd ways in which climate change dots can be connected. African farmers burn fields for the ash that naturally fertilizes the fields, but the burning produces vast, toxic pollution that crosses continents silently and irrevocably harming the earth in its wake. The billion hectares burned annually in Africa causes Allan Savory to remark to Erlich: “You see, it’s right here that we are causing your beloved Greenland ice to melt!”
There is no end to the interesting people Erlich encounters—a trauma surgeon doing work in post-genocidal Kosovo, a classical composer drawing inspiration from frozen, icy wastes, and a horse trainer who uses elements of Buddhism to forge understanding between horse and human. Her network is truly global and she has probably witnessed firsthand more evidence of climate change and its dire consequences than politicians and policy makers glean from any amount of reading reports and analyses.
Erlich’s prose is as beautiful as ever, efficiently languaged and flawlessly rhythmed, almost keeping time with her fidgety restiveness. “My feet are restless,” she says, “they yearn for the ski, the dogsled, the stirrup.” But the more she travels, and the more she witnesses, the more “unsolaced” Erlich becomes. She is not without hope, however, faint as it may be in her yearning observation: “Intimacy with weather, terrain, and pronghorn taught me to hold each foot-worn trail in my mind as it deepened. I like to think that a ‘green light’ glowed inside those animals, instructing them to survive and eat well. We humans might do the same and, in the process, vernalize our minds.”
After finishing Unsolaced, I confess I am less hopeful. In the equation comprising humans, animals, and the earth, it is clearly humans who will consciously do anything to profit from the present at the expense of the future. Yet ironically and frighteningly, humans are also the only species who can consciously do otherwise to save endangered animals and heal the wounded earth for future generations.
And yet if her previous book, The Solace of Open Spaces, was about “finding something,” then does Unsolaced hint at having lost what was found? Or does it, at least, express a yearning for something not yet grasped? If the former work was about restorative healing, does the latter suggest an untreated wound? Indeed, I think it does, though ironically, not when she was struck by lightning!
After she spent a couple of years at her parents’ home recovering from that injury, Erlich seemed to hunger for travel, which she satisfied by going to far-flung places to witness and then embrace the climate change catastrophe. Unsolaced then becomes the story of other people rather than of Erlich herself. In Zimbabwe, for example, she visits Allan Savory and tells of his efforts to reverse “desertification” by keeping and moving livestock in a way that mimics nature. There is desperation in Erlich’s narrative, for Savory’s task seems hopelessly monumental.
Erlich favors Greenland with multiple visits. Her friend, Jens Danielsen, describes a way of life that is vanishing in direct proportion to the vanishing ice. Ice that in the past would measure ten feet thick now barely measures ten inches. Multiyear ice, a reliable metric that sea ice survives at least one melt season, is all but disappearing. Concomitant with the melting ice is rising sea temperature, which jeopardizes the survival of everything from polar bears to guillemots. An unexpected victim of the climate change turns out to be Greenlander culture, which is driven by omnipresent ice. So when the source, the very life-blood for survival of everything begins to disappear, then even the stories that pass from one generation to another evaporate.
And Erlich uncovers in her explorations odd ways in which climate change dots can be connected. African farmers burn fields for the ash that naturally fertilizes the fields, but the burning produces vast, toxic pollution that crosses continents silently and irrevocably harming the earth in its wake. The billion hectares burned annually in Africa causes Allan Savory to remark to Erlich: “You see, it’s right here that we are causing your beloved Greenland ice to melt!”
There is no end to the interesting people Erlich encounters—a trauma surgeon doing work in post-genocidal Kosovo, a classical composer drawing inspiration from frozen, icy wastes, and a horse trainer who uses elements of Buddhism to forge understanding between horse and human. Her network is truly global and she has probably witnessed firsthand more evidence of climate change and its dire consequences than politicians and policy makers glean from any amount of reading reports and analyses.
Erlich’s prose is as beautiful as ever, efficiently languaged and flawlessly rhythmed, almost keeping time with her fidgety restiveness. “My feet are restless,” she says, “they yearn for the ski, the dogsled, the stirrup.” But the more she travels, and the more she witnesses, the more “unsolaced” Erlich becomes. She is not without hope, however, faint as it may be in her yearning observation: “Intimacy with weather, terrain, and pronghorn taught me to hold each foot-worn trail in my mind as it deepened. I like to think that a ‘green light’ glowed inside those animals, instructing them to survive and eat well. We humans might do the same and, in the process, vernalize our minds.”
After finishing Unsolaced, I confess I am less hopeful. In the equation comprising humans, animals, and the earth, it is clearly humans who will consciously do anything to profit from the present at the expense of the future. Yet ironically and frighteningly, humans are also the only species who can consciously do otherwise to save endangered animals and heal the wounded earth for future generations.
March 5, 2021
In 2019, I found a first edition copy of The Solace of Open Spaces in a used bookstore in downtown Sacramento. I had never heard of Gretel Ehrlich, but I decided to purchase the book because of Annie Dillard’s endorsement on the back cover and because I was in the beginning stages of acquainting myself with our country’s great nature writers, particularly those based in the West. I’m glad that I did. Ehrlich’s story of carrying her grief and cultivating hard-earned skills among the animals and small-town folk and long silences of Wyoming provided me with courage to make - in my own way and for my own reasons - a fresh start. I closed that book with the impression that Ehrlich had found her true home, had made some kind of vow of stability. I did not realize how much had changed in her circumstances between the release of Solace and my purchase of it.
Published thirty-six years after that debut work, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is lays bare Ehrlich’s actual lifelong restlessness, a restlessness energized by cycles of abundance and deprivation, of forming attachments only to lose them or leave them. Undoubtedly, many of these felt losses are attributable to the climate crisis. Ehrlich recounts her repeated trips to Greenland and Zimbabwe where she “kept touching the tips and spikes of climate change… [and] saw the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice” (193, 198). She sojourns among people losing their place-bound cultures and repeatedly calls for the establishment of “great pasture ecosystems” throughout the earth, believing that grasses and trees that absorb and store airborne Carbon in the ground are our best hope for reversing ecological damage. Even so, against this catastrophic backdrop, Ehrlich moves restlessly (though not always by choice) through homes, lovers, friendships, seasons of sickness and health, and areas of curiosity. As she recounts these movements, the central question of the book emerges: How does a person make a home in an endlessly changing world?
Ehrlich, like the migrating Pronghorn of her beloved Wyoming, learned to experience place “not as a dot on the map but a long vista of land” (214). Her own “long vista of land” became the earth itself; she is a migratory creature, a creature seeking the land’s gifts wherever they are to be found. To me, the power in her appeal to address the climate crisis is found, paradoxically, in this embodied transience, this story of worldwide seeking. The world – this world, not some other – with its peoples and cultures and animals has been the place of her journey. She comes to know herself through witnessing, say, the Pronghorn family outsider her Wyoming cabin, just as one of her companions in Greenland, Dennis, a musical composer, receives his symphonies from the “polar desolation” at the top of the world (136). In contrast to industrial humanity’s posture toward nature, which is “all a form of aggression,” Ehrlich comes to the world openhanded in order to receive the gift of her creative power (171). It follows, then, that every loss of landscape and species is mirrored by a loss of cultural and creative possibility. An impoverished world can only tell impoverished stories.
Thus, a writer who began her career wounded by impermanence and in search of a true home has grown into a person able to make a home within the given conditions of finitude: “Life is absurd; death waits for us; unconditional living is true. So much of our problem is our point of view. The Sanskrit word prana defines the point of view of ‘ground.’ Not soil but rootedness, knowledge inseparable from reality” (216). In the process of befriending the conditions of existence, Ehrlich has learned to distinguish the unnatural forms of impermanence wrought by human hubris from the natural contingency of all creatures, landscapes, and lives. This is a wisdom we desperately need, for Unsolaced, in the gentlest of ways, had unified spiritual questing with ethical living.
Published thirty-six years after that debut work, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is lays bare Ehrlich’s actual lifelong restlessness, a restlessness energized by cycles of abundance and deprivation, of forming attachments only to lose them or leave them. Undoubtedly, many of these felt losses are attributable to the climate crisis. Ehrlich recounts her repeated trips to Greenland and Zimbabwe where she “kept touching the tips and spikes of climate change… [and] saw the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice” (193, 198). She sojourns among people losing their place-bound cultures and repeatedly calls for the establishment of “great pasture ecosystems” throughout the earth, believing that grasses and trees that absorb and store airborne Carbon in the ground are our best hope for reversing ecological damage. Even so, against this catastrophic backdrop, Ehrlich moves restlessly (though not always by choice) through homes, lovers, friendships, seasons of sickness and health, and areas of curiosity. As she recounts these movements, the central question of the book emerges: How does a person make a home in an endlessly changing world?
Ehrlich, like the migrating Pronghorn of her beloved Wyoming, learned to experience place “not as a dot on the map but a long vista of land” (214). Her own “long vista of land” became the earth itself; she is a migratory creature, a creature seeking the land’s gifts wherever they are to be found. To me, the power in her appeal to address the climate crisis is found, paradoxically, in this embodied transience, this story of worldwide seeking. The world – this world, not some other – with its peoples and cultures and animals has been the place of her journey. She comes to know herself through witnessing, say, the Pronghorn family outsider her Wyoming cabin, just as one of her companions in Greenland, Dennis, a musical composer, receives his symphonies from the “polar desolation” at the top of the world (136). In contrast to industrial humanity’s posture toward nature, which is “all a form of aggression,” Ehrlich comes to the world openhanded in order to receive the gift of her creative power (171). It follows, then, that every loss of landscape and species is mirrored by a loss of cultural and creative possibility. An impoverished world can only tell impoverished stories.
Thus, a writer who began her career wounded by impermanence and in search of a true home has grown into a person able to make a home within the given conditions of finitude: “Life is absurd; death waits for us; unconditional living is true. So much of our problem is our point of view. The Sanskrit word prana defines the point of view of ‘ground.’ Not soil but rootedness, knowledge inseparable from reality” (216). In the process of befriending the conditions of existence, Ehrlich has learned to distinguish the unnatural forms of impermanence wrought by human hubris from the natural contingency of all creatures, landscapes, and lives. This is a wisdom we desperately need, for Unsolaced, in the gentlest of ways, had unified spiritual questing with ethical living.
July 11, 2021
The author's vivid descriptions of her experiences cannot be topped. Although her first book was more about discovery and personal journey in a new land , this book not only reminisces critical times in her life, but is a wake up call as to how we are impacting the world at large. Although "Unsolaced" is earthy and often dark it is a most worthwhile read.
November 7, 2021
Gretel Ehrlich has managed to succinctly lay out the catastrophic scenarios facing the earth and her creatures. If we are indeed responsible for what we have read or learned, we cannot ignore the scholarship, observations and dogged tenacity of the author's seeming charge, to inform us first, then gently, thankfully suggest there is recourse--if the will is there. I loved revisiting some of her earlier expeditions and travels, intrepid as she is undoubtedly is. A more game advocate for the earth we've seldom seen. She's the kindred spirit of John Muir, about whom she has also written. And yes, we need more than words, we need action; but it must begin somewhere, with truth telling. Brava, Gretel.
--Renée Carrier, author of The Riven Country series and fellow Wyomingite
--Renée Carrier, author of The Riven Country series and fellow Wyomingite
January 25, 2021
“Early on I saw how conventional society wanted me to be one thing only, reduced to a splinter in a reductive world, but I went the other way and kept unpeeling my mind. Sagebrush and string quartets, Buddhist practice and cowboying were all of a piece. Quantum decoherence interested me more than mapping out a firm life plan. The ground would always be spacious landscapes and animals. The sky would hold the soul-songs of Brahms and birds; the blue shawl of imagination would enfold everything else.”
Solace is a favorite word, the sound of it said aloud and the feeling, and where it is found may be different for everyone, but I had never considered being “unsolaced.” Do you think that is even a word? I went looking, and did not realize you can also solace, that it is a verb, so you can solace others, or be solaced, or perhaps create solacement, a new word for me. Desolaced reminds me of desecrated, to make unsacred, but desolaced is not a word, but desolate is, and that is what it means, so I will float along in solacement with the gems the author writes of the natural world.
Unsolaced is a word, and the author comes to the same conclusion she did in The Solace of Open Spaces, and is saying the world tries to unsolace us in its shortsightedness and waste, but there is still deep joy available every day despite it. ”Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.” I have never loved her writing, but this was actually an interesting overview of some of her adventures and her life’s work as a writer; her ranching/cowboying anecdotes never appeal to me but her African, Greeenlandic, and Arctic stories are powerful.
Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.
The mind splices fragments of sensation and language into story after story. The blood in my veins and every blade of grass is oxygen, sugar, photosynthesis, genetic expression, electrochemistry, and time. I watch clouds crush the last bit of pink sky. Breath slips even as I inhale, even as snow falls out of season and mud thaws, even as lightning ignites a late spring.
Those mountains are my mind’s wall and wellspring. Down here, the light is peach colored, and as the sun shifts, one loose shadow, like thought, takes on a sharp edge.
Almost daily I return to the high country. Mountain is shoulder: I rub against it and step forward. The hinge squeals, an arm lifts, a rock wall slides, and for a moment the mountain’s inner sanctum is revealed.
Becoming “native to a place” doesn’t have to be about secured boundaries of blood and territory but can allude to a deep, growing knowledge of that place. The way one feasts on it and becomes nourished and gives thanks. And hands it over to be shared.
The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.
My friend Malcolm Margolin once said, “Our responses to Earth are dug in deep and are old. We aren’t new to what we do and know. The old ways are embedded in us.”
In his journal, Emerson wrote: “Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis….We dive & reappear in new places.”
Hunger became an ally. My metabolism changed and my understanding of this land changed with it. On the night the wind howled, our tents rattled like bones. We were camped by a string lake. Pans of ice made of bunched crystals floated by. Pale green on top, the clear sides looked like see-through rows of teeth. When the sun came, the bunched stalks disintegrated: deconstructed chandeliers. I heard music—not Dennis’s but candle-ice tinkling. The whole lake chimed. Lying on top of my sleeping bag by the water, I lost track of my body. I wasn’t floating—there was nothing mysterious going on—but something had let go inside me. The weight of my boots, my abraded heels, ankles, and toes ceased to hurt and no longer impeded my journey. I had entered a trance state. The equation was this: hunger + beauty = movement. I wanted only to keep going.
“Where we are right now has nothing to do with human time. The word now is meaningless. What we call a year is a tiny framework in a huge sea of time. We are engulfed.” I lifted my arms. No words came, only images of the Japanese gardens I had once visited: Saihō-ji, Kinkaku-ji, Ryōan-ji. But this place was the font. The whole world was this, embedded in this, had issued from this. It was a place where, as Dōgen said, being and nonbeing are rolled together.
Fresh, original, unvarnished, spontaneous, and old. No hinge that held or released. Some places remind you of nothing and everything at once.
Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn’t had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I’d seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.
A Cibecue Apache elder once said, “The purpose of sacred places is to protect the place and to perfect the human mind. Wisdom sits in places.”
So often we miss the whole-fabric aspect of where we live, and our own consciousness embedded within it. We are not interrelated but “intrabranched”: one branch wound around another and fused into a single embrace. Our lacelike nervations have overlapping frequencies. It’s what the Greenlanders simply call sila: consciousness, weather, and the power of nature as one. If nothing else, we are what the physicist Richard Feynman called “scattering amplitudes,” wholes within unbounded totalities.
Physicists have recently discovered “quantum entanglement,” in which paradoxical and counterintuitive measurements of entangled particles result in wave function collapse, or as one scientist put it: “Seeming impossibilities occur, as when a photon that has not been born comes under the influence of one that was already dead.” That’s how those summer months felt: the boundless ways in which episodic fragments of experience and memory were torn away, sewn into a future that had not yet taken place, then conjoined.
Our “always in a hurry” ways of living seemed doubly insignificant. Intimacy with weather, terrain, and pronghorn taught me to hold each foot-worn trail in my mind as it deepened. I liked to think that a “green light” glowed inside those animals, instructing them how to survive and eat well. We humans might do the same and, in the process, vernalize our minds.
Half a mile from my cabin I sat on a huge boulder—a glacial erratic left behind by retreating ice—and looked out over the range, then held my head in my hands. A neurologist explained that the balance between stability and mental chaos occurs when a phalanx of neurons fires, triggering others, until across the whole brain they cascade and avalanche in sequenced, tidal rhythms.
Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true.
The Salish word sumic means “sacred flow, the intertwining of nature and lifeways.”
From the Tale of Genji scroll fragments I saw in Kyoto, I learned fukinuki yatai: how, if the roof is
blown off, one can see down into people’s lives without entering the room; how the “sacred flow” and the “everywhere and all that is” lies shimmering inside us and all around.
I pull the rope of my door tighter and stuff the window with roots and ferns. My spirit is turned to springtime. At the end of the year there is autumn in my heart. Thus, imitating cosmic changes, my cabin becomes the cosmos. —Lu Yun
Since Solace was published thirty-six years ago, everything and nothing has changed. Ecosystems are crashing. Terrorism sprouts and vanishes with devastating effect. Coronavirus is on a rampage, reminding us that the roulette wheel still spins. As the pandemic spreads, animals wander through empty cities as if to say that we humans have been in the way all this time. Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
Solace is a favorite word, the sound of it said aloud and the feeling, and where it is found may be different for everyone, but I had never considered being “unsolaced.” Do you think that is even a word? I went looking, and did not realize you can also solace, that it is a verb, so you can solace others, or be solaced, or perhaps create solacement, a new word for me. Desolaced reminds me of desecrated, to make unsacred, but desolaced is not a word, but desolate is, and that is what it means, so I will float along in solacement with the gems the author writes of the natural world.
Unsolaced is a word, and the author comes to the same conclusion she did in The Solace of Open Spaces, and is saying the world tries to unsolace us in its shortsightedness and waste, but there is still deep joy available every day despite it. ”Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.” I have never loved her writing, but this was actually an interesting overview of some of her adventures and her life’s work as a writer; her ranching/cowboying anecdotes never appeal to me but her African, Greeenlandic, and Arctic stories are powerful.
Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.
The mind splices fragments of sensation and language into story after story. The blood in my veins and every blade of grass is oxygen, sugar, photosynthesis, genetic expression, electrochemistry, and time. I watch clouds crush the last bit of pink sky. Breath slips even as I inhale, even as snow falls out of season and mud thaws, even as lightning ignites a late spring.
Those mountains are my mind’s wall and wellspring. Down here, the light is peach colored, and as the sun shifts, one loose shadow, like thought, takes on a sharp edge.
Almost daily I return to the high country. Mountain is shoulder: I rub against it and step forward. The hinge squeals, an arm lifts, a rock wall slides, and for a moment the mountain’s inner sanctum is revealed.
Becoming “native to a place” doesn’t have to be about secured boundaries of blood and territory but can allude to a deep, growing knowledge of that place. The way one feasts on it and becomes nourished and gives thanks. And hands it over to be shared.
The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.
My friend Malcolm Margolin once said, “Our responses to Earth are dug in deep and are old. We aren’t new to what we do and know. The old ways are embedded in us.”
In his journal, Emerson wrote: “Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis….We dive & reappear in new places.”
Hunger became an ally. My metabolism changed and my understanding of this land changed with it. On the night the wind howled, our tents rattled like bones. We were camped by a string lake. Pans of ice made of bunched crystals floated by. Pale green on top, the clear sides looked like see-through rows of teeth. When the sun came, the bunched stalks disintegrated: deconstructed chandeliers. I heard music—not Dennis’s but candle-ice tinkling. The whole lake chimed. Lying on top of my sleeping bag by the water, I lost track of my body. I wasn’t floating—there was nothing mysterious going on—but something had let go inside me. The weight of my boots, my abraded heels, ankles, and toes ceased to hurt and no longer impeded my journey. I had entered a trance state. The equation was this: hunger + beauty = movement. I wanted only to keep going.
“Where we are right now has nothing to do with human time. The word now is meaningless. What we call a year is a tiny framework in a huge sea of time. We are engulfed.” I lifted my arms. No words came, only images of the Japanese gardens I had once visited: Saihō-ji, Kinkaku-ji, Ryōan-ji. But this place was the font. The whole world was this, embedded in this, had issued from this. It was a place where, as Dōgen said, being and nonbeing are rolled together.
Fresh, original, unvarnished, spontaneous, and old. No hinge that held or released. Some places remind you of nothing and everything at once.
Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn’t had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I’d seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.
A Cibecue Apache elder once said, “The purpose of sacred places is to protect the place and to perfect the human mind. Wisdom sits in places.”
So often we miss the whole-fabric aspect of where we live, and our own consciousness embedded within it. We are not interrelated but “intrabranched”: one branch wound around another and fused into a single embrace. Our lacelike nervations have overlapping frequencies. It’s what the Greenlanders simply call sila: consciousness, weather, and the power of nature as one. If nothing else, we are what the physicist Richard Feynman called “scattering amplitudes,” wholes within unbounded totalities.
Physicists have recently discovered “quantum entanglement,” in which paradoxical and counterintuitive measurements of entangled particles result in wave function collapse, or as one scientist put it: “Seeming impossibilities occur, as when a photon that has not been born comes under the influence of one that was already dead.” That’s how those summer months felt: the boundless ways in which episodic fragments of experience and memory were torn away, sewn into a future that had not yet taken place, then conjoined.
Our “always in a hurry” ways of living seemed doubly insignificant. Intimacy with weather, terrain, and pronghorn taught me to hold each foot-worn trail in my mind as it deepened. I liked to think that a “green light” glowed inside those animals, instructing them how to survive and eat well. We humans might do the same and, in the process, vernalize our minds.
Half a mile from my cabin I sat on a huge boulder—a glacial erratic left behind by retreating ice—and looked out over the range, then held my head in my hands. A neurologist explained that the balance between stability and mental chaos occurs when a phalanx of neurons fires, triggering others, until across the whole brain they cascade and avalanche in sequenced, tidal rhythms.
Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true.
The Salish word sumic means “sacred flow, the intertwining of nature and lifeways.”
From the Tale of Genji scroll fragments I saw in Kyoto, I learned fukinuki yatai: how, if the roof is
blown off, one can see down into people’s lives without entering the room; how the “sacred flow” and the “everywhere and all that is” lies shimmering inside us and all around.
I pull the rope of my door tighter and stuff the window with roots and ferns. My spirit is turned to springtime. At the end of the year there is autumn in my heart. Thus, imitating cosmic changes, my cabin becomes the cosmos. —Lu Yun
Since Solace was published thirty-six years ago, everything and nothing has changed. Ecosystems are crashing. Terrorism sprouts and vanishes with devastating effect. Coronavirus is on a rampage, reminding us that the roulette wheel still spins. As the pandemic spreads, animals wander through empty cities as if to say that we humans have been in the way all this time. Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
December 28, 2021
" . . . sentience and sunderance: how we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all."
Unsolaced is a collection of loosely related essays about Ehrlich's experiences in many areas of the globe - from her cabin in Wyoming, to the islands off the coast of California, to the grasslands in Africa, and the ice shelves in Greenland. Much of her writing explores the impact of climate change that she has encountered over the course of her life intermixed with her personal experiences of loss of those close to her and grief. There is some beautiful writing in here, although I do think I would have appreciated more of the connections she was making if I had read The Solace of Open Spaces - one of her earlier works. I have the sense that some of this feels like it might have been a response to the solace that she found at earlier points in her life.
Unsolaced is a collection of loosely related essays about Ehrlich's experiences in many areas of the globe - from her cabin in Wyoming, to the islands off the coast of California, to the grasslands in Africa, and the ice shelves in Greenland. Much of her writing explores the impact of climate change that she has encountered over the course of her life intermixed with her personal experiences of loss of those close to her and grief. There is some beautiful writing in here, although I do think I would have appreciated more of the connections she was making if I had read The Solace of Open Spaces - one of her earlier works. I have the sense that some of this feels like it might have been a response to the solace that she found at earlier points in her life.
September 10, 2023
"'When I was little my father saw the track of a polar bear', Jens began. 'He lifted his rifled to shoot the bear - he needed new skin clothing - and just then, the bear turned his head: he had he face of a human. The bear was smiling and said, "Take me, I'm yours." The dogs were scared and ran away. My father tried but couldn't shoot it. He let the bear go. If a person has special talents, animals will come and ask you to be a helper. You are only asked once by a polar bear, but my father said no to him and the bear ran away.'"
December 27, 2024
4.5 stars
While I truly enjoyed her book The Solace of Open Spaces, I think I enjoyed this one a tad bit more. It is clear that Gretel is one of a kind and has lived an incredible life. As I attempt to reckon with my own climate induced anxiety, I took solace in her own reckoning, however fatalistic it seemed.
The last few chapters were very heavy and just made me sad - hence the half star reduction. However, I still respect the hell out of this Wyoming woman!
While I truly enjoyed her book The Solace of Open Spaces, I think I enjoyed this one a tad bit more. It is clear that Gretel is one of a kind and has lived an incredible life. As I attempt to reckon with my own climate induced anxiety, I took solace in her own reckoning, however fatalistic it seemed.
The last few chapters were very heavy and just made me sad - hence the half star reduction. However, I still respect the hell out of this Wyoming woman!
February 11, 2023
“…the sharp lessons of impermanence that I learned while writing ‘Solace’ still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out inti an unquenchable appetite for life” — Gretel Erlich (in ‘Afterward’, from “Unsolaced”).
Stunning memoir, and reflections on climate change, and the changes that we experience in life as humans on this Earth. ❤️
Stunning memoir, and reflections on climate change, and the changes that we experience in life as humans on this Earth. ❤️
August 25, 2022
A good introduction to the author. Yes, she jumps around but actually it seemed appropriate for this type of writing. I admire her spunk and sense of adventure.
October 25, 2024
Beautifully written stories of life, community and climate catastrophes, centered on the people affected, including Erlich. Important and hard to read while going through personal turmoil within my own family.
Read
March 4, 2021If "climate is culture," as Ehrlich claims, then, perhaps, like her Greenlandic pals, it's time for us to choose only what we want to keep from the modern world, and forbid the rest.
June 2, 2024
Unsolaced is an exploration of sorrow. Through her deeply personal and highly poetic narrative, Ehrich brings to light the sense of loss that she feels about the senseless and selfish environmental devastation around the globe, which she has personally witnesses through many trips around the globe. She talks about the destruction of natural landscapes, such as the melting of polar ice, the devastation of forests, and the dying of coral reefs, all of which are altering or altogether disappearing entire ecosystems, and driving many species to extinction. Those natural destructions have effected climatic changes that are disrupting not only the physical environment, but also the culture of indigenous peoples around the world, who are being uprooted and displaced, such as the hunting communities of Greenland.
Ehrlich also reflects on human disconnection, both from the natural world and from each other. We no longer think as communities but as individuals and are more and more isolated and depressed for it. The death of loved ones and mentors have also left her bereft of her own sense of community.
But this book is not without hope. Ehrlich’s deep love for the earth and her commitment to bear witness to its beauty and fragility is, in itself, a form of resistance and a call to action, urging readers to pay attention and do something to reverse our own dogged track towards extinction.
Ehrlich also reflects on human disconnection, both from the natural world and from each other. We no longer think as communities but as individuals and are more and more isolated and depressed for it. The death of loved ones and mentors have also left her bereft of her own sense of community.
But this book is not without hope. Ehrlich’s deep love for the earth and her commitment to bear witness to its beauty and fragility is, in itself, a form of resistance and a call to action, urging readers to pay attention and do something to reverse our own dogged track towards extinction.
June 10, 2021
A hot mess
This addictively readable, but the narrative hops from place to place and time to time, dislocating and distancing the reader. The individual chunks of the book are compelling and impassioned. They read like a set of different magazine articles placed next to each other without a transition written to bring the reader from one to the next. The over effect is that the book is a mess.
Of course, the theme is that earth is becoming a hot mess. Her anecdotes bring valuable ground level truth to what the ecosystem is facing. But her analyses are often shallow. For example, climate change is not caused by desertification, or by changes in the albedo - these are secondary (positive feedback loop) effects of the rising level of greenhouse gases and ill-advised human activity. To her credit, she does propose some workable ways to ameliorate climate change, such as restorative farming for grassland biomes. But she ignores others, such as eliminating burning of jungle biomes.
This addictively readable, but the narrative hops from place to place and time to time, dislocating and distancing the reader. The individual chunks of the book are compelling and impassioned. They read like a set of different magazine articles placed next to each other without a transition written to bring the reader from one to the next. The over effect is that the book is a mess.
Of course, the theme is that earth is becoming a hot mess. Her anecdotes bring valuable ground level truth to what the ecosystem is facing. But her analyses are often shallow. For example, climate change is not caused by desertification, or by changes in the albedo - these are secondary (positive feedback loop) effects of the rising level of greenhouse gases and ill-advised human activity. To her credit, she does propose some workable ways to ameliorate climate change, such as restorative farming for grassland biomes. But she ignores others, such as eliminating burning of jungle biomes.
Read
February 9, 2021Misses the boat. Forgets the biggest cause of global warming, industries, use of oil, and herself. She flies from her homes in Wyoming,California, and Hawaii in her lifetime yet blames others in less developed countries for the problems. Sadly, she needs to look in a mirror for real culprits. Nice writing about beauty of nature. Hence two stars.
February 24, 2021
I know the author has travelled extensively and has had many experiences but I found these stories to be told in a stilted, florid, disjointed manner. I do enjoy nature inspired books and this one occasionally reeled me in but not enough to rate it higher.
March 5, 2021
The writing is beautiful, but it’s very slipshod. It feels like the stories were all just thrown together, with little connective tissue.
Read
March 7, 2021I had never read anything by Gretel Ehrlich before this and I was pleased to find that her voice (audio and written) sounds a lot like Anne Lamott. California boomer women, I guess.
This book is a memoir of sorts, a fractured catalog of events in her life and her personal experiences with climate change. She spent many years ranching in Wyoming as a single woman, extensive periods in remote Greenland experiencing arctic ice culture, and a long visit the backcountry of Zimbabwe learning about how rotational grazing can reverse climate change and prevent drought. She also employed rotational grazing on her Wyoming ranch to great effect: water was pulled into the ground regenerating long-lost native rye grazing pastures that were able to support a herd of wild elk in the winter and her herd of cattle in the summer. It made me wonder if this could be used in Brazil to stop greedy deforestation of the Amazon in order to grab more grazing land for cattle. It would be nice if the UN or someone could step in with grants to get ranchers the basic fencing and water tanks needed to set it up.
I liked hearing about the adventurous life she led. In addition to stints in Wyoming, Greenland and Zimbabwe, she also toured Kosovo after the war, closed down a ranch on an island off the coast of California, was stuck by lightning and recovered, made movies, wrote magazine articles, learned to break horses from a horse whisperer, lost homes to divorce and wildfires, nearly starved to death while hiking a glacier, buried her parents, and had relationships with a variety of men.
The problem is that the book is not arranged by any discernible logic and it comes out as stream-of-consciousness glimpses of her life. I had zero reference for what year she was talking about, which husband if any she was married to at the time, when the events happen in relation to each other, how old she is, etc etc. That was very frustrating and made my interest in the book dwindle (unbelievable, considering all that happened), so I wouldn't recommend the book unless you don't really care about that kind of thing.
This book is a memoir of sorts, a fractured catalog of events in her life and her personal experiences with climate change. She spent many years ranching in Wyoming as a single woman, extensive periods in remote Greenland experiencing arctic ice culture, and a long visit the backcountry of Zimbabwe learning about how rotational grazing can reverse climate change and prevent drought. She also employed rotational grazing on her Wyoming ranch to great effect: water was pulled into the ground regenerating long-lost native rye grazing pastures that were able to support a herd of wild elk in the winter and her herd of cattle in the summer. It made me wonder if this could be used in Brazil to stop greedy deforestation of the Amazon in order to grab more grazing land for cattle. It would be nice if the UN or someone could step in with grants to get ranchers the basic fencing and water tanks needed to set it up.
I liked hearing about the adventurous life she led. In addition to stints in Wyoming, Greenland and Zimbabwe, she also toured Kosovo after the war, closed down a ranch on an island off the coast of California, was stuck by lightning and recovered, made movies, wrote magazine articles, learned to break horses from a horse whisperer, lost homes to divorce and wildfires, nearly starved to death while hiking a glacier, buried her parents, and had relationships with a variety of men.
The problem is that the book is not arranged by any discernible logic and it comes out as stream-of-consciousness glimpses of her life. I had zero reference for what year she was talking about, which husband if any she was married to at the time, when the events happen in relation to each other, how old she is, etc etc. That was very frustrating and made my interest in the book dwindle (unbelievable, considering all that happened), so I wouldn't recommend the book unless you don't really care about that kind of thing.
January 4, 2025
She narrates the audiobook and does an amazing job. I also had it on Kindle, so am able to share some passages that will give an idea of how lovely her writing is. Her writing is soooo beautiful and poetic.
You may know her writing if you read National Geographic. In this book, she lives in/travels to Greenland, Africa, Wyoming, and California. She lives the life of a rancher, learns about restoration ecology and how rotational grazing can heal the land, witnesses the decline of the Arctic, and also suffers losses in her personal life.
This book was recommended by Lily Nash, and she recommended it right around the time that my dog Lilly died, and when I was experiencing a lot of climate sorrow too. I see why she recommended it. The author writes a lot about grief, and for so many reasons - her partner dying when she was only 29, deaths of friends and family and beloved dogs, but mostly climate change and it’s cause of “cultural death spirals and animal extinctions”(97%), which she bears witness too and describes in these pages.
Her words are dark, like this passage. “So many unimaginable changes had been taking place, and too few had taken the time to understand the chemistry, mechanics, and amplifying feedback loops that kept global heating on the rise. News from what I called the “Ice Desk” was disastrous: the Desk had melted. As albedo decreased, the planet warmed, and more snow and ice disappeared. Earth’s forehead was hot from fever”(81%).
She also leaves the reader with a sense of hope. She meets EO Wilson, and he tells her, “It’s our chance to practice altruism… We have to wear suits of armor like World War II soldiers and just keep going. We have to get used to the changes in the landscape and step over the dead bodies. We have to discipline our behavior and not get stuck in tribal and religious restrictions. We have to work altruistically and cooperatively and make a new world”(83%).
You may know her writing if you read National Geographic. In this book, she lives in/travels to Greenland, Africa, Wyoming, and California. She lives the life of a rancher, learns about restoration ecology and how rotational grazing can heal the land, witnesses the decline of the Arctic, and also suffers losses in her personal life.
This book was recommended by Lily Nash, and she recommended it right around the time that my dog Lilly died, and when I was experiencing a lot of climate sorrow too. I see why she recommended it. The author writes a lot about grief, and for so many reasons - her partner dying when she was only 29, deaths of friends and family and beloved dogs, but mostly climate change and it’s cause of “cultural death spirals and animal extinctions”(97%), which she bears witness too and describes in these pages.
Her words are dark, like this passage. “So many unimaginable changes had been taking place, and too few had taken the time to understand the chemistry, mechanics, and amplifying feedback loops that kept global heating on the rise. News from what I called the “Ice Desk” was disastrous: the Desk had melted. As albedo decreased, the planet warmed, and more snow and ice disappeared. Earth’s forehead was hot from fever”(81%).
She also leaves the reader with a sense of hope. She meets EO Wilson, and he tells her, “It’s our chance to practice altruism… We have to wear suits of armor like World War II soldiers and just keep going. We have to get used to the changes in the landscape and step over the dead bodies. We have to discipline our behavior and not get stuck in tribal and religious restrictions. We have to work altruistically and cooperatively and make a new world”(83%).
January 11, 2022
If you are a fan of Gretel Ehrlich as I am this book is a must read. We Wyomingites regard her as a state treasure. I first read her Solace of the open spaces decades ago followed by A match to the Heart which tells the tale of her lightning strike while on horseback by her ranch in Shell Wyoming. This book is her first memoir and it was a pleasure to read about her perambulations across my region and the Arctic north where she joined Intuit hunters in northern Greenland and Southern Africa where she made repeated visits with Allan Savory, the famous ecologist. Then there was her trip to Kosovo with a trauma surgeon she met in Sea Tac Airport . Her passion for some decades has been the impact of global warming with melting sea ice in the northern hemisphere and desertification in equatorial and subtropical regions. Her writing is evocative and poetic and a pure pleasure to read. Solace is obviously one of her favorite words and this volume makes a nice bookend to Solace of the Open Spaces, her masterpiece of cowboy Wtyoming.
February 28, 2023
This didn't land as powerfully for me as The Solace of Open Spaces, but not because the writing or the topics weren't well explored. Granted, there's over 30 years between the two works, and I haven't read anything else of hers yet. But, I think listening to this on audiobook was not the right choice. Also, this felt in some ways less personal, as she seemed to spend more time relaying the stories of those she met and focusing more on them and seeing the world through their eyes; while there is nothing wrong with that, it was not what I expected. It was somewhat objective, journalistic reporting, which has always been a component of her style, but I had hoped for more introspection I guess. Through her observations in her globetrotting she highlights concerns of climate change, expressing both remorse and urgency, and while I can relate, I would have rather not read this if I knew it was going to make me feel slightly depressed. Just a personal preference, but I don't like books that make me sad/hopeless.
January 19, 2021
Near the end of this book the author quotes a Mandan elder who says, "When we know we are going to die, we dance." Well, thus, we should ever be dancing.
The great Vaslav Nijinsky once said, "Now I will dance you the war.... The war which you did not prevent." In this era, my friend, that war is climate change!
This book is a memoir, a smattering of tales of great individuals who fight injustice for a better world, a tale of personal tragedies, of hope and awe of the natural world, of travels to parts of the world where most won't go, a tale of loss of culture and place, a personal tale of global fate.
At first I did not care much for this book, but it drew me in along the way. This author does not shy away from life as it is.
The great Vaslav Nijinsky once said, "Now I will dance you the war.... The war which you did not prevent." In this era, my friend, that war is climate change!
This book is a memoir, a smattering of tales of great individuals who fight injustice for a better world, a tale of personal tragedies, of hope and awe of the natural world, of travels to parts of the world where most won't go, a tale of loss of culture and place, a personal tale of global fate.
At first I did not care much for this book, but it drew me in along the way. This author does not shy away from life as it is.
September 10, 2023
A beautiful and troubling book about the author's up-close witness of climate change, though much of the book, honestly, seems to focus more on just the beauty and wonder of nature. Ehrlich writes about her life in Wyoming, how a divorce and being struck by lightning returned her to California, and her time spent in Zimbabwe and on the melting ice of Greenland.
I personally think Ehrlich should have cut herself off after chapter 20. The last few chapters of the book feel like unnecessary add-ons. But I still recommend the book to anyone who enjoys literary nature writing, because Ehrlich's prose shines.
I personally think Ehrlich should have cut herself off after chapter 20. The last few chapters of the book feel like unnecessary add-ons. But I still recommend the book to anyone who enjoys literary nature writing, because Ehrlich's prose shines.
September 12, 2021
Gretel describes her book as "an odd kind of memoir" and this description seems appropriate. She writes beautifully and somewhat disjointedly as the chapters bounce all over the place.
She writes poignantly about her life and how our planet is in peril due to our riding roughshod upon it. She certainly cares deeply about the planet but it's hard to square that with her massive personal footprint from traveling the globe. Although some of the travel brings the reader to places that she describes in a unique and powerful way.
It's an interesting book and worth reading.
She writes poignantly about her life and how our planet is in peril due to our riding roughshod upon it. She certainly cares deeply about the planet but it's hard to square that with her massive personal footprint from traveling the globe. Although some of the travel brings the reader to places that she describes in a unique and powerful way.
It's an interesting book and worth reading.
June 25, 2023
Gretel Ehrlich writes so well hard not to be put off by some of the "easy" outs of our global warming crises/oil/greed/$ and how Greenlanders can't survive as they did because of the fast growth of technology that is also warming our planet up and destroying it.
Anecdotal and sometimes disjointed, but always a good read, for ME hard to follow at times, but again, she's not as young and perhaps her best work was behind her, hard to admit that, and why not keep writing as she says at the end in these memoir type books.
Anecdotal and sometimes disjointed, but always a good read, for ME hard to follow at times, but again, she's not as young and perhaps her best work was behind her, hard to admit that, and why not keep writing as she says at the end in these memoir type books.
April 13, 2023
I love her writing.
"A neurologist explained that the balance of stability and mental chaos occurs when a phalanx of neurons fires, triggering others, until across the whole brain they cascade and avalanche in sequenced, tidal rhythms. Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true (221)."
"A neurologist explained that the balance of stability and mental chaos occurs when a phalanx of neurons fires, triggering others, until across the whole brain they cascade and avalanche in sequenced, tidal rhythms. Quiescence and fever. Starvation and extinction. Joy and blight. Ecosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true (221)."
July 16, 2024
Would recommend
Compared to one of her earlier books, The Solace of Open Spaces, this autobiography, that follows her life after writing some of her earlier works, does have a narrative that continues throughout that kept drawing me back. She is eloquent in the ways she writes about the various cultures in Greenland, Zimbabwe, and ranchers in California. The book does a great job pulling the reader into coming face to face with the way Climate Change is changing our world.
Compared to one of her earlier books, The Solace of Open Spaces, this autobiography, that follows her life after writing some of her earlier works, does have a narrative that continues throughout that kept drawing me back. She is eloquent in the ways she writes about the various cultures in Greenland, Zimbabwe, and ranchers in California. The book does a great job pulling the reader into coming face to face with the way Climate Change is changing our world.
Read
April 14, 2021Beautifully written by an author who has lived a remarkable life. She covered too much territory geographically so I didn’t finish because I had difficulty keeping up. And maybe because I am global warming-weary and feeling the need for escapist reading I couldn’t make it through? I’ll return to her.
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