Unique Voices Laud American Earth
Anthology Of Environmental Writing Offers An Array Of Surprises
P. T. Barnum, environmentalist? He’s the man who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He invented the billboard, with advertisements for his sideshows in New York City in the 1820s. He built the circus destined to become “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Yet in his 1866 book, “The Humbugs of the World,” Barnum wrote: “No man ought to advertise in the midst of landscapes or scenery, in such a way as to destroy or injure their beauty by introducing totally incongruous and relatively vulgar associations.”
Al Gore Becomes “Ozone Man”
Barnum’s environmental sensibility is one of many surprises in Bill McKibben’s “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau”(Library of America, 900 pgs., $40). Here is a wealth of provocative viewpoints on the fragile world around us, with treasures of recent and vintage photographs, single images telling stories worth thousands of words.
The editor of “American Earth,” McKibben authored “The End of Nature”in 1989, regarded as the first account of global warming targeting a popular audience. He made an early convert, as related in the foreword by Al Gore: “When I was in the Senate, [Bill] McKibben’s description of the planetary impact of chlorofluorocarbons left such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title “Ozone Man” from the first President Bush.”
Gore won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts to combat global climate change. Henry David Thoreau is pensive at Walden Pond. Teddy Roosevelt is present as America’s first great conservationist. Ansel Adams captures the stark and primeval grandeur of Alaska’s Mount McKinley and WonderLake. Renowned nature writer John McPhee has his well-earned place, as does John Steinbeck for his haunting descriptions of Dust Bowl America from “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Migrant Workers Face Health Threats
But then here is a 1986 César Chávez boycott speech titled “The Wrath of Grapes,” explaining that migrant workers faced violations of their human rights not just from low pay but also from dire threats to their health: “How can I explain these chemicals to three-year-old Amalia Larios, who will never walk, born with a spinal defect due to pesticide exposure of her mother.”
We expect the awesome “Blue Marble,” the first clear photo of an illuminated whole earth suspended in black space, taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972. We don’t expect the comic book art of R Crumb, depicting a “Short History of America” in 23 panels over 4 pages, taking us from pristine meadow and forest to a crush of traffic under a tangled umbrella of lights and power lines. The message in the bottom right corner of the final panel asks: “What Next?”
N. Scott Momaday, with American Indian heritage in his father’s line, offers “A First American Views his Land,” describing the Indian’s unique investment in the American landscape “that represents perhaps 30,000 years of habitation. . .The Indian has been here a long time, he is at home here.”
Pyramid of Buffalo Skulls, River of Tires
Rare photos sting our soft-edged images of history. In 1880, an unidentified photographer captured the image of a 20-foot pyramid of buffalo skulls at the Michigan Carbon Works, a Detroit charcoal and fertilizer factory. Edward Burjinsky photographed a bleak portrait of “Oxford tire pile #1, Westley, California, 1999,” the seemingly endless flow of a black river of discarded auto and truck tires.
Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” could symbolize our tenuous environmental relationship: “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Earth as Seen From Apollo 17 in 1980
|
An anthology of provocative writing and images
|
Bill McKibben Warned of Global Warming in 1989
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles