I grew up ignorant of reality: of my/our history, of the place I grew up in, of the social-ecological reality of the planet. I swallowed “the red pill” in my youth and awakened to a combination of wonder and horror, wonder at the beauty of the ecosphere and of humanity and horror at what is being done to it, to us, by us. In response, I started a garden, got involved in food system change, and became a journalist and author writing on social-ecological issues. My commitment to change intensified when I became a father and again when I became a grandfather.
Six hundred and fifty pages and every one fascinating, in the true sense of the word, i.e. it cast a spell on me. I read this the one and only time I joined a book club led by a visual artist, which made perfect sense as the book is not only richly illustrated with extraordinary images of paintings, sculpture, and drawings, the author argues that our experience of nature is entirely mediated by art.
We can’t, for example, see a tree, except from an inner perspective shaped by mythic trees seen in some paintings, even a picture postcard or poem from our Grade 8 reader. Using the most extraordinary (have to use that word again) examples, Schama convinced me that every natural thing I see is a mythological artifact.
A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year. In Landscape and Memory, award-winning author Simon Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as The Golden Bough and as irresistibly readable as Schama's own…
When one of the most consequential and erudite scientists of the era summarizes his learning from a life of keen observation and attempts to present all fields of knowledge in a coherent whole, I listen up.
I am especially attentive because E.O. Wilson, a champion of conservation I personally admire, is an exceptionally good writer. So good, in fact, that I found this deep dive into everything a delight to read and an invaluable source for my own writing.
In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning. Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos. It is a vision that found its apogee in the…
In 1990, Stan Rowe destroyed my narrow worldview. As a newspaper columnist in Saskatoon, on the Canadian prairie, I wrote about “the environment”. A cold, clinical term environment, wrote Rowe—a thing outside us, separate. Instead, call it what it is: our homeplace, embracing us, part of us.
Rowe’s love for the land transformed the prairie, typically thought to be dull, into the home I, too, loved. Every Winter day I had to walk the trembling aspen paths by the Saskatchewan River. In spring, I had to find that first shock of color, the purple prairie crocus. Now, in summer, I jumped in the cold river and went with the current. Now, in the fall, I searched out the elusive whooping crane. Stan woke me up, to my, to our homeplace.
First released in 1990, the essays in Home Place range from the personal—the search for a childhood vision of pristine grassland, the boy who goes from hunting to respecting wildlife and the living space around him—to theory on land use, environmental law, agriculture, education, and technology as it affects the relationships between humanity and the Ecosphere.
This book scared the hell out of me and, at the same time—because the author offers credible solutions—gave me hope. In all his books, Homer-Dixon does something I can’t get enough of: he presents unfamiliar, often surprising facts about reality in the context of stories, especially stories about the people that uncover them.
The accumulated information and stories reveal a truth, in this case, that human ingenuity, the force that built civilization, may no longer be sufficient to get us out of the mess of problems we have created through its application. Homer-Dixon transformed my writing style.
Despite all of society’s advances, our problems proliferate. Wars abound, environmental degradation accelerates, economies topple overnight, and pandemics such as AIDS and tuberculosis continue to spread. The Internet and other media help to disseminate knowledge, but they’ve also created an “info-glut” and left us too little time to process it. What’s more, advances in technology have made the world so bewilderingly fast-paced and complex that fewer people are able even to grasp the problems, let alone generate solutions. That space between the problems that arise and our ability to solve them is “the ingenuity gap,” and as we careen towards…
I’m a prairie boy, son of the pioneers and all that. But I, like other prairie settlers’ descendants, grew up blissfully ignorant of our history. Daschuk’s book shatters that ignorance. It should be required reading for every child and adult in Canada, and it wouldn’t hurt Americans to read it too, as the story of colonial disaster for the Indigenous people throughout the continent is all of a kind. It is so very sad.
But ”the truth shall set you free.” We need this book as a foundation for reconciliation for past and present wrongs, to inform a new society on the Great Plains that includes everyone, at long last.
In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special…
Close to 11 billion people will share this planet by the end of the present century. Trouble is civilization is already unsustainable: humanity’s ecological footprint exceeds Earth’s capacity to support us by 75 percent. As we add population equivalent to that of China, India, and the United States combined, the global economy is on course to quintuple in size by 2100, and our ecological footprint is set to triple. Since business as usual will result in civilizational collapse, we have no choice but to pursue a radical course correction.
Fortunately, there are innumerable examples of alternate approaches to building civilization anew. This book offers a transformative process that would set humanity and each of us on a path toward a just, peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable future.
