A Conservationist Manifesto

Scott Russell Sanders

Description

Practical, ecological, and philosophical grounds for a conservation ethic

Visit the author's website. Read an IU Press blog interview with the author.

As an antidote to the destructive culture of consumption dominating American life today, Scott Russell Sanders calls for a culture of conservation that allows us to savor and preserve the world, instead of devouring it. How might we shift to a more durable and responsible way of life? What changes in values and behavior will be required? Ranging geographically from southern Indiana to the Boundary Waters Wilderness and culturally from the Bible to billboards, Sanders extends the visions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson to our own day. A Conservationist Manifesto shows the crucial relevance of a conservation ethic at a time of mounting concern about global climate change, depletion of natural resources, extinction of species, and the economic inequities between rich and poor nations. The important message of this powerful book is that conservation is not simply a personal virtue but a public one.

Preface
Part One: Caring for Earth
Building Arks
Common Wealth
A Few Earthy Words
Two Stones
The Warehouse and the Wilderness
Part Two: Caring for Our Home Ground
The Geography of Somewhere
Hometown
On Loan from the Sundance Sea
Big Trees, Still Water, Tall Grass
Limberlost
Part Three: Caring for Generations to Come
Wilderness as a Sabbath for the Land
Simplicity and Sanity
Stillness
A Conservationist Manifesto
For the Children
Words of Thanks
Further Reading
Notes

Sujets

• Environmental Protection
• Environmental Conservation
• Essays
• Philosophy
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253002853
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Scott Russell Sanders
NONFICTION
A Private History of Awe
The Force of Spirit
The Country of Language
Hunting for Hope
Writing from the Center
Staying Put
Secrets of the Universe
The Paradise of Bombs
In Limestone Country
FICTION
The Invisible Company
The Engineer of Beasts
Bad Man Ballad
Terrarium
Wonders Hidden
Fetching the Dead
Hear the Wind Blow
Wilderness Plots
SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS

CONSERVATIONIST MANIFESTO

Indiana University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [e-mail]
The author warmly thanks the editors of the following publications, in which earlier versions of the essays contained in this book first appeared: “Building Arks” under the title “A Fleet of Arks” in Wild Earth and Resurgence ; “Common Wealth” in Tikkun ; “A Few Earthy Words” in Helen Whybrow, ed., The Story Handbook: Language and Storytelling for Land Conservationists (San Francisco: The Trust for Public Land, 2002); “Two Stones” in The Louisville Review ; “The Warehouse and the Wilderness” in Water-Stone ; “The Geography of Somewhere” as Foreword to Dan Shilling, Civic Tourism: The Poetry and Politics of Place (Prescott, Arizona: Sharlott Hall Museum Press, 2007); “Hometown” under the title “Where Belonging Is a Virtue” in Notre Dame Magazine ; “On Loan from the Sundance Sea” in Preservation ; “Big Trees, Still Water, Tall Grass” in Barry Lopez, ed., Heart of a Nation: Writers and Photographers Inspired by the American Landscape (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2000); “Limberlost” under the title “Limberlost and Found” in Audubon ; “Wilderness as a Sabbath for the Land” in Hank Lentfer and Carolyn Servid, eds., Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, March 2001) and, expanded, in Spiritus ; “Simplicity and Sanity” in The Georgia Review ; “Stillness” in Orion ; “A Conservationist Manifesto” in Helen Whybrow, ed., Coming to Land in a Troubled World (San Francisco: The Trust for Public Land, 2003); “For the Children” under the title “A Letter to Tomorrow” in Notre Dame Magazine .
© 2009 by Scott Russell Sanders
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
    The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sanders, Scott R. (Scott Russell), date-
  A conservationist manifesto / Scott Russell Sanders.
      p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references.
  ISBN 978-0-253-35313-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22080-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Nature conservation—United States. I. Title.
QH76.S26 2009 333.72—dc22
2008039531
1  2  3  4  5        14  13  12  11  10  09
FOR PETER FORBES AND HELEN WHYBROW
Among all creatures, we are the only kind that frets, the only kind that asks forgiveness, or needs to. Meanwhile, crows palaver in the pines, crickets sing in the high grass, cottonwoods wag their leaves in every least wind.
Having held our tongues to listen, having fallen asleep to the barred owl's call and wakened to fog over the Mad River, having seen the pond shiver like the taut hide of a horse and the dew ignite with dawn, freed now to break silence, we might find words to speak our love of Earth.
After you have exhausted what there is
in business, politics, conviviality, love,
and so on—have found that none of these
finally satisfy, or permanently wear—
what remains?
Nature remains; to bring out
from their torpid recesses,
the affinities of a man or woman
with the open air, the trees, fields,
the changes of seasons—the sun by day
and the stars of heaven by night.
We will begin from these convictions.
WALT WHITMAN
 
Contents
Preface
PART 1. Caring for Earth
Building Arks
Common Wealth
A Few Earthy Words
Two Stones
The Warehouse and the Wilderness
PART 2. Caring for Home Ground
The Geography of Somewhere
Hometown
On Loan from the Sundance Sea
Big Trees, Still Water, Tall Grass
Limberlost
PART 3. Caring for Generations to Come
Wilderness as a Sabbath for the Land
Simplicity and Sanity
Stillness
A Conservationist Manifesto
For the Children
Words of Thanks
Notes
Further Reading
Preface
Trapped recently in an airport lounge where there was no escape from television, I saw an advertisement that showed a husband and wife in an electronics store rushing from one gadget to another, their eyes agog with desire, their mouths curled into rapturous grins, while a chorus of voices chanted, “I want it all, and I want it now!”
This expression of unbridled appetite, neatly combining gluttony and impatience, might stand as the motto for our commercial culture. The same impulse prompts children to throw tantrums when their parents refuse to buy them candy or sneakers or toys. Most of us, I suspect, think of such children as spoiled. Yet the ad implies that once we are grown up and equipped with charge cards, we no longer need to throw tantrums, for we can have everything we want, without pain or delay. Politicians echo this appeal to our gluttony by promising to cut taxes while offering us more handouts and services. Technologists indulge our impatience by peddling gadgets that will let us do everything faster, regardless of whether what we're doing is worth doing at all. Merchants and media, pollsters and pundits, agree in defining us as consumers, as if the purpose of life were to devour the world rather than to savor and preserve it.
As an antidote to this culture of consumption, extravagance, and waste that dominates America today, we need to imagine a culture of conservation. The reasons are manifold. Whether one considers the disruption of global climate, the tattering of the ozone layer, the clear-cutting of forests, the loss of topsoil, the poisoning of lakes by acid rain, the collapse of ocean fisheries, the extinction of species, the looming shortages of oil and fresh water, the spread of famine and epidemic disease, or dozens of other challenges, it's clear that our present way of life is ruinous for the planet and for all Earth's creatures.
How might we shift to a more durable and responsible way of life? What models do we have for a culture of conservation? What changes in values and behavior would be required to bring it about? Where can we see it emerging in practice?
This book seeks answers to those questions. Ranging geographically from my home ground in southern Indiana to the Mount St. Helens volcano and Alaska's Glacier Bay and Minnesota's Boundary Waters Wilderness, and ranging culturally from the Bible to billboards, it maps the practical, ecological, and ethical grounds for a conservation ethic. The roots of conservation go deep in America, back through such visionaries as Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau; back through the frugal habits of the Depression and wartime rationing, through agrarian thrift and frontier ingenuity and the prudent advice of Poor Richard's Almanack; back through Quakers and Puritans, with their emphasis on material simplicity; and even farther back to the indigenous people who inhabited this continent before it was called America.
This tradition of living modestly and conservingly has been largely eclipsed in our own day. While comprising less than 5 percent of the world's population, Americans account for some 25 percent of the world's use of nonrenewable resources, and the amounts we use are increasing year by year. We likewise account for roughly 25 percent of the world's annual release of greenhouse gases. Yet in 2001, the vice president of the United States remarked that “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” In 2006, when a former vice president called on the United States to freeze our greenhouse gas emissions at their current levels and then begin reducing them, the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee responded that any such limitation on growth would cause an “economic calamity.” The senator did not acknowledge, or perhaps even know, that our economic behavior is already causing an ecological calamity.
This book argues that the practice of conservation is not merely a “personal virtue.” It is the most public of virtues, an expression of our regard for our neighbors, for this marvelous planet, and for future generations.
Over the past five years, my wife and I have become grandparents three times over, through the births of Elizabeth Rachel Allen and Margaret Lys Allen to our