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Stephen R. Kellert and Timothy J. Farnham (eds.) The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality (Washington, Covelo, London: Island Press, 2002), pp. xvi + 277. Hb $28.00, ISBN 1-55963-838-9 ‘The "environmental crisis,"’ writes Wendell Berry in a key essay in this volume, ‘is no such thing … it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, and as citizens’ (p.200), a crisis that has caused us to construct ‘an economy based on several kinds of ruin’ (p.202). He and the 19 other contributors to this broad collection, grapple with the problem of how it is that we continue to plunge with accelerating speed into this crisis of our lives, despite greater and greater scientific knowledge about how humanity affects the planet, and despite a steady growth in good intentions. As it was expressed by Aldo Leopold (a seminal figure in American environmentalism, whose work is central for many authors in this volume), ‘Concurrent growth in knowledge of land, good intention toward land, and abuse of land presents a paradox that baffles me’ (p.43). His proposal was that we require a ‘third step ethic’ of ‘relation to the land and the animals and plants that grow upon it’ to follow the first two steps dealing with relations between individuals (‘the Mosaic Decalogue’) and relations between individual and society (‘later accretions’) (p.176). Such an ethic must, however, be much more than an intellectual prescription: ‘We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in’ (p.19). These words delineate the strands of science, spirituality and religion that need to be in place if humanity is to arrive at such an ethic, and which are examined in turn in this volume. On the scientific side, Ursula Goodenough argues strongly that understanding nature can, of itself, lead to a subjective response of love of, and respect for nature. For her, knowing how species work enables us to connect with them. ‘Trees speak in electron and carbon and chemical bonds and DNA’ (p.20). Connection, we might infer, in turn binds our destiny to theirs, so that their diminishment becomes our diminishment. Thus it would follow that an original self-centred or anthropocentric impetus would become ecocentric. Other authors with links to science, however, take considerably further the need to acknowledge anthropocentrism rather than denying it. Dave Preble and Carl Safina, taking the destruction of fish stocks as their example, claim that ‘taken by itself, altruism will lead us as far astray as unrestrained self-interest’ (p.179). Their article represents a minority argument which makes it hard to see what role altruism can have at all in a land ethic, and leaves little space for the delight and love for nature expressed by Goodenough. The religious contributions arise from an awareness that only radical reconstruction will allow an adequate response. Mary Evelyn Tucker singles out the need for restoring a cosmological sensibility, and she traces this through the various book-based religions of the world, though she omits the primal religions which have never lost this sensibility. (Indigenous voices are absent from the book, as are voices from the more radical feminist perspectives.) The need for cosmology is also well endorsed by Margaret Fowler, citing the Christian tradition of the ‘two books’ of scripture and nature. A common thread emerges pointing to the reinvention of theism on a new basis centring on the cosmos rather than on human individuality. Spirituality is entwined in many of the essays. An interesting theme argues in support of the spirituality of Darwinism, as first expounded by Leopold. Strachan Donnelly characterises this in terms of the overthrow by Darwin of three old modes of thought inimical to a land ethic: ‘cosmic teleology—nature’s grand divine design and Designer … Newtonian determinism, the hegemony of … eternal unbreachable laws of nature … [and] essentialist thinking’ (p.164). The overthrow of this last means that thought ‘in terms of species types (horse, dog, rose, human being) is replaced by populational thinking … [I]ndividuality and particularity hold for populations, communities, ecosystems, and bioregions …’ Even more thought provoking is the account by David Peterson is of the spirituality of the hunter. His practice of hunting is the antithesis of that mainly practised in England: he describes the weeks spent in the wild tracking a deer, until he finally encounters it in a kind of union, when he shoots it with a bow, butchers it, and spends the next day hauling the meat back to his cabin where it will feed him for the winter. He contrasts this with the life of the Vegan eating mange-tous peas flown in from Nigeria. This essay was one of the few that brought me to moments of breakthrough, where a new vision was being presented, even if in need of qualification. The others included Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis’ ‘Gaia and the ethical abyss’, reminding us that ‘Ethics is a construct, a mask whose arbitrariness we must conceal if we are to believe that goodness has a face’ (p.92); and the story-telling of Terry Tempest Williams viewing the collapse of the environment through the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of Hell. But the pride of place for me goes to Wendell Berry, whom I quoted at the start. His essay on ‘The Idea of a Local Economy’ combines the passion for the land of a farmer with a pithy and insightful economic analysis. He argues that crisis we face arises from our handing over power to proxies, first governments, then corporations, who provide a ‘sentimental economics’ where rewards for the people lie entirely in the future, but where present reality is the increase of the corporations’ own power. This crisis of our lives, he claims, cannot be overcome by good intentions, but only by reclaiming our power through developing local economies, starting with food. An implicit but powerful spirituality of the earth breathes through the whole of his analysis, which unites justice, ecology and politics. This essay alone would make the book well worth buying, and many of the others are equally far-reaching in their conclusions. Chris Clarke Visiting Professor, University of Southampton,
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