Non-Fiction
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
Reviewed by Karen Rudin, AWC Zürich
In 2014, a Canadian journalist named Naomi Klein wrote a book entitled This Changes Everything. Klein’s book goes deeply into the basic causes of environmental ills and suggests radical changes that could reverse the present disastrous, worsening situation.
The title alone is provocative: what is the “this” that is powerful enough to change “everything?” This is climate change, and everything is commercial life, energy production and use, globalization, rule by the free market; our attitude toward nature, our whole culture, society and lifestyle as well. Everything!
The situation was summed up effectively on April 18, 2017 in the Summary of the advisory opinion of the International Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague: “The Tribunal clearly identifies and denounces a severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.”1
Klein compares present corporate practices and corporate ideology to the needs of the environment and society as a whole:
- The laws governing incorporation require increase in shareholder value and steady growth and expansion, while the environment needs contraction of our profligate use of resources.
- The corporate world lives by competition; the human community needs cooperation.
- Agreements meant to protect corporations are legally binding; agreements meant to protect the environment are unenforceable, weak, tenuous.
- Extractivism as practiced by the fossil fuel companies sees nature as currency; the laws of nature are such that it must be seen as capital.
- For hundreds of years we have seen man as master over nature; now we must acknowledge that man has to be a responsible partner of nature.
- Global concerns interpret freedom as a lack of regulation, so that freedom becomes rapaciousness; man’s freedom in nature requires responsible, cooperative behavior.
- A small minority, thinking in terms of short-term earnings, rules the economy, the political process and the media; nature and society need long-term solutions.
- Our prevailing philosophy in well-off countries is rampant consumerism; we need to make the change to a philosophy of “enoughness.”
Considering solutions to our environmental and societal ills, we see immediately that corporations cannot be in control of these solutions. We need two basic changes: “green” government policy with clout, on the one hand, and control in the hands of communities on the other.
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Reviewed by Ann Zulliger, AWC Zurich
A Sand County Almanac was written by Aldo Leopold, whose life was spent in nature – loving it and trying to understand and protect it. His writing is beautiful and profound. These astonishing portraits of the natural world explore the breathtaking diversity of the unspoiled American landscape – the mountains and the prairies, the deserts and the coastlines. Conjuring up one extraordinary vision after another, Aldo Leopold takes readers with him on the road and through the seasons on a fantastic tour of our priceless natural resources, explaining the destructive effects humankind has had on the land and issuing a bold challenge to protect the world we love.
The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology by Barry Commoner
Reviewed by Ann Zulliger, AWC Zurich
The Closing Circle is not as beautifully lyrical as Aldo Leopold’s book, but it is important enough to have been reprinted after 50 years. This is because it shows us how our thinking must change if we and nature are to survive. The examples are the same, but the problems they describe are still with us. His four laws of ecology sum it up in a nutshell:
- Everything is connected to everything else
- Everything must go somewhere
- Nature knows best
- There is no such thing as a “free lunch.”
Fiction
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nicholse
Review from Goodreads
Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began – though few knew it at the time – the Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories. Gradually, the small farmers and sheepmen begin to rally to Joe’s beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands. And downstate in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers huddle in urgent conference, intent on destroying that symbol before it destroys their multimillion-dollar land-development schemes. The tale of Milagro’s rising is wildly comic and lovingly told, a vivid portrayal of a town that, half-stumbling and partly prodded, gropes its way toward its own stubborn salvation.
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Review from Goodreads
The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God’s Gardeners – a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life – has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God’s Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.
Have others survived? Ren’s bio artist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...
Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...
By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
by Anne van Oorschot, AWC The Hague and Environment Team Co-Chair
Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman’s narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel’s inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith and everyday truces between reason and conviction.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town and a larger world in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.
Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy, Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Award-winning novel! Do you love trees? I thought I did, until I read Richard Powers’ The Overstory, and I realized that my appreciation of trees was lightweight at best. When one of Powers’ characters goes to a small grove outside her office window to determine the tree’s species, ‟She stands with her nose in the bark, perversely intimate. She doses herself for a long time, like a hospice patient self-administering the morphine.” Trees are not exactly an addiction to the wide-ranging cast of characters – an engineer, a Vietnam vet, a college student, a videogame designer and more – but more like a touchstone that offers tradition and destiny at once. Powers, a National Book Award and Pushcart Prize-winning author, is devious in that he first immerses the reader in the lives of his characters before delicately oxygenating his story with the devastation of Dutch elm disease, the enduring strength of the sequoia, and the communication methods trees use to warn of predators and to lure allies. The Overstory might sound a bit woo-woo – and it definitely is that, though in such a way that it inspires passion instead of eye-rolling. This gorgeously written novel will seduce you into looking more closely at not only our fellow human beings but the towering bio-kingdom that is too often merely a backdrop to our days. Perhaps, like me, you will be inspired to walk out into the night to smell the rain sweeping through the nearby evergreen trees. – Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
Comment by Environment Team member, Alexandra Vo de Jager: ‟This is a BIG book, but the last ¼ disappoints.”
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
by Anne van Oorschot, AWC The Hague and Environment Team Co-Chair
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life.
On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer’s wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own.
And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected.
Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the countryside, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they share a place. With the complexity that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative, drama, and ideas that render it an inspiring work of fiction.
