The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine

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The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine

POSTED: Thursday, February 7, 2008, 7:34 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

"The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalist anywhere are, We're fucked."

So begins the essay, "Beyond Hope," one in a collection ofmany in Orion magazine's best-of compilation The Future of Nature, which focuses on the rarely positive interaction between humans and natural world.

The book - divided into Action, Refugees, Boundaries, Reverence Monsters and Native - includes work by well-known nature writers like Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry, and deals with topics ranging from a grass roots group fighting to stop the construction of a Target in BK Loren's essay, "Got Tape?" to a story that might make one think twice before putting in vinyl flooring in your home. In her essay, "The Pirates of Illiopolis," Sandra Steingraber takes a close look at a polyvinyl chloride plant in Illinois and the effects of an explosion there.

And while Al Gore's talk of climate refugees in An Inconvenient Truth was sobering, how about conservation organizations kicking people off of their land instead of things like floods or other natural disasters? In "Conservation Refugees," Mark Dowie takes a critical look at organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund and asserts that they, among others, occasionally help "relocate" or "resettle" native peoples so their land can be protected.

"Not to be confused with ecological refugees - people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos - conservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures," writes Dowie.

Although didactic at points throughout the book, the essays provide a glimpse at the burgeoning and many-faceted debates regarding the environment. Some essays, like "Beyond Hope," deserve a close reading, while others can be skimmed.

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