An uncommonly clear, commonsensical argument for rehabilitating
damaged landscapes and moving toward what the author calls the
"future primitive." Mills (Whatever Happened to Ecology?, 1989) is
one of the leading proponents of the "bioregional movement," a
place-based environmental consciousness that has grown from a nice
idea of the '60s into a powerful ethic. Mills's place is the
deciduous forests of upstate Michigan, where she has taken once
badly overworked land and made it her own. Fierce in her
attachments and passionate in her writing, Mills tackles hard
questions head-on: How to we reconcile economic growth with
conserving, or better, preserving wild places? Under this huge
American sky, why worry about a few backwoods places that have
suffered ill use at human hands? Can't the Earth take care of
itself? Melding old-hippie and New Left sensibilities with a keen
respect for scientific precision, Mills proposes a program for
restoring the land's poor cousins - overlogged forests and
played-out fields, wildcat dumps and silted-up rivers - to
something of their former health. This is not, she recognizes, easy
or even pleasant work, and it reminds us of our failings: "To begin
a true and lasting restoration," she writes, "it is necessary to
travel imaginatively back through time to earlier, less disturbed
landscapes to develop an authentic vision of what to restore to.
How else can we view the losses, the irreparable gaps rent in the
fabric by extinctions, but as remonstrance?" Taking side trips to
the Himalayas, to colleges in Southern California and salmon runs
in the Northwest, to federally managed forests in Southern
Illinois, and, most affectingly, to Auroville, India, where a
once-barren tropical plateau has been reforested, Mills shows how
this hard and necessary work can be done. Good writing and good
thinking make this book fuel for long reflection. (Kirkus Reviews)
Ecologist Stephanie Mills offers an examination of the state of our
environment, after the destruction of habitats that has occurred
throughout this century in industrialised countries. This work
should be of use to conservationists, naturalists, and those
involved in land management.
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