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Everyone Talks About Climate: Here's How To Do Something About It
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Coleman, Lawrence A. |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | progress-through-devastation would not want to engage with such texts? Critical ethical questions are raised in James Barilla’s thought-provoking essay on the literature of ecological restoration. ‘‘. . .[T]he desire to return to conditions prior to European contact is primarily a preoccupation in those areas where such a disturbance, and continued colonization, has taken place. Thus the ecological restoration narrative expresses certain desires and anxieties while avoiding and disguising others, such as the highly troubling question of land rights’’ (emphasis mine). The texts considered within this framework include Aldo Leopold’s Sand County almanac, South African J. M. Coetzee’s Life and times of Michael K, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Garden in the dunes. Those who enjoy honest challenges to comfortably enshrined conventional wisdom will find this essay by itself worth the price of the book. Other essays in the volume challenge the very concept of ‘‘text’’ as limited to written materials. Songs, buildings, curricula, evolutionary processes, Linnean binomials—all can be read as text in the sense that they actually encode narrative, stories about how we see the world and our place in it. Jennifer Wheat’s essay on scientific nomenclature (‘‘Mindless fools and leaves that run’’) is particularly delightful. We are perhaps accustomed to the notion that indigenous languages often encode rather complex ecological information within their names for organisms; Wheat takes as her point of departure the obvious fact that Linnean binomials of course do the same. Or do they? Taxonomists and ecologists may find this essay by turns hilarious, infuriating, and illuminating. Another personal favorite is Tina Gianquitto’s essay on the work and works of Mary Treat, a 19 century naturalist and ‘‘. . .participating member of a famous and controversial circle of professional scientists that includes Charles Darwin and Asay Gray. . ..’’ Some of the many pieces I have not discussed may have particular champions within our discipline. For example Amy Patrick provides an interesting discussion of the effectiveness of ‘‘apocalyptic’’ literature in the style of Silent spring. David Mazel discusses the work of Annie Dillard in the context of the Book of Job. Michael Cohen takes on evolutionary literature as well as the sociobiology debates, apparently still alive and well in some corners of the humanities. The final essay by the courageous lone geologist Jeff Walker (‘‘The great, shaggy barbaric Earth’’) discusses the work of John Burroughs and is by comparison with most of the foregoing, somewhat tame, but an affectionate and kindly end to the volume. |
| Starting Page | 2947 |
| Ending Page | 2948 |
| Page Count | 2 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/publications/special/creating_climate_for_change/ecology_review.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1890/0012-9658%282007%2988%5B2947%3AETACHH%5D2.0.CO%3B2 |
| Volume Number | 88 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
