Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Cautionary and elegiac, these 30 mostly original essays by nature writers well-known and obscure provoke much thought about our responsibility to our environment. Some writers are pessimistic: Dan O'Brien, lamenting the destruction of the Black Hills, warns that their possible return to the Sioux might bring no improvement; Kris L. Hardin, after observing an African community where little was wasted, suggests that Americans have fought only symbolic environmental battles. Others are meditative: Alston Chase, returning to his Montana ranch roots, argues that only rural people--not urban environmentalists--have a true commitment to nature and to the land. There are some victories: rock climber and clothing maker Yvon Chouinard reports on striving to make his company Patagonia a ``sustainable business''; Bill McKibben recalls how his mountain community organized to fight a poorly planned landfill. Amidst the essays on rivers and mountains, that of Robert F. Jones stands out. Arguing that humanism has destroyed nature, he offers Swiftian methods of population control: encourage abortion and assassination, let AIDS and other epidemics run rampant, and give Dr. Kevorkian a Nobel prize. Katakis is the author of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. (Sept.)

Library Journal

This unique collection of new nature essays forthrightly addresses the environmental conditions and concerns of the 1990s. The contributors include an anthropologist, a filmmaker, and several novelists and fly fishermen and -women as well as established nature writers like Wendell Berry, Gary Nabhan, and Bill McKibben. Subjects range from hiking in Alaska to viniculture in France, and the tone and style vary from the Swiftian satire of Robert F. Jones to John Murray's personal meditation and Wendell Berry's passionate biblical rhetoric. Yet these diverse essays are bound by a single theme summed up succinctly by Mary Katherine Bateson: ``Ethics follow efficacy.'' Because we humans have become so many and so powerful, we must become environmentally responsible; we must reform our greedy, exploitative relationship to the natural world and learn to share the planet's wealth with other species and future generations. For all but the smallest libraries.-- Joan S. Elbers, formerly with Montgomery Coll., Rockville, Md.