| Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (The World As Home) |  | Author: Bill McKibben
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $8.50
as of 9/9/2010 04:51 MDT details
You Save: $6.50 (43%)
New (14) Used (25) from $5.66
Seller: MyUsedBooks4Sale
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 67,720
Media: Paperback
Pages: 232
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 1571313001
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.28
EAN: 9781571313003
ASIN: 1571313001
Publication Date: January 12, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Divided into three sections, Hope, Human and Wild profiles the efforts of three caring communities to preserve wilderness and reverse environmental devastation. They include the reforestation of McKibben’s home territory, New York’s Adirondack Mountains; solving traffic and pollution problems in the densely populated Curitiba, Brazil; and how the citizens of Kerala, India have demonstrated that quality of life doesn’t depend on overconsumption of resources. This edition features a new introduction that revisits these places and explores how they’ve changed over the years.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
 At Last I Get It January 31, 2006
Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is an exploration into what's right and what's wrong with the planet and our relationship with it. It was written as a sequel to an earlier book by McKibben, "The End of Nature." In this book, McKibben starts by identifying some areas where there is hope for improvement in the environment in the future. The book is arranged in four parts. In the first part, McKibben considers examples of environmental recovery in his own region. He then turns to two parts of the world with very different local solutions to global problems. The first of these is Curataiba, Brazil, a city made famously livable by some very forward-thinking city planners. He then turns to Kerala, India, noting that a relatively high quality of life can be achieved with extremely limited resources, provided one addresses the key structural problems of society first. In the last section of the book, he reflects on his observations from the three regions.
McKibben hardly needed to look any further than his own backyard for proof that the environment can indeed bounce back to some extent from extreme abuse. His backyard in the Adirondacks is now full of trees, a condition that is now common throughout the Eastern United States. Much more common, in fact, than it was just fifty years ago. A little over a hundred years ago, most landscapes in the Northeast were treeless. The trees had been cut down to clear fields, to use for ship building and house construction, and most notably, to use for fuel. With the invention of a plow that could at last turn the thick prairie soil, many of the New England farmers pushed westward, glad to leave their cold, stony fields to grow up into forest again. But changes in fuel usage played an even larger role in the recovery of the trees. A hundred years ago, we got 90% of our energy from wood, necessitating the cutting down of millions of acres of forest per year just to keep the economy going. With the switch to petroleum-based fuels, we now rely on wood for just 10% of our energy, and as a result, the forests in the East are now thicker than they have been for over four hundred years. In tandem with the return of the trees, the wildlife are also coming back, and wild turkeys and bear sightings are now more common in this region than they have ever been since the arrival of Europeans on the continent. As petroleum fuels become more difficult and expensive to come by, we can only hope that we will stumble on a new fuel to replace oil, just as oil replaced wood.
McKibben's discussion of Curataiba is quite stimulating. He describes how ingenious local leaders made the city into a model of a livable, workable metropolis. They did this not by copying technology of developed countries, but by creating original solutions based on locally available materials and culture. Kerala also was faced with seemingly insurmountable problems of poverty, race, and class. Individual leaders in Kerala were successful in getting the community to rally around local solutions to these problems. Thus, McKibben's theme seems to be, in a world of ever-increasing globalization, where all problems are global, the solutions need to be local.
I've been wrestling with trying to understand globalization ever since the protests in Seattle. Despite reading heavily on the topic and talking to others, I just couldn't understand why the protesters made such a fuss. I even completed a discussion course on globalization offered by the Northwest Institute, and I still didn't get it. But as I read this book, the problems of an economy controlled by transnational corporations finally began to sink in. McKibben describes the shocking extent of deforestation in Maine. It just so happens that a South African company is now one of the largest owners of timber rights in the state. With a home office some 10,000 miles distant, they don't have a personal stake in what happens to the Maine environment. So millions of acres of forest in the state are being clear cut, but visitors and locals don't notice the missing trees because the companies leave 50 yard wide swathes of undisturbed forest along the roads, trails, and waterways. Along with the clear cuts comes erosion, silting of streams, and massive loss of habitat for the wildlife. After reading about Maine, I thought about a plot of land up the road that is currently being logged. Fortunately, the land up the road is owned not by a transnational corporation, but by a neighbor, who has a vital interest in seeing that the forest remains healthy throughout his logging operations; indeed, he is truly managing the forest, rather than simply cutting down trees. I now see calls for supporting the local economy rather than going with the flow of globalization in a new light-in purchasing items made in a global economy, we may unwittingly be contributing to environmental destruction on a massive scale, destruction that is magnified by the fact that the decision makers in the production process have no personal interest in the environment that they are damaging. And the ones who do have a personal interest in that environment are powerless to fight the big companies. If, on the other hand, we support local producers and local economies, we can directly influence how the producers treat the land. At the same time, the local producers have a very personal interest in not causing damage to their own homes and livelihood. Indeed, there is plenty of food for thought in this book.
Another Thoughtful Book By Bill McKibben October 1, 2002
Barron Laycock (Temple, New Hampshire United States)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
In a time when many people finally accept the fact of global warming and of continuing human assault on the environment, Bill McKibben has launched this wonderfully written, inspiring, and informative book, another in his continuing series of important essays on the complex relationship between humankind and the planet we inhabit. McKibben, a former writer for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, transplanted himself and his small family in the Adirondack region of upstate New York in the late 1980s, from whence he has come once more to deliver a healthy dollop of insight, whimsy, and wisdom concerning the way we continue to walk not so lightly on the earth. Like most environmentalists, McKibben is deeply concerned about the continuing onslaught on the skin of the planet, and about our continuing disregard for the welfare of everything within the natural environment we most depend upon to have a continuing quality of life. Yet he is also propelled by aspects of his own experience with the ecology of his local area to set off on what he terms to be an exploration of hope, in the sense that he was searching for examples of recovery and progress in the natural landscape. One wonderful example he uses is that of the recovery of the amount of land reforested since the signal journey of one Timothy White, who in traveling in the early 1800s found very little land not cut and turned to the plow. Yet some two hundred years later, much of the Northeast forest is once again covering the landscape, and all of this in spite of the vastly increased population over the landmass in question. Of course, as McKibben admits, must of the reforesting took place based on the gradual abandonment of the lands of the Northeast in the so-called western migration as we fulfilled our "Manifest Destiny", and this migration also spelled further deforestation efforts in those area under active migration. Once again, part of the genius of the natural environmental processes can be viewed in such a way, requiring not so much in the way of human intervention as in a kind of purposeful benign neglect (my own hackneyed term, not McKibben's). Left alone long enough, natural processes are underway that are restoring the Northeast forests to their primordial glory. And, like McKibben, I wonder at the good fortune some of us have to live in relatively sparsely developed and populated areas, where we can enjoy nature on amore personal level, where deer and bear and moose and all sorts of birds are free to live and roam. I sit in wonder with my friends the Labradors and watch, enraptured as the geese soar noisily above me this time every year..... Moreover, one must share his frustration and sadness at the prospect of such massive forces denuding and despoiling the ecosystems even as we read and write. While he offers some reasons for hope, the truth may be that things will have to become much worse for human beings to begin to act more responsibly in following his advice to find many more ways to walk more lightly on the earth. It is imperative for those of us who understand the magnitude of the dangers confronting us act to continue to try to inform others, while also preparing to gradually break our own bonds to this culture of waste and wanton destruction. This book is more fuel for our own sustenance as we begin the long journey back to what Joni Mitchell once called "the garden'. See you there! Enjoy!
Read it!! September 30, 1998
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
This book is essential reading for environmentalists.
This book changed my life September 29, 2007
Susie-Q (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In it, there are stories about how entire communities have been positively transformed by the action of a few determined individuals. This book will have you contemplating how you can affect change in your own community, and will give you the courage to enact it.
A hopeful look at living well October 28, 2007
John G. Curington
Bill McKibben takes an original view of some environmental issues and some solutions. I was especially pleased to read about Curitiba in Brazil and the Kerala in India. This town in Brazil and state in India show that we humans can live full happy lives on our planet while using less resources. I was also pleased to read about reforestation in New England. This short hopeful book is definitely worth reading.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 13
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Powered by Keralam.ws | |
