The Book I Wish I had Read Two Years Ago: Crow Planet

I think every PhD student has a secret worry that there is a book out there that makes the same argument they plan on making. Well, turns out that Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness is that book for me. I really wish that I had read this book 2 years ago as it would have saved me a fair bit of work …. There is an element of facetiousness in this of course. Haupt does not take up literature like I do and instead writes as a naturalist (which I am decidedly not). However, Crow Planet is a very well written and engaging book that makes clear how important it is for urbanites to embrace the natural world around them. In the opening chapter she writes:

I have come to believe that opening ourselves to [close and detailed] inquiry and participating daily in the process of discovery it implies is our most urgent work as humans in the new millennium. And not because engaging these questions will make us happier, or smarter, or make more of our moments feel enchanted, though it will certainly do all of these things. It is urgent because an intimate awareness of the continuity between our lives and the rest of life is the only thing that will truly conserve the earth – this wonderful earth that we rightly love. (12-13)

Haupt was an avid bird watcher and committed environmentalist who placed high value in wilderness experiences. However, after her editor pushed her to do a project on crows, she began to see the necessity of studying and understanding her own urban (Seattle) context. I think this is what makes Crow Planet so persuasive. Haupt is forthright about her own struggles with the compromised nature of urban nature and about the everydayness of crows in general. However, she very quickly finds wonder in this bird’s adaptability and life in the city. And in this wonder, she begins to sketch out a way to embrace and engage with urban nature. I am struck how similar our overall projects are even though our methods ended up being quite different.

This is a very good book that I highly recommend to anyone who lives in a city. This is what environmentalism should look like! Seriously. Go get this book now.

Haupt, Lyanda Lynn. Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2009. Print.

Mystery Down in the Don River Valley: Free Reign

Another bit of work sneaking onto the list, this time in the form of Rosemary Aubert’s Free Reign. The novel features a disgraced lawyer now living in Toronto’s Don River valley who is called back up into the streets when he discovers a human hand with a special ring on it in his garden. Sounds like an interesting plot setup doesn’t it? Unfortunately, as a mystery/suspense novel, Free Reign does not quite live up to the promise it shows. For my own academic work, I am interested in how the Don River valley shows up in the novel so reading it was not a loss by any means. However, as a pleasure read, I’m not convinced that Aubert’s book works that well.

One of the primary rules of mystery/suspense novels is that they adhere to a high degree of verisimilitude. They must be believable even if the crimes/mysteries are often spectacularly sensational. By rigidly adhering to the rules of the actual world, a mystery novelist can then throw in some surprising events that become believable based on the previous work done by verisimilitude. In a way, fiction has to be truer to life than life itself. Read any tabloid and some of the crimes are so spectacular as to beg belief. The problem with Free Reign is not so much the fact that Ellis Portal, the disgraced judge, lives in the Don River valley (many of Toronto’s homeless live in this area – see this Globe and Mail story and this academic article for more), but more the manner in which everything gets conveniently tied up at the novel’s end. I won’t spoil the novel’s twist but the ending really does read like a Disney script. I couldn’t stand this and was left with a bitter taste in my mouth.

The other problem, at least for me, is that Aubert’s novel seems to be structurally flawed in a crucial way. Although the mystery of Ellis’s disgrace is alluded to early on and the mysterious hand appears in the first few pages, the actual source of mystery, a teen pregnancy hostel in a seedier area of Toronto, does not show up until later in the novel. When Aubert ties everything together, which is one of the more satisfying aspects of mystery novels, I felt like she had somehow cheated. For some reason, I feel that readers should be able to solve the crime/mystery as well but with this novel the timing of the appearance of the various parts of the mystery plot was off. Moreover, the novel itself sets up an interesting class critique but then goes on to completely nullify this by making the villains appear heroic or noble. The academic in me was not happy.

Overall, the novel does some very interesting things with the Don River valley and, for Toronto readers, Free Reign could be a fun read, matching a fictional narrative to actual places in city.

I would recommend this book for Toronto fans of mystery, but be warned that it leaves something to be desired.

Aubert, Rosemary. Free Reign. Bridgehampton, NY: Bridge Works Publishing Company, 1997. Print.

Couldn’t Do It: The Practice of the Wild

I really wanted to like Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, given that it has been such an important text for ecocriticism, but I just could not like it. Sure, there were parts of it that I enjoyed, but on the whole it left a sour taste in my mouth. I think I was expecting something more than what Snyder gives, so perhaps my negative reaction comes as much from wrong expectations as from the material itself. For those of you who don’t know, Snyder is one of the pre-eminent nature poets in American literature. He came of age with the Beat Poets but took a very different route than they did, engaging with the natural world and dipping heavily into Buddhism and eastern religion. The Practice of the Wild collects a series of essays he had published in various places. 

Okay, my first problem with this book was the essays themselves. I found them too diffuse, unfocused, and lacking in rhetorical punch to be effective. This is not to say that Snyder should have written them like a politician’s speech, but rather that the unfocused nature of some of the pieces detracts from their strength. In “Good, Wild, Sacred,” Snyder moves from a meditation on wild land versus good land versus sacred land into reflections on preagricultural peoples, California politics, a trip into the Australian outback, dreams and their significance to Australian Aborigines, shrines in Japan, early North American explorers, the meanings of the word cultivation, what sacred land might mean, and, finally, returning to the Sierra Nevada foothills where Snyder lives. As you can see, he covers a lot of ground here and although this is not necessarily a bad thing the writing does not make sufficient transitions between topics to make it work.

My second problem is more conceptual in nature. Snyder firmly believes that wildness will be the savior of the contemporary moment. He makes a strong case for its importance in human experience in essays like “The Etiquette of Freedom,” but I am not entirely sold on the efficacy of wildness as the key part of environmentalist rhetoric. I could go into a long diatribe of why I believe this, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that wilderness and experiences of wildness are a relatively recent phenomenon historically speaking and seem to speak more to affluent citizens who have the time, money, and will to engage with them (without properly acknowledging this privilege as such).

I really did want to like Snyder’s book. I even read parts of it in the wilderness. I found a number of parts useful, particularly one section where Snyder calls on readers not to abandon where they live for the wilderness but to take lessons from the wild back to their home places: “The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory – never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could live considerable numbers on much of it” (101). Here, Snyder puts forward from very sage advice. Unfortunately, I think this advice tends to be disregarded in favor of Snyder’s preference for the wild.

I would recommend this book to fans of Snyder’s poetry and fans of wilderness. Be forewarned about the loose writing though.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. 1990. Print.