Green Options

Northern Alberta’s vast stores of bitumen–a.k.a. “tar sands” or “oil sands” or “dirty oil”–may well be one of the worst environmental tragedies you never heard of. At least that is what Andrew Nikiforuk, a prize-winning Canadian journalist, wants you to believe.

In his recent book Tar Sands: Diry Oil and the Future of a Continent, Nikiforuk lands a knockout blow on the kissers of the oil industry, oil-friendly bureaucrats, and petrol-guzzling North Americans. It is obvious that this Canadian is sick and tired of watching his own beloved habitat mutate from a pristine Northern ecosystem to a veritable toxic wasteland.

That said, Nikiforuk is clearly perturbed (another “p” word springs to mind…but this is a family-friendly blog). His book combines intensive research with a lively, caustic writing style…sort of enlightened invective. This makes for an astonishingly entertaining read that raises your hackles while raising your awareness about a seriously dangerous issue.

For someone to appreciate a book (or any expressive work for that matter), to “enter into” it fully the way William Blake described the process, there has to be some connection made between the work and the person. Even if the writer is as gifted a storyteller as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, or Stephen King, the work will never speak to you if it does not hook your interest somehow. If you are not open to what it has to say, you will never hear its message.

The same holds true for nature. If you are preoccupied or in a bad mood, a spectacular sunrise will not set you on fire, a wood thrush’s haunting song will go in one ear and out the other, and a vortex of wind-whipped winter snow will not set your spine a-tingling. If some place or thing does not “do it” for you, or if your “doors of perception” are not “cleansed” and open (Blake again), then you will remain blind to nature’s wonders.1

Now, this essential requirement of “mutual affinity” can either save or damn a book. And the best thing about a collection of nature essays like When the Wild Comes Leaping Up: Personal Encounters with Nature is that you have many different doorways to enter into the work and then connect with it. Or you will end up walking down a lot of dead-end hallways.

Editor David Suzuki brings together very personal pieces from some heavy hitters in the eco-literary world, including Diane Ackerman, Bill McKibben, Wade Davis, and Margaret Atwood. Each author explores some important way that he or she has connected with nature, leading to the reflective musing that is the stock in trade of nature writing. Sometimes these stories will draw you in and hold you breathless; other times they will leave you wondering why some people bother to share their ramblings with the world…and get paid for it!

When the Wild Comes Leaping Up, then, is as variegated and dappled as nature itself. Some pieces will strike you as arid deserts devoid of life while others will be like tropical rainforests teeming with more species than you can count.

When it was first published in 1997, David Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature provided an insightful, heartfelt commentary on the dangers that humanity was facing and creating as a result of its disconnection from the natural world. And it seems that his pleas did not go unheard, for the book did quite well, selling over 100,000 copies in the age before “green” was trendy.

A decade later, Suzuki, with Amanda McConnell and Adrienne Mason, has updated and expanded his work in order to strengthen his case with the most recent scientific data and to tailor his argument to even more alarming conditions on Earth. Indeed, despite a growing focus on the environment, we are probably more out of balance now than when The Sacred Balance was first published. “More than ever,” Suzuki writes in the introduction, “we need agreement about what humankind’s real bottom line is, and achieving that agreement remains the primary goal of this book.”1

What do you love about nature? What place, animal, thing, or experience opened your eyes to the sacredness of the natural world? Who in your life provided a role model for stewardship, activism, or scholarship? Why on Earth do you give a hoot about this planet Earth?

In A Passion for This Earth, edited by Michelle Benjamin and published by Greystone Books and the David Suzuki Foundation, twenty of the biggest movers and shakers in the fields of writing, science, and social activism come together to explore these questions. At the same time, each writer seeks to continue the multifaceted approach to making positive change begun more than fifty years ago by David Suzuki, Canada’s foremost environmentalist.

The book is very reader-friendly and engaging, and the obligatory instances of fêting Suzuki that pop up are not gratuitous, awkward, or irrelevant. Instead, all of the individual pieces coalesce as the writers express their personal perspective on nature and environmentalism. The book’s title may have you suspecting a mélange of ooey gooey green effusions–you know, the sort of stuff I generally tend to write. But what the book delivers is a truly enlightening anthology addressing four different topics relevant to Suzuki’s legacy: “Falling in Love with the Wild,” “Rise Up and Reclaim,” “Uncompromising Dedication,” and “Travels with David Suzuki.”

Every individual, no matter how small or inconsequential that individual may seem, has the power to make a difference in the lives of others and to make positive changes occur on the largest scales.

This is the message in Flight of the Hummingbird: A Parable for the Environment by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. The author takes a story from the Quechuan people of South America about Dukdukdiya, a fearless little hummingbird who tries to put out a fire in the Great Forest one drop of water at a time. While the other animals stand at the Forest’s edge, afraid and confused and hopeless, Dukdukiya tirelessly picks up droplets of water in an effort to save her and her companions’ home. Rather than give up like the others, and despite her diminutive physical form, her heart shows its grandness as she does what no one else will. “I am doing what I can,” she says.1

Along with this wonderful, touching folktale, Yahgulanaas provides illustrations in the traditional Haida Manga style. In evocative red and black colors, his depictions of the animals and habitat capture both your eye and the wildness of the animals. Although not true-to-life renderings by any means, Yahgulanaas’s stylized renderings seem to express the “spirit” of the creatures, adding great life and strength to the story itself. This fantastic artwork almost literally comes alive, too, in the animated video on the publisher’s website.