Green Options

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.