Salva and the lost boys walked. They had not lost their way. What they had lost was their homes. They walked away from conflict and to what would keep them alive: water. 

The Nile supplies water for farming and drinking to much of Northeastern Africa as the characters in A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park learn. The plot of the novel centers on two young characters fleeing the Sudanese Civil War and quickly learning the importance of water amidst its scarcity. At the end, Nya and Salva’s paths cross as the giver and receiver of water. 

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

Salva walked to save himself. When tragedy struck, he walked. When conflict arrived, he walked. Based on Salva Dut, a real Lost Boy, Salva’s story highlights the reality for people in conflict ridden countries and the tough choices real life characters are forced to make when on the brink of survival. 

Triggered by conflict over the role of Islamic law, the first Sudanese Civil War began in 1955 and lasted 17 years. The second Sudanaese Civil War began in 1983 and ended in 2005. The third civil war took place between 2013 and 2020. Conservative estimates suggest that almost 3 million people were killed in the civil wars, by disease, or by the resulting famine. 

Approximately 20,000 boys from the Dinka and Nuer tribes became known as “the Lost Boys.” They were displaced and orphaned during the second civil war. Salva was among them. Salva, like the other “Lost Boys,” wandered across Sudan fleeing civil war, mostly ending up in Kenyan refugee camps. 

Salva was a school boy daydreaming about the fresh milk that awaited the end of the school day when gunshots rang from outside. Salva’s teacher instructed the students to go “into the bush” to hide. For Salva, that was the beginning of years of uncertainty. 

In that instant, Salva became one of the Lost Boys. “No more looking back” for Salva, instead he looked forward as he escaped from the civil war. Salva continued walking through the Akobo Desert, built canoes to cross rivers, and watched for dangerous animals and people. He spent years walking and almost a decade in refugee camps trying to find safety. 

Map of Nile and its main tributaries in North East Africa

In the novel, water is often at the root of the characters’ precarious existence. When Salva encountered another group of travelers who had just run out of water, Salva needed to decide if he should prioritize his own survival or help others. Despite his uncle’s pleas, Salva gave some of his water to the thirsty travelers, the small amount reviving some of them.

Part of Salva’s journey involved determining the safety of the water he found. Water borne illnesses were and continue to be common in Sudan. Malaria and cholera are the number one causes of death in children. Years after Salva completed his journey through Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya, landing in New York, his father found and reached out to him. Salva’s father was thrilled to know his son survived, but he was suffering from a waterborne illness, not uncommon in Sudan. Salva’s journey and his father’s illness inspired him to start his non-profit Water for South Sudan in 2003. As of August 2022, this non-profit had drilled 571 new wells, providing clean water for over 325,000 people. 

This isn’t just a story about the Lost Boys, but a comparison to the lives of the current communities still waiting for clean water access amidst continued conflict. Park crafted the fictitious character of Nya, in a parallel storyline to Salva’s, based on stories of real girls in Sudan and recipients of Water for South Sudan’s wells. 

Water access is a tool of empowerment. Intertwined in Salva’s story is the story of one of the recipients of a well from his charity, Nya who spends her days getting water for her family, instead of in school. The plastic can she carried to and from the watering hole kept her family alive. Once a well with safe drinking water is built in Nya’s community, Nya is suddenly able to attend school. Access to water secured their lives, but better access to clean water promotes development and education. This is why the United Nations made access to clean water a sustainable development goal. 

The UN recognized the importance of clean water for all because universal access to water means water will be much less likely to trigger conflicts or be used as a weapon. Clean water access also supports other development goals like education and gender equality, just like it did for Nya. 

Salva inspires readers of all ages to persevere in the face of conflict. Park’s telling of Salva’s story takes a winding journey that confronts readers with challenges and highlights resilience. Park’s book acts as an educational tool. It is popular with American middle schools, where it is used to teach about the Sudanese Civil War, resilience, and the importance of water.

By teaching children about large human rights concerns from a young age, Park promotes awareness of non-western cultures, regions, and conflicts, while stressing the humanity of the children in her book.

Don’t bother with metal straws – the turtles aren’t interested in your “help”. While your efforts may be well founded, using a paper straw isn’t going to save turtles or solve climate change.

In a book purportedly written as “an environmentalist manifesto”, it seems counterintuitive to tell people to quit doing environmentally friendly things. But Stop Saving the Planet by Jenny Price, claims this is exactly what the  environmental movement needs. With dry and irreverent humor, Price gives eleven reasons why trying to save the planet within a capitalist, consumerist society is not the best idea. At the end of the day, the planet needs effective solutions centered on socioeconomic equity, not band-aids for proverbial bullet wounds.

Grist / W.W. Norton / Igor Heifetz

Price’s very short book focuses on two main themes. The first is “Green Virtue” (GV).  This is the idea that you can save the planet by talking about saving the planet. GV references the “greener-than-thou” mentality that some environmentalists espouse, even though their “greener” behavior is still sustaining harmful economic practices and systems. The second is “Whole Planetude” (WP).  This is the idea that any and all strategies to save the planet are effective because they’re better than doing nothing. Saving the environment is synonymous with saving the planet, whatever that is, everywhere for everyone.

She contends that a combination of these mantras has contributed greatly to the proliferation of ineffective, unsustainable, and inequitable green schemes marketed by and sold in our consumerist society. It’s a lot to cover in a book shorter than most budget bills. Take the Tesla, a popular symbol of environmentalism in America. Well-off people may buy a Tesla to drive, guilt free, forgetting all of the materials and energy required to manufacture an electric car in the first place.

GV and WP are both at work here. This practice ignores how consumerism causes climate change and allows the consumption of even more “stuff”, or the things we buy, which is GV. It’s also supposedly “helping” save the planet, except at a high cost to the local environments where all the lithium and steel ore were mined and refined, which is WP. Price’s point is that the existing framework of environmental policy panders to capitalism and corporate interests. God forbid Ford or ExxonMobil take some losses after poisoning the planet for generations.

How do you reconcile balancing the needs of the economy and the environment? Price believes it’s impossible because “the goal of our economy is to maximize growth and profits – not your health and well-being”. Turns out you can’t buy your way to a clean, green future.

As Jenny Price says: “WTF?”

Part of the problem is how we view ‘The Environment’ as some separate, wild entity that operates independently of our lives. This is a key aspect of WP. In reality all those materials needed for that new electric vehicle are taken directly from the Earth. The environment is central to the economy, so to protect the economy we must first protect the environment. And if we do this correctly, we’ll be protecting people too.

Price says environmentalists are widely disliked in the US because the onus for solving climate change is put on the backs of the general public, most of whom can’t afford to buy an EV. The worst-polluted communities are majority low-income and communities of color, and they rarely see environmentally positive change. So when environmentalists champion purchasing fuel-efficient vehicles to demonstrate GV, palpable disinterest is understandable. When corporations and public agencies have acted for centuries against the best interests of low-income populations, allowing rampant pollution in deference to economic gains, disenchantment with the system is rational.

EVs do require massive inputs, but across their lifetime, have fewer impacts than a combustion engine run car. Transportation is the largest source of American carbon emissions, so it’s plausible that this is one of those issues we can buy our way out of, or at least help with investments.

“We are not all in this together” but any proposal to solve climate change, a global problem, requires global cooperation (WP). Price believes the best plan would “democratize the economy and… fight climate change”: an overhaul of existing economic structures – no biggie.

While Price’s book starts with what not to do, it ends with a long list of things to do.  The list is too exhaustive to enumerate, but the ideas center around engaging oneself introspectively and outwardly. Inspect one’s own relationship to the environment, governance, and “stuff”. Engage externally too, with local politics and neighborhood groups.

Maximize time and effort, not by picking easy, highly visible things to challenge (like the straws symbolizing GV) but the most effective for the planet. Almost half of the Giant Pacific Garbage Patch is composed of synthetic fishing line, not straws. So why aren’t we holding fishing conglomerates accountable in the same way?

With current societal regression in “almost every… environmental crisis”, Price just wants a plan, though she doesn’t offer one herself. Above all else, Price stresses that saving our home, as daunting as it seems, is achievable through collective action, grit, and a sense of humor.

Milking in the Shadows–a review

Tucked behind the trees and farmhouses dotting rural Wisconsin’s stretching dairy fields lie trailers housing the migrant workers who keep these farms running.

Veracruz, Mexico. Image accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons.

This one of the environments where Julie C. Keller takes readers in her book, Milking in the Shadows: Migrants and Mobility. While often unacknowledged, migrants from the Mexican state of Veracruz are the backbone of Wisconsin’s dairy industry. Keller situates these migrant workers’ experiences in the broader contexts of globalization and migration.

Keller met Vicente, a 52 year-old teacher, in Camotli, Mexico. Vicente thinks he was the first person to travel from Camotli to Wisconsin in 1996. Vicente worked as a milker on a farm in Fairfield, Wisconsin, and when his boss asked him to reach out and see if others from Camotli would like a job, Vicente spread the word. “‘I went out and began to call people, and those people began to call other people, and it went like that, making a chain of information.’”

From her conversations with farmers, Keller learned that in the 1990s and early 2000s farmers also began to have informal conversations amongst themselves about hiring Mexican immigrants. Farmers have gradually spent less time milking cows and teaching workers how to do so; instead, they rely on immigrants to train each other. As dairy farmers have hired more migrant workers, they have been able to grow the size and production of farms. Remaining dairy farms tend to be large and employ immigrant workers (today, 79% of the United States milk supply is produced from farms that employ immigrants).

A former dairy worker named Yurico reflects on his experience as an immigrant dairy worker: “‘Life is beautiful there, but you suffer. You suffer.’” When Keller visited farms, she usually found white workers in indoor offices, and Mexican workers in milking parlors. Immigrants are far more likely to be milkers or pushers; every day, they bring cows to milking parlors, hook them up to milking machines, clean cows and milking machines, and wipe up manure.

It is hard work and often for little pay. Milkers are the lowest paid jobs on dairy farms–the hourly wage in 2014 was about $7.90. Immigrant workers are also more likely to work late night shifts and work overtime, and in Wisconsin, agricultural employers are not legally required to provide overtime pay. When Keller asked Yurico, a former dairy worker, how he felt about the pay, he replied, “‘It’s not much, but how would you do that?… The boss is the one that pays… We have to put up with it… because it’s the boss who pays us and we can’t ask for more pay.”

There is little regulation governing wages, housing, or treatment. Workers often live in run-down trailers provided by their employers. On one farm Keller visited, the trailer bathroom was broken, so workers had to use the office bathroom for months. Living in a trailer on the farm places immigrants closer to their workplace and employers. They are also more likely to work late night or early morning shifts with no overtime pay. Yurico told Keller that his life in Wisconsin was “‘From my job to my room… I was enclosed every day.’”

People migrate for these jobs, despite the conditions and pay, because they don’t have much of a choice. When economic hardships hit Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s, people began to migrate to the United States in order to make money to send home to their families. Falling prices on coffee and corn farms in Mexico in particular led those with agricultural work experience to seek it elsewhere. Since jobs on farms in Wisconsin are less competitive than the other main dairy producing states, such as California and New York, traveling to Wisconsin offered better prospects for a job and an opportunity to support loved ones and future endeavors back home.

The journey that many migrants take is dangerous and difficult. Keller tells the story of Yurico’s border crossing. In 2004, Yurico crossed the border at a remote desert border town, but was detained by border patrol agents. He was taken to a detention center, and then deported to Mexico. Yurico finally found a way to cross the border into southern California, and he made it all the way to Los Angeles where he flew to Chicago from, and took an $800 taxi to Wisconsin.

Yurico’s journey represents the many risks, difficulties, and expenses of a trip across the border. Journeys to work in the dairy industry exist within a larger legacy of immigration policies that institutionalize a demand for cheap and exploitable labor across industries. Keller keeps this history in mind, whether in the kitchens where she sat and drank coffee in Veracruz or in the grassy fields where she wandered and chatted with those currently working in Wisconsin. Her writing highlights that today’s efficiency and quality of Wisconsin dairy is made possible by the laborers that have and continue to be physically and metaphorically pushed to the shadows of individual farms and broader agricultural policies and practices. As Voces de la Frontera, a Milwaukee-based immigrant and labor justice organization, says, “Got milk? Not without immigrants.”

A few years ago, Mamaroneck, New York residents received a letter from the Westchester Land Trust commemorating a generous donation made to conserve a local watershed. The letter highlighted the watershed’s wildlife, its lush vegetation, and conservation value. But what the letter did not mention was the previous caretakers who had stewarded the land for almost 50 years. This inspired storyteller and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney, whose parents helped preserve the land, to write Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors.

Finney’s book, published in 2014, highlights stories of African Americans’ experiences in the natural environment. She unmasks how popular culture commonly excluded African Americans’ participation in environmental protection and environmental-related activities, creating the false impression that African Americans do not care about the environment.

Finney starts the book recounting her experiences growing up on a 12-acre estate of a wealthy Jewish family in Westchester County, where her father was hired as caretaker of the estate. It was this estate that the Westchester Land Trust acquired.  For over 40 years, Finney’s parents tended to the estate. They knew the land better than the landowners. Despite this, Finney and her family were outsiders. “While I came to love what was ‘natural,’ I also discovered that for some folks it wasn’t ‘natural’ for my family or me to be there,” Finney recounts. “We were the only ‘colored’ family living in this area [up until the 1990’s].”

Over time, Finney began to notice how her experiences growing up related to how Americans talked about who belonged in the environmental movement more broadly. Finney looked through 10 years of Outside magazine issues and counted only 103 out of 4,602 pictures that showed African Americans. The few pictures of Black people usually featured Black men in sports and advertisements for athletic shoes, clothing, or automobiles. Meanwhile, white men and women were shown participating in various outdoor activities, such as kayaking. Finney noted that these pictures promoted a view of African Americans as only being able to engage in sports when it comes to outdoor activities.

Finney also shares the stories of Black environmental activists. One of those is John Francis, who walked across the United States from 1971 to 1933 to raise environmental awareness. Remarkably, for 17 of those years, he did not speak. When Francis sought to publish his story, the board of the National Geographic magazine declined because they thought he was, in his words, “a crazy Black person.” Eventually, Francis received an apology from a staff member from National Geographic for their behavior. Finney stresses that National Geographic rejected Francis not because he was crazy, but because he was Black and did not fit the norm of American environmentalism.

Finney’s analysis further explores representations of the American landscape and identity through film. She focuses on popular movies, such as Far and Away, that glorified land ownership. The film is based on the 1880’s and Irish immigrants’ desire to own land in the American West. Finney signals that the film overlooks how, in 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which legalized the violent displacement of thousands of Native Americans in the United States. Finney states that this enabled Euro-American settlers to own land, as seen in the film. Such films construct narratives “about the environment that is deemed at once authentic and universal and that denies the complexity of experiences that nondominant groups have encountered historically.” Finney contends that these narratives hindered engagement of marginalized groups in environmental activities.

According to Finney, these prominent images of “white wilderness” reflect the marginalization of African Americans in environmental organizations. In the early 1900s, the U.S. environmental movement was dominated by white and middle-class environmental organizations. Groups like the Sierra Club paid no attention to African Americans’ environmental concerns. Finney emphasizes that because of the exclusion of African Americans in the early environmental movement, very few African Americans participated in outdoor recreation. Finney points out how racist views of white environmentalists, including John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club, pervaded the U.S. environmental movement. In Muir’s Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he describes African Americans as “lazy” and “unable to pick cotton as well as a white man,” demonstrating his insensitivity toward African Americans.

Finney’s book notably raised awareness on African Americans’ relationship with the natural environment and pushed environmental organizations to think about how they are “building relationships across differences within the organization and [their] own lives.” Since 2014, several organizations have stepped up to increase the diversity of their membership and employees. For example, in July 2020, the Sierra Club released a public statement acknowledging the racist views of its early members and how it strives to undo the harm done. Recently, the Sierra Club elected their first Latino president, Ramón Cruz, and African American Ben Jealous as their new executive director. 

Black Faces, White Spaces urges readers to understand the challenges African Americans faced with the pervasive exclusion of African Americans in the early U.S. environmental movement and how it has influenced present-day interactions with the natural environment. Finney’s book makes clear that African Americans’ environmental perspectives, just as every other group’s perspective of the environment, are legitimate and worthy of recognition too.

Imagine life in a rural town with a beautiful landscape and neighbors that you often interact with. One day, big trucks carrying supplies to install wind turbines enter your town without warning. You’ve heard about the transition to cleaner energy through wind and its potential benefits, but you never expected it would happen in your backyard. How would you feel?

There are many reasons to oppose the transition to wind energy. They include the difficulties of changing our current established energy system, fossil fuels, and the unwillingness of people to shift their views on opinions towards wind turbines.

This is exactly what happened in the rural town of Sereno in Spain. Sereno is the focus of David McDermott Hughes’ book, Who Owns the Wind?: Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy. As an anthropologist, Hughes uses Sereno as a case study in order to explore the complications of transitioning to renewable energy, specifically wind energy. He proposes that the transition to renewable energy is not only a technological transition, but also a social one.

Historically, when energy technology improves and there’s a shift to the new technology, the old technology continues to make a contribution to the overall energy generation. For example, water mills from the early nineteenth century still serve to generate electricity as hydropower in the twenty-first century. However, Hughes states that fossil fuels should not follow this process. Climate change poses a huge threat to everyone and the use of fossil fuels needs to be reduced to zero instead of still contributing to worldwide energy generation. 

Hughes begins The book by explaining wind as a natural, free source of energy. So why haven’t we put it to good use yet? Wind is hard to quantify, unlike coal. It is constantly flowing through space, not buried underground and ready to dig up. It is hard to hold and possess, so how can people own the wind? This is the main question that Hughes brings up in his case study with Sereno. 

Sereno (also called Andalusia) is a small village in rural Spain, with a population of roughly 400 people. Sereno barely existed forty years ago and was gradually built up through a communal cattle trail. However, the lands in Sereno are owned and controlled by the rich who do not live on those lands. With its population, it is too small to have a mayor, too small to have any political structure, and too small to have any leverage and say in what happens to the land. In 2006, Tarifa, a nearby town with a larger population that mainly controls Sereno, installed 250 wind turbines (60-meter blads and 90 meters tall) in the surrounding valley with little to no warning. Hughes follows the journey of this town and listens to the stories from the locals about the process of rejecting, protesting, and eventually surrendering to the turbines.

Hughes arrived in Sereno in 2015, 9 years after the wind farm was finished. He went to El Pollo, a bar where most residents go to hang out at the end of their work day. As he asked about their thoughts on the wind farm in their village, he got many negative comments and stories about what the residents had to go through. As the village is mainly controlled by Tarifa, residents of Sereno barely had any say in the decisions Tarifa made with Sereno. The first pushback – the anti-turbine movement – was led by Angel Monedero, an artist who loves admiring the landscape, and other long-standing residents. As an act of rebellion, Serenenos, residents living in Sereno, drove to Tarifa and blocked the only road to the construction site as part of a “No more turbines” protest. Their efforts failed due to Monedero eventually accepting a bribe to stop the protests and surrender to the turbines. The turbines were installed and even though there was a 500-meter legal limit from houses, it only applied to registered homes, which most of Sereno was not. Some turbines were placed as close as 300 meters.

After this betrayal from Monedero, Sereno was left fractured. As no new leadership rose in Sereno, residents did not believe in each other and thus, the village was unable to make any further moves against the turbines. The employment rate in Sereno stayed high at  40%. Few locals got jobs in the wind industry, which required skills they did not have. Wind farm employees came from outside the village. 

The winners were the landowners like Alejandro Baptista. Although he was hoping to develop a golf course on his land before the turbines, he now collects rent for the land on which four turbines sit. That puts him in a sticky spot with the rest of the residents. Although he collects amounts that are way below what tourism could have made, it is still more than what a Sereno resident can save in a year. 

In the culture of working-class coal communities, sons are sent in after their fathers to work in mines. Daughters are proud to be miners’ daughters. Hughes asks: why can’t wind do the same? With coal mines, there are 37 deaths per terawatt-hour of energy generated; wind only has 1 death per terawatt-hour. So why is being a miner celebrated? Hughes writes ‘the threat of climate change should ennoble turbines” but people don’t feel that saving the world from climate change is a noble act, thus not recognizing that wind power can be seen as heroic.

This deep-engrained perspective that shapes what people consider  “heroic” needs to change. One way is through invoking emotions and telling stories around wind turbines. With Sereno as an example not to be made again, wind turbines should be presented as a good force of change. Instead of describing turbines as just mechanical and lifeless, they should be described as graceful and sustainable. Susan Sontag, a photographer, writes of the photographer’s power to “make the ugly beautiful, the repulsive attractive, and the bland fascinating”. By the late 2010s, Serenenos came to accept the turbines and to consider them a part of their landscape. Diego, a resident that works at a wood-fired grill in Sereno, says the turbine blades make the landscape special. After some years of acceptance, the turbines in Sereno are now seen as sublime, invoking feelings of greatness beyond all possibilities.

Like the sailors who harness the wind, the world should let wind turbines do the same. With this example from Sereno, the views around wind turbines need to be changed. They are not the ugly machines taking up the view of the horizon, but rather, graceful and sustainable energy sources that add to the aesthetic appeal of the horizon. 

So who should be owning the wind?

The answer should be the people. The people living in the areas surrounding the turbines should be able to own the wind. The world should not make the same mistake as they did with Sereno. Shifting to renewable energy is both a technological and social change that must be done together. As a community, people need to be accepting of turbines in order for a successful transition to renewable energy, which starts with getting people to see the positive sides of wind turbines.

Somewhere between the glitz and glamour of The Hunger Games’ Capitol and the cultural explosion of Crazy Rich Asians lies the lifestyle of New Delhi’s elite in The Windfall. 

Diksha Basu’s high-spirited first novel The Windfall follows the Jhas, an unassuming middle-class family from Delhi. Sudden wealth leads the Jhas to purchase a home in a lavish neighbourhood. Their old neighbours are quick to jump to conclusions. They think the Jhas family must be involved with black money real estate and are now evading taxes like the rest of India’s “new-moneyed” elite. The Jhas hardly notice.  They are too busy grappling with the new world of designer tracksuits, Swarovski-studded sofas, and 24-hour instant hot water to concern themselves with their neighbours’ suspicions. 

Basu’s novel exposes us not only to the influence but the culture, of wealth in India.  Before their good fortune, the Jha lived in an old apartment complex populated by East Delhi’s middle-class. They face entirely new value systems and habits in their new house in the luxurious district of Gurgaon. The differences in these areas exemplify an increasingly financially unequal Indian society, where the richest 10% own over 57% of the national income. Consumerism and residential ownership are the unspoken great dividers in this society. 

The Windfall introduces us to India’s uber-rich, whose families are casual large-scale rural landowners, heads of construction businesses, or the owners of mines. They command India’s wealth but desire the offerings of foreign countries. In their luxurious homes, the wealthy try to create ways to ‘forget’ that they are in Delhi. Exotic plants dot their gardens, imported cars crowd their driveways, Sistine Chapel-esque paintings cover their ceilings. This sharply contrasts Basu’s description of the Jhas’ East Delhi apartment, where peeling wallpaper and water damage characterise the building.

In The Windfall, as the residences of Gurgaon’s elite are modernising while the residences of East Delhi deteriorate, the divides of modern Delhi emerge. 

Basu creates an interesting dichotomy between the Jha’s, and other Indian elites’ awareness of societal issues and their complete disregard for how they contribute to them. The mildly corrupt police officials judge the wealthy, struggling artists struggle with nothing but how to best spend their parents’ income, and gossiping housewives scrutinise each other’s homes. 

These judgments have basis: India’s wealth disparity has never been greater, and the country’s art scene is dominated by individuals hailing from generational wealth. Material wealth and consumerism continue to hold value in social standing.  

New Delhi, as the capital of India, has been touted as the nation’s ‘modernist’ city and was built to display architecture and infrastructure to rival prosperous international cities. In The Windfall, Basu takes care to not blame the Gurgaon elite alone for the lack of investment in greater Delhi’s development. As a Eastern Delhi resident notes when looking at Guragaon’s roads and drainage, “Who could blame the Jhas for moving when even the government seemed to prefer this part of town?” 

The Windfall has the dialogue of a gossip column, wittiness of a slapstick comic strip, and the narrative power  of an investigative report. Basu skillfully weaves a tale of class relations and wealth disparities through shifting narratives that form a cohesive whole. Each of these narratives is an exposè about consumerism, social class, or privilege, pushing readers to question how we devote our resources and participate in larger societal issues. The Windfall will make you laugh.  If you let it, it will also challenge you to consider the broader implications of wealth disparity in modern India.

“The most important – and gloomy – scientific discovery of the twentieth century was the extinction crisis.”

Dave Foreman on the Sheenjuk River, Arctic NWR, AK © Nancy Morton

This is the opening statement of Dave Foreman’s 2004 book Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century, a spirited and well-researched rundown of the history of extinction, strategies for rewilding, and how Americans can take action. Foreman demonstrates that environmental work doesn’t end with addressing fossil fuels. Since humans set foot on the continent, North America’s ecosystems have faced novel evolutionary pressures. Rewilding North America focuses on the damage humans caused to North American ecosystems and the paths we can take to correct them.

In this book, the late Dave Foreman confronts the enormously complex issue of the human-caused extinction crisis. It’s a bold undertaking, but if Foreman will be remembered for anything, it is for his unflinching vision. As a co-founder of the radical environmental group Earth First!, Foreman stepped on a lot of toes in the environmental and bureaucratic world. This did not slow him down – except perhaps following his 1990 arrest for conspiracy to commit eco-sabotage – in his pursuit of conserving the American Wilderness.

Despite the title, much of Rewilding North America centers on the ecological depravity of humanity. Much of the book details “the unusually destructive way we have interacted with the world for the last forty thousand years.” Foreman insists that rewilding – restoring land and returning it to wilderness – is fundamentally about human humility and restraint. 

Foreman’s emphasis on human’s negative impacts on biodiversity is likely to alienate more moderate audiences. The history of the extinction crisis takes up nearly half the book. The reader journeys through the bleakest impact of Homo sapiens on the natural world. Human-caused extinctions began 40,000 years ago after humans first left Africa. First among the victims were human’s closest relative, the Neanderthals. Waves of destruction followed, claiming giant ground sloths, huge flightless owls, 24-foot-long Komodo dragons, and 500 lb ostriches.

After this detailed accounting of human’s history of ecological destruction, Foreman offers a measure of hope. Hope comes in the form of science, and with this tool, Foreman departs from his more radical opinions. The scientific tenants of conservation biology ground the remainder of the book. Foreman introduces rewilding as a conservation strategy, drawing on researchers Michael Soule’s and Reed Noss’s ideas about conservation biology. 

Three C’s anchor the explanation of conservation biology: Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. If the greatest challenges to biodiversity conservation are that there is too little protected land, the land is too isolated, and that it cannot support diverse ecosystems, then the three C’s aim to rectify those challenges. Together, they form the building blocks of a wildlife network.

The Four Continental MegaLinkages

Foreman uses the three C’s to outline a plan to rewild North America. He proposes the creation of Four Continental MegaLinkages. These corridors would connect the Pacific, the “Spine of the Continent,” Atlantic, and Arctic-Boreal landscapes. It is a top-down approach to conservation influenced by Foreman’s near obsession with large carnivores.

Large carnivores, like cougars and bears, need huge swaths of land to thrive. If they are protected, the other animals living in their habitat are too. A connected North American wildlands network promises to give the wilderness back to wildlife. Foreman’s plan offers the possibility for humans and wildlife to both thrive.

Foreman is above all things a strategist, and the most valuable knowledge Foreman gives the reader is a guide on how to implement the rewilding strategy. There are a number of pieces to the North American Wildlife Network puzzle. Actions such as reintroducing carnivores, restoring natural fire ecology, and removing barriers to wildlife movement break the extinction crisis solution into many smaller pieces.

These are by no means small feats – accomplishing any of them is a large endeavor. However, these campaigns lie outside of what conservationists usually focus on. Foreman demonstrates that even in a world without climate change, there is much environmental work to be done. His ability to parse the issue into many smaller campaigns makes the movement feel more approachable. 

Rewilding North America is a bold but credible approach to the human-caused extinction crisis. It’s a daunting enterprise, but Foreman gives us the knowledge and tools we need to address wilderness aspects of the extinction crisis. As he says in his conclusion, “it’s all up to you.”

“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing poses this question at the beginning of her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Anthropologist Tsing’s answer is that she goes on a walk.  That is something that I have started to do more during these pandemic times too.

Over the past summer, I’ve taken up foraging on my New England college campus. My guide has been a good friend, who did the same in her year off in Georgia. When we go on walks together, we point out plants and mushrooms and different things we see. Excitement ensues when we find something we know we can eat, like a Chicken of the Woods or a Black Trumpet mushroom. 

Chicken of the Woods (foragerchef.com)

Reading Tsing has given my adventures in foraging new meaning.  

When we forage we become part of what Tsing describes as an “assemblage”. This term is used as a way to give flexibility to the term “ecological community.” 

An ecological community is rigidly defined by its members and place, but an assemblage says that these members can change as they move from place to place, or even pass away. The assemblage expands as mushrooms travel from the place they grow to the hands of foragers and buyers, and ultimately eaters. 

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom, which has become a hot commodity within the framework of our global economy, from its foragers to its gourmets. There matsutake means something different for the Southeast Asian refugee who is foraging mushrooms for a livelihood post-war compared to the white forager who picks without permits, or the Latino forager who picks while living in the forests.

Within the commodity chain of the matsutake mushroom the foraging of the mushroom is not inherently equivalent to economic wealth, but there is a possibility for the commodity to transform into a gift. These mushrooms have both economic and social value based on their cultural significance, but the economic value comes into play with their cost value at gourmet Japanese restaurants. The process of foraging and selling 

Like any good contemporary anthropologist, Tsing artfully and intentionally inserts her voice throughout the chapters in order to give life to the text. She does this especially in the interludes, which explicitly bring in how her views influence her work, such as by describing the smell of the matsutake mushroom. Although she discusses complicated subjects 

The matsutake mushroom is one of the most valuable mushrooms in the world, especially in Japan. I was surprised to learn how the mushrooms of different countries were described as colored differently because of the perceptions of the people who live in those places. To be specific, Tsing mentions that … 

It’s no surprise that The Mushroom at the End of the World was the constant recommendation I received when I first became interested in multispecies ethnography, which are narratives about human and nonhuman interspecies relationships. This book is part of the canon of multispecies ethnography, providing new ways to think about and complicate interspecies relationships. 

The book allowed for me as a student of Anthropology to think about how prominent concepts (like embodiment, capitalism, and participant observation) come into play within a nontraditional ethnographic approach that focuses and centers the human. 

Focusing on the matsutake mushroom at the same level of importance as people exemplifies the fluidity of the “nature” concept as inclusive of the human. Tsing further complicates “nature” with her focus on human-made constructs of capitalism and global trade because of the ways in which they affect interspecies relationships. Within the context of the matsutake mushroom, 

Now, I’ll definitely think a little bit deeper as I spot some mushrooms during my walks in the middle of the woods. I become part of an assemblage by interacting with the beings around me, whether I end up picking the mushrooms I see or not. Just my presence makes a difference.

When my friend and I go on our next walk, I’ll be sure to tell her all about the mushroom lives we walk into and Tsing’s tales of the matsutake mushroom.