Moby-Dick

Images from leftist artist Rockwell Kent's 1930 illustrated version of Moby-Dick, which was sold through the Book-of-the-Month Club and revived the book's popularity. Kent was asked to do a version of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, but proposed the Melville classic instead. Weirdly enough, the cover of this version did not credit Melville (is Moby-Dick himself the author? V. fitting).

Title: Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851). I read the Penguin Classics edition, introduced by Andrew Delbanco.

Author: Herman Melville, 1819-1891. It's sad to think how early in his life he wrote this amazing book, and how anti-climatically it was received. Melville's first couple of books, which were more conventional adventure stories, got a degree of popular acclaim, but Moby-Dick didn't sit so well with the type of readers who had gone for his more salty (sorry) stuff. Melville saw a revival in the 1920s, spearheaded by the writing of several biographies (Lewis Mumford wrote one in 1929! was there anything the Mum couldn't do?), as well as the belated publication of Billy Budd, Sailor in 1924. See above caption for info about the popular revival of Moby-Dick. There have also been a couple of film version of this book, including one made in 1930 and one in 1956, directed by John Huston and script-written by Ray Bradbury, which I would really like to see.

Some words: This book was totally wasted on seventeen-year-old me the first time I read it. It's a fever dream, it's obsessive, it's beautiful, it's funny and very sad.

I appreciated Andrew Delbanco's introduction for a number of reasons, but I most profited by keeping in mind his comment about the looseness of the narrative form. He writes that there are times in the novel when there's no way that Ishmael can still be the narrator, in the traditional first-person sense, and the reader must give up on wondering "How could Ishmael know what Ahab said to himself in the belowdecks...or what Starbuck said to Ahab in private conversations..." etc.

Forewarned, I pictured the narrative more as Ishmael's scrapbook on the fall of the Pequod, a series of texts, accounts of things he witnessed, reports of his studies, but also things he might have imagined or foreseen or projected. (I suppose you could also look at the book as alternating between first and third person narrators, but I think my way is more fun.)

I kept a list of the different narrative forms that these small texts/chapters took, and I came up with: Dramatic script or soliloquy; affadavit; natural history (these were the chapters on the whale's anatomy, which I thought were hundreds of pages long when I was in high school reading this, but were actually much shorter); adventure story; yarn-within-a-story, a la Heart of Darkness (the chapter on the Town-Ho!); Emersonian essay (the amazing "Whiteness of the Whale"); object study resulting in multiplicity of character perspectives (the chapter in which each character reacts to the doubloon pounded into the mast); and horror story (the appearance of the dead Parsee, lashed to Moby-Dick's back and staring at Ahab, was an indelible image worthy of Poe). This is a very postmodern book, perhaps. I'm sure somebody has written on that.

I am going to forebear to comment too much on the questions of what Moby-Dick means for America or American literature, since I'm pretty sure a couple of the authors I have yet to read will do that, but I am interested to know if anyone has written an ecocritical or animal-studies analysis of the book. The chapter on the possible future extinction of the whale (in which Ishmael points to the buffalo, who, he argues in 1851, are commonly slaughtered without going extinct, as evidence of the whale's similar ability to withstand constant culling - heh) is one candidate for an analysis, but I also kept fixating on how Ishmael constantly points out how ironic it is that the whale lights the scene of his own slaughter. There's something here about the way that the body of the animal is made to betray itself, and how the nineteenth-century character sees this as somehow grotesque yet inevitable.


Also, the entire project of Moby-Dick could be seen as a forced re-marriage of production and consumption; during a time in which whale oil is used to light the ceremonies and celebrations of humanity, Ishmael writes, fewer and fewer humans seem to understand the risks and death involved in the killing of whales (risks and death both for the whales and the humans). The chapters on the floating factory that is the Pequod after a kill point toward a sort of a Jungle for the whaling industry, but with a less activist slant - it seems as though Ishmael simply wants the landlubber to realize the ultimate madness of technological achievement that their desires can stimulate.

In a way, the madness of Ahab is the ultimate extension of an endeavor (whale-hunting) which comes about because of the mad strivings of humanity. Even Starbuck (aka reasonableness/rationality) is unable to stop it. The human bond, as between Ahab and Starbuck, is finally unable to slow down Ahab's mad desires - after Ahab bids Starbuck to come close and "let [him] look into a human eye", which gaze is "better than to gaze upon God" (591), the bond that's created doesn't stop Ahab from continuing, but seems rather to seal Starbuck's fate. The first mate is unable to make a moral stand against Ahab's madness, because he sees Ahab's humanity. So, Melville says, we are all complicit in allowing each other to run amuck with doing and fixing and pushing and achieving.


Other books I've read which analyze this one: In Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current, he points to both Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1938) and the writings of J.N. Reynolds (most prominently the story "Mocha-Dick" [1839]) which he describes as antecedents to Moby-Dick. Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden juxtaposes the chapter in which Ishmael sits on the masthead and meditates on the meaning of life and the dirty, dark production chapters, in order to show the conflict in American life between lofty transcendentalism and the underpinnings of capitalism and material progress.

Vocab words: "puissant" ("possessed of or wielding power"); "poniard" ("a small, slim dagger"); "tierce" ("a third part").

The Unsettling of America

Title: The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977)

Author: Wendell Berry, author of many books: novels, poetry, and essays. Also a longtime resident of northwestern Kentucky, farmer of 125 acres, former teacher of college creative writing, former Stegner Fellow.

My review:

This is a still from the recent documentary King Corn, which was co-made by/costars an alum from my high school, Ian Cheney. In this film, two city-raised kids who have old family roots in agricultural America try to return to Iowa, buy an acre of corn, and live the agdream. Of course, they end up on a tour through all of the technological boondoggles of contemporary monoculture. My favorite moment is when Ian tries to make high fructose corn syrup on his stove, and the process is so complicated that he almost can't do it. The number of friends I have who care a lot about farming (yet, interestingly, don't have farms themselves) is quite large (see, for example, Elanor Starmer's blog), and I am so implicated in this system of thought that reading a book like Unsettling almost felt like overkill. Plus, my conception of Berry's writing came completely from a couple of poems of his I had read and loved in high school, and which were kind of smushy in a latter-day Unitarian earth-love sort of way. (Here's one, "The Peace of Wild Things".)

Unsettling was much more of a jeremiad than I had ever expected, and addressed much deeper issues of National Character (or, more specifically, Modern Character) than I had thought. Berry's thought on technology (broadly defined) and its place in human endeavor goes beyond Luddism or antimodernism (although you could certainly slot him in there - he also really loves the Amish). For Berry, who employs what I would call a heavily Marxist mode of analysis, our "attitude toward work" has caused us to create a Frankensteinian system of technology and impersonal management methods, all designed to distance ourself from our own physical bodies.

As for the structure of the book, which Berry specifically cast as a response to what he saw as "modern or orthodox agriculture" (and remember, this was the 1970s, post-Earl Butz and Green Revolution...), Berry seems to get off with a bang, or three chapters which use the word "crisis" twice in their titles. Then there are more extended meditations on aspects of the crisis, including a chapter, "The Body and the Earth", which seeks to re-place the body in the ecological system and which follows a Carolyn Merchant-esque path in describing the tragic consequences of the divorce of body and soul.

Passages such as this startling one make his point, namely that technology is another method of alienation, leading to increasing enslavement of people and energy. Question: I see his point, but I find it objectionable to compare slavery and, say, modern irrigation systems. Is this direct equivalence, in itself, dehumanizing? Viz: "We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from...Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a n****r: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making n****rs of people, we have ended by making a n****r of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable energies and materials of the world and turned them into jimcrack 'labor-saving devices'. We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds n****rs to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making n****rs of people: we have become each other's n****rs" (12).

Some other potentially objectionable facets of this argument - beyond the comparison between slaves and tractors - include Berry's lament on the divorce of sexuality from childbearing marriages, which he says has destroyed the fabric of community and devalued the sacred act of sex. Pretty heteronormative, and also fairly biologically determinist, which is interesting, because his call for technological limitation is kind of anti-evolutionary. If you think that humans should be fulfilling the family structures their biology "demands" of them, then you also have to accept the human drive for technological improvement and reduction of work. A family structure that reaches beyond the boundaries of the "traditional" procreative one is a creative reimagining of biology, just like Berry's ideal farming structure would be.

All of Berry's critiques stem from the concept of human limitation, which he argues is necessary for our own health, bodily and spiritually speaking. Human limitation, which might involve limiting technology used (a la the Amish) or production itself (a la all previous versions of agriculture before the Green Revolution) is, of course, not a particularly popular concept, with the dominant visions of technocratic elites focused on the "way forward". Because of this, Berry visualizes himself on the "margins" of contemporary agriculture, and maybe also contemporary society, but says that the "margins" are a totally necessary and fruitful contributor to societal planning. (Once again, I wonder why he can't, then, get with the idea of marginal families or family units.)

Reception: I believe my colleague Lisa Powell will be sending me her paper on the reception of this book, so that I can put more in this section. From what I remember of her work, it seemed that Unsettling was the catalyst of a new small-farming movement, and that many new organic/small/local farmers could trace their "awakening" to this book (or, at least, that was her thesis - but then the paper explored the difficulty of pinpointing the origins of a movement or following the influence of a text through said movement - see, for example, Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang and ELF...) More to come on that.


I found this picture of Wendell Berry attached to a fascinating document: a 1976 debate published on NASA's website, in which Berry responded to a contest held for students to plan space settlement colonies. There's a long debate between him and one of the responsible adults. Sample of Berry: "I think you have wandered into a trap - one that is crowded with so many glamorous captives that you think it is some kind of escape. The trap is that a technological 'solution' on the scale of this one is bound to create a whole set of new problems, ramifying ahead of foresight." (See also Markley's Dying Planet on the anti-environmentalism of space colonization.)

Things to follow up on: The 1914 Smith-Lever act created the cooperative extension service. Was there a childhood education component at that point?

Last Child in the Woods

Image of schoolchildren pulling carrots comes from the website of The Edible Schoolyard, a school-garden project in Berkeley, spearheaded by Alice Waters. Caption: "'The garden looks beautiful, it smells great, it tastes like heaven, the sounds are very calming, and the feel of the plants is wonderful.' - Emily, 6th Grade". The emphasis on the multi-layered sensual experience echoes Louv's ideas about the ways that plants or the outdoors could calm children with ADHD or other behavorial disorders.

Title: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005)

Author: Richard Louv, journalist, columnist for the San Diego Union-Trib. Chairman of an org. called The Children and Nature Network. Author of other books about childhood and general life in America: Web of Life: Weaving the Values that Sustain Us (1998); 101 Things You Can Do For Our Children's Future (1993); and Childhood's Future (1992).

My review:

It's a difficult thing to read a book whose premises you fundamentally agree with, but whose presentation elides nuance and is ahistorical and alarmist. (Reminds me of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11" - ugh.) Yes, I do agree that kids spend too much time indoors playing video games; that it is a terrible thing that communities have little space for children to play in; that it sucks that parents are too afraid to let kids bike around by themselves, so they rein them in with cell phones and GPS devices or don't let them out at all; that it's bogus that science education seems not to foster a generalized love of the outdoors, instead directing children toward specialized technological achievement. But Louv's discussion of these matters relies so heavily on anecdote, and on fear, that I find myself picking holes in it almost against my will (and not just because I think Louv's characterization of the problem as "nature deficit disorder" is fundamentally opportunist - the man wanted to sell books, or his editor did, anyway).

A great kid-in-nature tome of earlier years: Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909).

In many ways, Louv's central concerns are very similar to those of Progressive-era educational thinkers such as John Dewey (who he references on p 65, on the virtues of primary experience) and G. Stanley Hall (who idealized his own farm-based upbringing). Louv's book is mostly free from the nastier racial implications of the late nineteenth-century anxiety re: "overcivilization" and degeneration (nobody back then ever seemed to worry about whether black sharecroppers' kids in the South were becoming proper men - all that anxiety was reserved for cream-of-the-crop white children). However, Louv sometimes seems to assume that the standard-issue "kid" is a white suburban one. There are a couple mentions of the problem of equal access to natural areas, and a few interviews with black or Latino kids who come back from wilderness-ed programs fundamentally changed, but they feel like gestures.

Teddy Roosevelt had Louv-like fears a hundred years before Louv louved. Here he is, at about the age when "Teedie" would have started discovering his affinity for the outdoors - a lifelong affection he credited for his vitality and right-thinkingness. See his "The Strenuous Life" for more.

Although Louv does not prescribe the benefits of Outside as a tonic for race regeneration, he does focus on the benefits - a very androcentric approach, which totally ignores a deep-ecology or biocentric POV. Humans, and human kids, are what matters here, not the environment per se. I'll go into pick-apart mode here: Louv is basically arguing that human kids will become stronger, more mentally acute, be cured of behavior problems, and probably get better grades and better scores on their SATs, if they go wander into a forest every once in a while. Will driven middle-class parents everywhere now begin scheduling in nature-time for their little babies, to give them every advantage in the race for success? If it doesn't "work", will they stop? Is this any way to create a new environmental paradigm?

Louv's book touches on very complex contemporary environmental issues, such as whether or not religious groups will embrace a movement which they see as embodying some animistic pagan qualities (292) and even cites Jennifer Wolch's idea of the "zoopolis", or the new interpolation of wildlife and natural growth into the city. But his fundamental stance seems unprepared to grapple with the implications of the scope of the topic.

The questions I see arising here include the most basic ones about the aim of our society, including whether or not we believe in equal economic rights (and thus, access to nature) for all children; whether technological education and environmental education can ever go hand in hand; whether we are willing to control capitalism (in the form of development) in order to create an environmentally aware society; and whether the system of labor and settlement brought about by advanced capitalism can be amended so that humans continue to get a good dose of "nature time" when they are young - and whether these humans will be able to maintain their contact with nature once they are working full-time, as are the parents reading this book, or whether they will be so straitened with the need to earn a living that they will not be able to do so. The alienation of childhood from the natural world is not the problem. This is a symptom of the way society is going today, and as such, will not be "fixed" in and of itself, but needs to be viewed as a part of a constellation of larger issues around environmental ethics and human rights.

Caption text from article by Michael B. Smith, "The Ego Ideal of 'The Good Camper' and the Nature of Summer Camp", Environmental History, January 2006 (link): "Boys at Camp Dudley, the first YMCA camp in the country, learn the finer points of axmanship, a skill intended to reconnect them with both nature and the "good life" of their frontier forbearers. As critics of this romantic construction of both nature and American history would later point out, learning to use an ax did not in itself prepare children very well for life in a modern city or suburb. (Courtesy of the YMCA of the USA and the Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.)"

Books to follow up on:

The American Boys' Handy Book, written by Daniel Carter Beard (of the Boy Scouts) at the turn of the century, was reissued in a centennial edition in 2003 - a circumstance I find fascinating.

Eva, my friend who teaches elementary school, recommended this one. Which reminds me that Eva; my sister Sarah, who teaches pre-K kids; and my friend Mira, who is considering going into environmental education, are all intensely concerned about the issues Louv brings up. But Eva and Sarah are criminally underpaid, and Mira will be, if she goes through with her plan. Are Americans ready to consider environmental education as something CENTRAL to childhood, not a frill to be cut as soon as the budget gets tight? If they aren't ready, why? Is it because we still think of it as something that should take place organically (ha), in the bosom of the family (or in the backyard of the family, rather), like it used to? And if it doesn't take place organically, is it still as effective? Can a kid "discover" something s/he has been pointed towards?

Sand County Almanac

Title: A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949)

Author: Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948, who formed an important part of the early conservation movement. A transitional figure, Leopold first worked in the US Forest Service during a time when activities such as killing wolves on sight were accepted and encouraged - a much more drastic, human-oriented management style.

"I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not the creel, but my memory. Like the whitethroats, I had forgotten it would ever again be aught but morning on the Fork." (40)

By the end of his life, Leopold had come around to a more biocentric environmental ethic, as showcased in this book. He was involved in the founding of the Wilderness Society in 1935. Leopold taught at University of Wisconsin, Madison as a professor of game management from 1933 through the time of his death. He lived in Madison during the week and on the farm described in the book on the weekends. He died while fighting a brush fire on a neighbor's farm. Two of his sons, Luna Leopold and A. Starker Leopold, were also scientists notable for their conservation efforts.

Basic characterization: The book consists of a series of essays concerning biotic life on the Wisconsin farm owned by AL's family. They manifest a deep love of these "wild things", and question the "progress" which strips them from the land - not only on the basis of their inherent right to live, but also on the basis of the right of what he sees as the biophilic minority of humanity ("for us...the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech" [vii]). The essays manifest a strong critique of the ways of modern society, which Leopold likens to "a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy" (ix).

Leopold at work.

Things that surprised me, or that I liked, or would follow up on:

Leopold's emphasis on the transnational nature of biotic life ("the international commerce of geese") (23).

The characterization of the prairie settler as another kind of "animal" - Coleman makes the same move in his description of the conflicts between wolf and man (29).

AL's constant emphasis on the insufficience of biological /historical/botanical education, when it comes to creating an ecologically aware and ethical citizenry (46, 207). Meanwhile, ETHICS is his main bag: he believes that the "extension of ethics" to the land is "an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity" (203, also 214).

What makes a conservationist, he writes, "is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop" (68) - all about stewardship and domain.

His own sort of conflicted, maybe-elitist relationship with his desire to see nature: "All conservation of wildness is self defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish" (101).

His idea that subversion of evolutionary rules is what renders us human/better (spoken on the topic of his sadness about the passing of the passenger pigeon): "For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn our loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont's nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush's bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts" (110). My question: can you feel yourself to be superior, and still subvert your needs to those of the "beasts"? If you set yourself up over them, do you risk not caring? (See Matthew Scully, Dominion.)

Telling the story of a lightning storm that almost got him while he was in New Mexico in his youth, Leopold ends with: "It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear" (126). A direct hit at FDR?

He writes much on the incapicity of "recreational areas" to develop habits of perception - yet he advocated their creation (esp. p 174-5). Solution: he wants us to experience wild life unmitigated by "machinery" - processed only by "modern mentality" (187). Snowmobiles in Y'stone, take that.

On the gap between concepts of scientific power and actual ability of scientists to "manage" the environment: "The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully understood" (205).

Vocab words: "pasque" ("a spring-flowering herbaceous plant, Pulsatilla vulgaris [family Ranunculaceae], with finely divided leaves and purple bell-shaped flowers clothed externally with silky hairs, found locally on calcareous grassland in Europe. Also: any of various similar Eurasian and North American plants of the genus Pulsatilla [formerly, and sometimes still, included in Anemone]; esp. P. patens var. multifida of North America (also called prairie crocus, prairie smoke"); "precocial" ("of an animal, esp a bird: able to move about and feed independently soon after hatching or birth; having young which are able to do this"); "anserine" ("of, pertaining to, or of the nature of a goose"); "tyro" ("a beginner or learner in anything; one who is learning or who has mastered the rudiments only of any branch of knowledge; a novice").

The pasque flower.

Books I've read that mention it: Coleman, Vicious (use of the "Thinking Like a Mountain" wolf anecdote).

Population Bomb

Title: The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968)

Author: Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, president of the Center for Conservation Biology, and professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He's called himself "an unusual academy specimen," due to his "having had only one tenure-track job (Stanford), which I've held for 44 of my 72 years." He has written widely, both biological/scientific work and more popular environmental nonfiction. A recent book of the latter ilk, written with Anne Ehrlich, was titled One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (2004).

Argument/structure: Every bit of enviromental immiseration we complain about is being brought on us by a simple problem: people have too many kids. Food shortages; water shortages ("By 1984, the US will be dying of thirst", Ehrlich proclaims [97]); "psychic" problems caused by overcrowding (64); an overreliance on dangerous methods of environmental engineering (pesticides, etc)—all of these stem directly from our insistence on having as many offspring as we damn well please. This insistence is tied up with ideologies of continual material progress and technological optimism (i.e., "if we could just figure out a way to do it, the United States could feed the world!")

Ehrlich sees his project as a fundamentally humanitarian one: if fewer people are born, fewer people will starve (the front of the book reads, scarily: "While you are reading these words, four people will have died from starvation - most of them children"). His book is prescriptive, offering examples of letters which the reader could use as models of political action (readers are told to send letters to congressmen urging them to support programs limiting population growth; send letters to the Catholic Church asking them to change their anti-contraception policy; send letters to television networks requesting that programs glorifying families with large numbers of children not be aired).

Most interesting of all to me is Ehrlich's insistence that we cannot use the ideology of free choice to justify bearing a large number of children. The concept of "family planning" comes in for an amount of scorn, because in the end, Ehrlich argues, it tends to continue to produce an inordinate number of children. Ehrlich believes that the government should a) include abortion in the range of options considered to be valid "family planning" and b) fund the entire range of "planning" programs, once they are modified to include abortion, at a much higher level. It's interesting that Ehrlich does not come right out and say that government should require people to have fewer children, but he does seem to be pointing in that general direction.

At the end of the book, Ehrlich compares the problem of population growth to cancer, writing "I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone." His best-case scenario involves a "die-off" of millions of people, combined with good governmental management which saves the optimum number for future carrying capacity of the earth. This can sound incredibly brutal, and critics of the book have pointed that out (including Betsy Hartmann, who, Wiki writes, applied a feminist critique to the argument in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control & Contraceptive Choice [1987]).

So this is an illo I found doing a Google Image search for "Population Bomb". It's by a retired geologist named John Holden, whose drawings all seem to have some kind of intimate engagement with the kind of science that speculates about possibilities. I want to buy some, but in the meantime, this will have to do, I suppose. I wish I knew more about the popularization of the Population Bomb concept - I can think of a but a couple of random cultural examples, including the movie Zardoz (1974), in which an elite technocratic class incites the underclass to kill each other instead of breeding, in hopes of controlling their demographics.

Books I've read which cite it: Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life. Buell argues that Ehrlich's alarmism about the population crisis ended up doing the environmental movement more harm than good, because when it didn't all come true, people were reaffirmed in their fundamental belief that nothing was really wrong at all. (Here is an article by Gary Becker, economist, who points out that while populations have not had the immediate dire effects that Ehrlich predicted, the trend in recent years has been toward low population growth in rich countries and high growth in developing countries - a trend which Becker suggests could be reversed by immigration policies, were this not politically unfashionable.)

Buell also points out that the first bit of Ehrlich's book, in which he leaves a hotel in India with his wife and very sensibly singular daughter and is plunged into a mass of teeming humanity, can be read as being very anti-developing country (or almost racist - see Hartmann's critique, cited before). Why use Calcutta as a paragon of overpopulation, when American examples might be called into play?

According to Wikipedia, the book was included on several "Worst Books of the Century" lists by conservative groups (though of course, Origin of Species and Silent Spring showed up on these as well, so, as they say, whatever).

Ehrlich argued in an article published by Grist in 2004 that although many of his dire predictions did not come true, the bulk of his warnings have held: "Some things I predicted have not come to pass. For instance, starvation has been less extensive than I (or rather the agriculturalists I consulted) expected. But it's still horrific, with some 600 million people very hungry and billions under- or malnourished. What I predicted about disease and climate change was essentially right on. And of course the movement the 'bomb' helped to fuel softened some of the impacts. Many people said not to worry - that marvelous technological fixes would make it possible to take wonderful care of even 5 billion people. We now have 6.3 - you judge how well technology is doing. Bottom line: substantial criticism, little embarrassment."

Leads to follow up on: There's more in here about supersonic transport (SST), which Lindbergh rallied against in his later years, and about which I know little. An activist handbook to the issue, advertised in the beginning of Pop Bomb: William Shurcliff, SST and Sonic Boom Handbook. The problem was also mentioned on pp 60 and 128. On p 21, Ehrlich addresses the question of space colonization as a solution to surplus population, citing Garrett Hardin as one who has studied the question and found that we would fill up the remaining planets in the solar system too quickly to make the solution work. On p 62, Ehrlich cites a New York Times article about Russian conservationists' efforts to save Lake Baikal. On p 103, Ehrlich writes that there was an effort underway when the book was published to cultivate protein-rich molecules of food on petroleum - an effort which, Ehrlich says, had not been fully proven to be useful. Whatever happened to that? On p 126, Ehrlich writes that pesticides were directly associated with anticommunism by people in the Agricultural Chemical Association, in 1964, as a riposte to the environmentalist claims that pesticides were killing off fish populations.

Dominion

Title: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin's, 2002)

Author: Matthew Scully, who, in an alternate universe, used to be a "special assistant and senior speechwriter" for George W. Bush. That George W. Bush. Apparently he wrote the post-9.11 presidential addresses - and, what's more, is proud of that fact. He's also involved with the National Review, and writes for other pubs including the NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ.

Argument: Arguing from Scripture, Scully holds that because God put humans in "dominion" over the non-human world, we are obligated to exercise "stewardship". This means that we must not treat animals as though they are there for our pleasure and our pleasure alone. Scully believes that our motivations towards animals could be called "love", and that this speaks well of our humanity - and that cruel actions toward animals, on the other hand, indicate that some part of our morality has been lost. (This is very similar to the arguments of early animal rights activists, who thought that animal cruelty would lead a human down the road to worse and worse crimes against their own Christian nature.) Scully sometimes veers close to making a critique of consumer culture and capitalism as a whole (!), but always somehow steers clear.

Chapter-by-chapter:
The Things That Are: An exploration of the phenomenon of fellow-feeling between men and animals. Scully looks back at previous Christian thinkers who have spoken out against cruelty, and wonders why today's church doesn't have a stance on the issue. In a section called "Practical Ethics", he points out that "traditional" animal rights activists seek to place animals on a level with humans, but that his own thought is based on the idea that animals are "less" than humans - weaker, more vulnerable - but that this must require more care from us for their welfare, not less. He then makes the case for his inclusion of farm animals in the book (even though, as he says, he feels like it'll lose him readers). Looking at animals and deciding "right action" toward them, he says, "requires discernment and care and humility before Creation...it means understanding that habits are not always needs, traditions are not eternal laws, and the fur salon, kitchen table, or Churchill Room are not the center of the moral universe" (45). In other words, refraining from animal cruelty is, for him, an act of rational morality.

The Shooting Field: Scully gains access to safari club conventions, and interviews several safari club outfits and patrons. (This is a good example of a reporting situation in which I bet it really helped to have the Republican connections and credentials.) Lots of details about the fetishization of particular animals, the masculine society, the money it costs, the videos they watch of "greatest charges" or "chases", etc. Scully goes OFF on the "canned hunts", in which animals who are fenced in and unable to get away are shot. Describing one patron of the canned hunts, Scully writes, "These are his needs, his demands as a paying customer, and of course all things of the earth must be reordered to meet them - whatever creature Ray Baxter desires located, seized, trucked to Arkansas, and brought before him for a quick and convenient shot" (65). This is one of those places where Scully is almost, almost, almost anticapitalist. Sort of. I like the way Scully ends the chapter by interviewing professional hunters - the men who take the customers out, find the animals, and arrange the kill.

Matters of Consequence: Returning to "the beginning" (this he means biblically), Scully looks at the concept of "dominion" and asks "where on earth they [the people at the Safari Club, etc] got this idea of dominion as a relentless, merciless merchandising and pillaging of our forests and their inhabitants" (90). Scully faces right up to the inherent contradiction of his being a conservative who supports animal rights, saying "habits, customs, and impulses, just because they are ancient, are not necessarily venerable" (doesn't sound very conservative to me!) (101)

Riches of the Sea: What better place to explore the ethics of "resource harvesting" than when it comes to fishing? Whaling is where Scully focuses most of his energy here, going into International Whaling Commission business and into issues of indigenous whale hunting rights (he's not for them). But he also has some interesting things to say about the WTO, which he writes creates a "kind of mania" for fair trade, which becomes "not just a good but the highest good", stripping us of our ability to have moral standards (184). Yeah, it does.

The Laws: Here Scully looks at the current research on animal "thinking" and "feeling", asking how, if at all, this research has an impact on our understanding of what animal cruelty laws should entail (for he now believes that our system of laws doesn't go far enough, because as it is, "the creatures under our dominion thus inhabit a moral void of subjective human desires and situational ethics" [192]). Some theorists of animal intellect, like Stephen Budiansky, are actively trying, according to Scully, to prove that animals can't think, and therefore that we should not have laws to keep them from being killed. "I am not sure which is the worse evil, the kill or the theory," he writes (229).

Deliver Me From My Necessities: Here we have an unusual thing: Scully actually manages to get inside a pig farm in North Carolina, where he writes vividly about the physical experience of entering the place where all the pigs are kept, and also about the people he meets who work in the industry ("Gay embodies in her ample frame all of humanity's contradictions about animals, capable of touching solicitude one moment and staggering disregard the next" [266]).

Nature and Nature's God and Justice and Mercy: "When our own fundamental interests are at stake, in short, and our suffering in the balance, we are moral absolutists, and with animals and their suffering we are moral relativists," Scully writes, pointing out the hypocrisy of humanity in his final appeal to change (298). He writes that if we need to find a moral basis for defining our approach to animals, we should look at the plan of "the nature of things" for a guide, striving not to transgress against what would seem to be the program of each organism by torturing it into a "machine of our own invention" (303). "For me," he writes, "it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer" (325).

Reviews: The book won the PETA award for "Book of the Year", after it came out, though this fact is not on the book jacket! Positive reviews have come from a motley crue, everybody from Michael Pollan to Christopher Hitchens to Peter Singer to Charles Colson.

The Jungle

Title: The Jungle (1906) (I read the Enriched Classic edition by Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster, pub. 2004)

Author: Upton Sinclair, who was only 28 when this book was published. He had spent two months in Packingtown in Chicago doing research, in 1904 (citation). The book was turned down by five different publishers before finding one willing to commit. The success of The Jungle was career-establishing for him, but no other book that he wrote gained equal popular success. He did win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon's Teeth, about the Fascist takeover of Germany, in 1943.

Sinclair was a politician as well as an author, running for several offices on Socialist tickets, finally almost winning the governor's office in California in 1934 while running on the "EPIC" ticket ("End Poverty in California").

Some random facts: Sinclair was, perhaps not unexpectedly, friends with Jack London. His 1927 book Oil!, about the effects of an oil strike on a small Texas town, is being made into a movie filmed partially in Marfa, dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson and due out at the end of this year. Sinclair is also the source of the bon mot "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it".

Plot: Jurgus Rudkis, an optimistic young Lithuanian, emigrates to Chicago with his fiancee Ona and a large number of her extended family members. The book chronicles his systematic degradation at the hands of the Chicago stockyard system, and later rebirth as a member of the Socialist party.

The degradation, or, as Jurgus finally realizes, "soul-death" of immigrant workers (375), could be illustrated by the fates of Jurgus' various family members. Ona expires in childbirth, after the family cannot afford a proper doctor (and after she has worked herself into "womb troubles" by not taking enough time off after a previous birth [134]). Jurgus' elderly father Antanas dies after he takes a job in a dark basement, standing in acidic effluvia from the production of meat products (this is the only job he can get, as a less-than-perfect physical specimen). Jurgus and Ona's son Antanas drowns when he falls into a cesspool on the street (the sidewalk is elevated above the water-filled, potholed thoroughfare, which was supposed to be paved over, but wasn't, due to the corruption of public officials), but not before he's suffered from an untreated bout of measles, allowed to run its course for lack of money to buy a doctor's visit (171). Stanislovas, one of Ona's half-siblings, is literally eaten to death by rats after he is shut in to the factory where he works overnight (354). Ona's other half-siblings, unnamed in the narrative, take jobs as newsboys/girls, trying to make money for the family, but living on the street renders them intractable and corrupted. Ona's cousin Marija, originally a strong and unbreakable woman, becomes a prostitute in order to support the family, and develops a morphine addiction in order to deal with her situation. And finally, Teta Elzbieta, Ona's stepmother, reacts to all of this disaster by caring only about getting food, and losing all of her other motivations - perhaps the ultimate example of dehumanization.


Jurgus himself goes from a just-emigrated innocent, who believes in "work will set you free" (whenever anything goes wrong, he says "I will work harder" [23]); to, after injuring himself and losing his "place" (job), a frustrated alcoholic; to, after Ona is seduced by her boss, a raging animal, lashing out violently at the perpetrator; to a hobo, abandoning his family after the deaths of Ona and baby Antanas; to a criminal participant in the system of corruption, even going so far as to work as a scab during a strike; to, finally, a Socialist, with his soul restored by learning the "truth" of the system of labor that employs him.

It's unclear how exactly the play advertised would re-cast this story as "wonderful", but maybe they mean "wonderful" in the "awe-inspiring" sense.

Various descriptions of the physical ecology of Packingtown serve as a background to the story and to play up the corruption Sinclair sees as attendant to the entire system. See page 32-3 for a physical description of the stockyards; page 37 for the description of the land upon which Packingtown is built, which is literally made out of trash; page 116 for a description of "Bubbly Creek," a tributary that runs through Packingtown and literally boils over with pollution; page 417 for the Socialists' view of environmental management for ultimate human efficiency and freedom (cf. Bryson's chapter on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who Sinclair's character cites as an authority on these issues).

Long passages describe the unhealthiness of the meat, I think in order to point out the inherent corruption in the system (if your food is corrupt, it hits mighty close to the bone). See page 43 for the initial explanation that the companies "use everything of the hog but the squeal"; page 93 for descriptions of the spoiled food that the children of Packingtown eat; page 119-20 for descriptions of what goes into the canned meat; page 167 for descriptions of the sausage making process (Sinclair: "This is no fairy story and no joke"); page 385, on which a Socialist compares the situation of workers to that of the hogs; and page 413, on which a Socialist catalogs the systemic costs of adulterated food.

Major themes: Socialism. Labor. Progressivism. Reform movements. Corruption. Food. Factories. Dehumanization. Immigration. Environmental degradation. Prostitution. Drug abuse. Political machines. Class.

Reception: Sinclair famously said, "I aimed for the nation's heart and hit them in the stomach" - in other words, people were far more willing to consider the possible danger to their own food supply, than to empathize with the plight of immigrant workers exploited by a capitalist system. After reading an advance copy of the book, TR was "sickened", and called on Congress to establish tougher meat-packing standards. The book was eventually the major impetus for the establishment of the FDA. Supposedly TR coined the term "muckrakers" to describe Sinclair and other journalists who took on similarly controversial subjects in an effort to expose corruption and abuse.

Meat inspection was upped after the publication of The Jungle.

Books I've read that cover it: Jacobson - Barbarian Virtues; Adams - The Sexual Politics of Meat.