Jedediah Purdy

Jed Purdy reviews American perceptions of their country, their relationship to the land, and how modern environmental laws conflict with earlier laws based on the settlement mentality and the use of public lands at a time when changes to the biosphere are changing more rapidly than they have ever. And from our perspective, they are changing for the worst.

One of the most striking observations of American polity in the book comes from the French traveller and writer Alexis de Tocqueville.

Tocqueville arrived at 3pm of a hot summer afternoon in the largely French village of Detroit in 1831.

He didn’t find the locals very welcoming or at all in awe of the wilderness beyond their village. Not surprising given how difficult and dangerous frontier life was in those days.

“Tocqueville’s intuition was that Americans’ isolation from one another, their evasion from their own warm and passionate energies, and their relentless, muscular, but cold-blooded struggle with nature were parts of a coherent outlook, which would foster both wealth and devastation.”

The author disagrees with Tocqueville’s observation. He didn’t think the outlook was necessarily coherent.

Based on my own observation of how Michigan residents reacted to COVID regulations I would have to agree with the author on this one.

Any American initiatives to deal effectively with climate change will come up against the accretion of laws and precedents to protect the sanctity of private property. Laws made at different times and law cases adjudicated by judges with different biases reflect different currents of thought in the community.

The current crisis of ecology is as political as the crisis in economics and government.

It’s what I have called the problem of inertia in government and I believe it could prevent Americans from ever ratifying a supra-national authority on any environmental matters to an international agreement or adjudicating body.

If there is any serious flaw in this timely book it is the sense of a parochial examination of the environmental catastrophe enveloping us. Climate change will not be an American issue, nor a Canadian, or Chinese. The laws this book examines arise out of intra-American conflict. He isn't necessarily wrong, but the argument feels a little cramped.

The author justly points out that climate change is not something to manage: it's something to get used to and to plan for. Humankind adjusted the global environment. And as we know from other scholarship, changes to the landscape began right at the dawn of homo sapiens, if not earlier. Now the changes are accelerating whether we like it or not. Nature doesn't approve or disapprove. Species are dying quietly. Coral is dying quietly. Humans stand to lose so much. So quickly.… (mere)

Deserving of a re-read. Purdy always manages to render, with much more clarity and breadth, many of my own thoughts. I will say this book left me a tiny bit confused at the end, as it became more prescriptive --in a very gentle way-- than descriptive. I guess I was just not expecting that, and it seemed a bit of a sudden turn.

That said, when all is said in done, he made a strong case for addressing issues of today with a wide open mind and great respect. As always with Purdy, a good read; better yet, something worth rereading.… (mere)

A difficult, but rewarding book that is worth the time and effort required to understand. The bulk of the book is a necessary analysis of the history of the environmental movement --Thoreau, T. Roosevelt, Muir, The Sierra Club and others. The concluding chapters are an analysis of where we can go from here and ways in which we can reshape our thoughts about the environment by understanding that we are inevitably changing the world around us. The author's style is somewhat convoluted, but becomes more decipherable when you notice that the final sentence of a paragraph is often like a topic sentence for the following paragraph.… (mere)