This is a book by a tall skinny guy with a goofy warm
smile who took “a long walk across America’s most hopeful
landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s
Adirondacks.” Along the way, he meets up with old friends, many of
whom also seem to be tall skinny guys with goofy warm smiles, who
walk a ways with him. Their conversations form the basis of this
hopeful book, as relevant to the West as it is to the East, from a
guy we generally associate with gloomy predictions.
Bill
McKibben is best known for The End of Nature.
Published in 1989, that well-reasoned work uses global warming as
the ultimate evidence that humans are taking over the operations of
nature in a haphazard, unconscious and ultimately destructive way.
Wandering Home is McKibben’s own
“hope against hope” answer to the “clanging finality” of his
End of Nature argument. He leads us through a
post-urban landscape of people making creative efforts to live more
intelligently on earth, including the students who started
Middlebury College Organic Garden with dreams of feeding the
college, and a winemaker grappling with the problems of local
organic production when the global agribusinesses have started to
exploit “organic.”
A key passage is McKibben’s
reflection on the slightly unlikely friendship between Wendell
Berry and Ed Abbey — the one “nearly solemn in his writing,”
the other “wildly and rudely funny,” but both bound together by
“the sense that they each held part of the puzzle: the
iconoclastic, individualistic, rebellious defense of the wild as
necessary for our sanity; the communalistic, enduring defense of
the pastoral as necessary for our culture.”
Wandering Home is a good backpack book
(hardbound but small) for those trips when you aren’t out to
conquer the wilderness, but to seek there the wildness “necessary
for our sanity” from which we can look back to think more clearly
on what might be “necessary for our culture.” We need somebody
— maybe everybody — to make this kind of hike here in
the Rockies, and in the Sierra, and in the Bitterroots.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A long walk into hope.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
