While waiting for new tires for my car, I dropped into a used bookstore that is going out of business. Twenty-five cents a book!
And so I picked up a bunch of enviro classics: an old book by Paul Hawken where Paul looks like a very young Preppy from the early 80's; A couple copies of A Sand County Almanac; some old Sierra Club books on wilderness (from those halcyon days of the early 70's) written by David Brower. And the book above on taking a daily walk by a naturalist I've never heard of before. This is a guy who wrote about taking a daily walk in 1978.
I guess I'm not original. Different generations strike the same themes all over again. Ed Abbey borrows from Joseph Wood Krutch who borrowed from Thoreau. In a sense, there is nothing wrong with that. The classics need to be updated for ever newer generations.
Waiting for the car to be fixed, I opened A Sand County Almanac and read how Aldo Leopold despised consumerism. In 1948. Geese, give me the problems of 1948 instead of the ones of 2011. What would Aldo think now?
1 comment:
I do love used bookstores! Some awesome finds there.
Aldo Leopold would be disgusted and frightened if he were alive today...obviously. He would be a loud and consistent voice in defense of the wilderness. And the right wing machine would call him a wacko environmentalist, a socialist, a tree-hugger, a radical, and possibly even anti - American.
And in the name calling they would miss out on what he truly was, an iconoclast and an environmental philosopher who understood ecology from the standpoint of the ideas that he practiced in his daily life!
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