Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic (originally posted November 14, 2013)
Part of the allure of utopian writing originates from how it envisions a seemingly effortless relationship between ideals and their implementation. If we desire a happier and less alienated secular society, for instance, Alain de Botton declared in Religion for Atheists that merely following a handful of his practical recommendations will get us much closer. For readers yearning after a fuller sense of community and belonging, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet offered a variety of soul-benefitting practices, most of them easy enough to schedule into everyday routines.
Outside the comfort of one’s solitary consciousness (and venue of choice), though, such concept-rich and aspirational reading material can lose its heft. Daring to spread word to a skeptic or a pessimist will quickly introduce misgivings about the likelihood of mass-scale utopian change. Just watching a half-hour news broadcast can spawn similar uncertainty.
In a new book with a scope that’s broader than dietary transformation, J.B. MacKinnon’s utopianism plays a crucial—and intermittently troubling—role. As with 100-Mile, the author’s call for radical change registers as compelling and doable on the page. It’s the off-the-page experience that generates moments of doubt.
Developing ecological concerns scattered throughout 2007’s 100-Mile, The Once and Future World gathers together findings, studies, and theories from an impressive array of fields in order to point toward a future of less contained and domesticated nature. Instead of strictly warning about the real possibilities of dystopian scarcity or capitalism-as-usual, MacKinnon invites readers to picture a tomorrow founded on the natural abundance of the remote past.
Before describing the building blocks for this potential transnational greenbelt, MacKinnon surveys the Earth’s past and present. These chapters set up a marked contrast between once-upon-a time ecological wealth—of diversity, fecundity, and systems in balance—and contemporary near-destitution.
In the “As It Is” segments, MacKinnon explains with characteristically sobering and harrowing detail that we live in a “10% world,” which is to say in an environment where the numbers of many, many species have been reduced by 90%. Skeptics may quibble over numbers, but the overall trajectory, plus or minus a trivial percent, seems undeniable.
Counting up “the ways we have wounded the earth quickly starts to feel like stacking skulls in a crypt,” MacKinnon writes, and that paying attention “to the web of life today is to acknowledge that our times are grim almost without relent.” He discusses habitat reduction and elimination, spiking extinction rates, and widespread extirpation, the vanishing of particular species from particular places (e.g., while not extinct, tigers have disappeared from 93% of their original range). And he surveys loss from varying perspectives, from forest to aquatic biomass (i.e., “the total weight of living things—off North America’s east coast may have declined by as much as 97 percent since written records began”). In short: bad news and much blood on collective human hands.
With a time machine out of reach, the “As It Was” bits are necessarily speculative (but supported by reams of credible source material). In them, MacKinnon conjures a wild Edenic place stocked with “the most complete web of life” that appears to have existed until the arrival of human beings. If we want to restore our world, he contends, this era just after the last ice age is the model we should refer to. He depicts lands of awesome marvels defined by teeming populations in a delicate but generally upheld state of equilibrium. In picturing a North America that was home to lions, hyenas, supersized wolves, and long-legged bears, he ably supports his stance on the value of knowing the planet’s ecological history: the “history of nature also takes courage. It calls on us to remember losses, not only in the wild, but within ourselves. The past asks us how, what and why we allow ourselves to forget.”
(Tonally, the calm, reasonable, and meditative persona MacKinnon projects throughout makes for an interesting foil to fuming, adversarial, and pointedly masculine George Monbiot, whose recent Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life suggests Wordsworth via Robert Bly’s Iron John and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. As Kirk-vs-Spock archetypes of environmental activism, Monbiot implies an assertive storm-the-gates approach while MacKinnon appears to find hope via enlightenment resulting from education.)
Word-wise, the sections outlining the earth “As It Could Be” with recollection and rewilding their key concepts are the briefest. They’re evocative nonetheless.
A complex of premises related to memory appear often in MacKinnon’s speculations. Humanity, he claims, suffers from a “long-term pattern of amnesia” and an “adapt-and-forget pattern.” These are in turn tied to what cited sociologist Stanley Cohen calls an “amazing human phenomenon”: denial. As MacKinnon states, denial is “the last line of defense against memory. It helps us to forget what we’d rather not remember, and then forget that we’ve forgotten it, and then resist the temptation to remember.” Our forgetfulness is likewise connected to Daniel Pauly’s “shifting baseline syndrome”: “The crux here is that with each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.” Having forgotten what the abundant past looked like, in other words, we erroneously accept the scarcity we currently see as equivalent to normal and acceptable.
As a species-wide psychological fact, or even as a metaphor, the apparently simple workings of memory (i.e., recalling what has been forgotten) offer a curious and not entirely satisfying explanation for the mess we’re in as well as a means out of it. The mechanisms of this millennia-long forgetfulness—whether of nature or our innate wildness—remains relatively sketchy in MacKinnon’s study; and as a process, remembering (or our species’ collective surfacing from an unfathomably lengthy bout of amnesia) seems too easily accomplished. As a point of contrast, the position taken nearly two decades ago by John A. Livingston in Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication suggested both the origins of the ‘nature problem’ and the enormous difficulty in escaping it. He contended that humanity’s fateful evolutionary leap was a kind of self-domestication that traded wildness and connectedness with the natural world for the “prosthetic” of abstract ideas and technology.
Like Monbiot, MacKinnon also places faith in rewilding. He declares as much—“Ours will be an age of rewilding”—especially since “conservation is not and has never been enough.” Rewilding takes a variety of forms, including familiar ones like “habitecture” (sharing social space with other species, such as with a birdhouse). More challenging is setting aside swathes of land, reintroducing indigenous species, and letting nature takes its course (minus our helping hands). Besides making “new and controversial demands on the way we see the world,” this reintroduction of real nature into our midst could foster a renewed sense of familiarity with our natural selves, or at least slow (and perhaps stop) our “increasingly distant and disconnected” relationship to nature. As a utopian scheme it’s a delight to consider. As a practical feat, however, it’s easier to imagine the “paved paradise” of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”
MacKinnon’s aware of his idealism and that a philosophy of “paying deliberate attention to nature may sound ridiculously old-fashioned.” He also contends that such thinking does not reflect primarily sentimental or spiritual practice so much as a “profoundly realistic one”: it’s a “way of binding ourselves to the simple truth that human beings depend on ecological systems for our survival.” Even so, he acknowledges that humans “can survive—thrive, even—in a degraded natural world,” say a planet converted into nothing but urban sprawl, grids of cropland, and livestock factories. Given the chance to inhabit a fuller, more wondrous sphere, though, he questions why we’d opt for self-made degradation.
“Nature may not be what it was, but it isn’t simply gone. It’s waiting,” MacKinnon writes. For those who perceive the natural world as lawns to trim or pests to spray, his words might reverberate like a threat. But for those enchanted by his admittedly enchanting vision, the words hold promise of a salvation we’d be fools to not consider.
Random House | 272 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0307362186
‘The Once and Future World’ by J.B. MacKinnon
Book Reviews
Part of the allure of utopian writing originates from how it envisions a seemingly effortless relationship between ideals and their implementation. If we desire a happier and less alienated secular society, for instance, Alain de Botton declared in Religion for Atheists that merely following a handful of his practical recommendations will get us much closer. For readers yearning after a fuller sense of community and belonging, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet offered a variety of soul-benefitting practices, most of them easy enough to schedule into everyday routines.
Outside the comfort of one’s solitary consciousness (and venue of choice), though, such concept-rich and aspirational reading material can lose its heft. Daring to spread word to a skeptic or a pessimist will quickly introduce misgivings about the likelihood of mass-scale utopian change. Just watching a half-hour news broadcast can spawn similar uncertainty.
In a new book with a scope that’s broader than dietary transformation, J.B. MacKinnon’s utopianism plays a crucial—and intermittently troubling—role. As with 100-Mile, the author’s call for radical change registers as compelling and doable on the page. It’s the off-the-page experience that generates moments of doubt.
Developing ecological concerns scattered throughout 2007’s 100-Mile, The Once and Future World gathers together findings, studies, and theories from an impressive array of fields in order to point toward a future of less contained and domesticated nature. Instead of strictly warning about the real possibilities of dystopian scarcity or capitalism-as-usual, MacKinnon invites readers to picture a tomorrow founded on the natural abundance of the remote past.
Before describing the building blocks for this potential transnational greenbelt, MacKinnon surveys the Earth’s past and present. These chapters set up a marked contrast between once-upon-a time ecological wealth—of diversity, fecundity, and systems in balance—and contemporary near-destitution.
In the “As It Is” segments, MacKinnon explains with characteristically sobering and harrowing detail that we live in a “10% world,” which is to say in an environment where the numbers of many, many species have been reduced by 90%. Skeptics may quibble over numbers, but the overall trajectory, plus or minus a trivial percent, seems undeniable.
Counting up “the ways we have wounded the earth quickly starts to feel like stacking skulls in a crypt,” MacKinnon writes, and that paying attention “to the web of life today is to acknowledge that our times are grim almost without relent.” He discusses habitat reduction and elimination, spiking extinction rates, and widespread extirpation, the vanishing of particular species from particular places (e.g., while not extinct, tigers have disappeared from 93% of their original range). And he surveys loss from varying perspectives, from forest to aquatic biomass (i.e., “the total weight of living things—off North America’s east coast may have declined by as much as 97 percent since written records began”). In short: bad news and much blood on collective human hands.
With a time machine out of reach, the “As It Was” bits are necessarily speculative (but supported by reams of credible source material). In them, MacKinnon conjures a wild Edenic place stocked with “the most complete web of life” that appears to have existed until the arrival of human beings. If we want to restore our world, he contends, this era just after the last ice age is the model we should refer to. He depicts lands of awesome marvels defined by teeming populations in a delicate but generally upheld state of equilibrium. In picturing a North America that was home to lions, hyenas, supersized wolves, and long-legged bears, he ably supports his stance on the value of knowing the planet’s ecological history: the “history of nature also takes courage. It calls on us to remember losses, not only in the wild, but within ourselves. The past asks us how, what and why we allow ourselves to forget.”
(Tonally, the calm, reasonable, and meditative persona MacKinnon projects throughout makes for an interesting foil to fuming, adversarial, and pointedly masculine George Monbiot, whose recent Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life suggests Wordsworth via Robert Bly’s Iron John and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. As Kirk-vs-Spock archetypes of environmental activism, Monbiot implies an assertive storm-the-gates approach while MacKinnon appears to find hope via enlightenment resulting from education.)
Word-wise, the sections outlining the earth “As It Could Be” with recollection and rewilding their key concepts are the briefest. They’re evocative nonetheless.
A complex of premises related to memory appear often in MacKinnon’s speculations. Humanity, he claims, suffers from a “long-term pattern of amnesia” and an “adapt-and-forget pattern.” These are in turn tied to what cited sociologist Stanley Cohen calls an “amazing human phenomenon”: denial. As MacKinnon states, denial is “the last line of defense against memory. It helps us to forget what we’d rather not remember, and then forget that we’ve forgotten it, and then resist the temptation to remember.” Our forgetfulness is likewise connected to Daniel Pauly’s “shifting baseline syndrome”: “The crux here is that with each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.” Having forgotten what the abundant past looked like, in other words, we erroneously accept the scarcity we currently see as equivalent to normal and acceptable.
As a species-wide psychological fact, or even as a metaphor, the apparently simple workings of memory (i.e., recalling what has been forgotten) offer a curious and not entirely satisfying explanation for the mess we’re in as well as a means out of it. The mechanisms of this millennia-long forgetfulness—whether of nature or our innate wildness—remains relatively sketchy in MacKinnon’s study; and as a process, remembering (or our species’ collective surfacing from an unfathomably lengthy bout of amnesia) seems too easily accomplished. As a point of contrast, the position taken nearly two decades ago by John A. Livingston in Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication suggested both the origins of the ‘nature problem’ and the enormous difficulty in escaping it. He contended that humanity’s fateful evolutionary leap was a kind of self-domestication that traded wildness and connectedness with the natural world for the “prosthetic” of abstract ideas and technology.
Like Monbiot, MacKinnon also places faith in rewilding. He declares as much—“Ours will be an age of rewilding”—especially since “conservation is not and has never been enough.” Rewilding takes a variety of forms, including familiar ones like “habitecture” (sharing social space with other species, such as with a birdhouse). More challenging is setting aside swathes of land, reintroducing indigenous species, and letting nature takes its course (minus our helping hands). Besides making “new and controversial demands on the way we see the world,” this reintroduction of real nature into our midst could foster a renewed sense of familiarity with our natural selves, or at least slow (and perhaps stop) our “increasingly distant and disconnected” relationship to nature. As a utopian scheme it’s a delight to consider. As a practical feat, however, it’s easier to imagine the “paved paradise” of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”
MacKinnon’s aware of his idealism and that a philosophy of “paying deliberate attention to nature may sound ridiculously old-fashioned.” He also contends that such thinking does not reflect primarily sentimental or spiritual practice so much as a “profoundly realistic one”: it’s a “way of binding ourselves to the simple truth that human beings depend on ecological systems for our survival.” Even so, he acknowledges that humans “can survive—thrive, even—in a degraded natural world,” say a planet converted into nothing but urban sprawl, grids of cropland, and livestock factories. Given the chance to inhabit a fuller, more wondrous sphere, though, he questions why we’d opt for self-made degradation.
“Nature may not be what it was, but it isn’t simply gone. It’s waiting,” MacKinnon writes. For those who perceive the natural world as lawns to trim or pests to spray, his words might reverberate like a threat. But for those enchanted by his admittedly enchanting vision, the words hold promise of a salvation we’d be fools to not consider.
Random House | 272 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0307362186