Our Readers Write Back
Misanthropic Mistake
Jonathan Boyd (“The Loss of Brown's Woods: A Letter to Scott Russell Sanders,” Winter 2010) errs dangerously when he calls author and environmentalist Sanders a “misanthrope” for addressing human overpopulation in A Conservationist Manifesto. There is no scientific debate of the fact that our population explosion is an ecological disaster. Bloated human numbers are directly responsible for deadly pollution of our air and water, widespread starvation, deforestation, desertification, soil depletion, and the worst species extinctions since the dinosaurs.
No one questions that we are overcrowded. By one estimate, from the University College, London, humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be. No one questions that we are running out of resources. The only debate is how rapidly the situation deteriorates. Does any lover of humanity really want us to reduce this sweet green earth to a place where only we—and our parasites—survive? What is misanthropic is ignoring this disaster in progress—or passing it off as an overzealous environmentalist's imagining.
Sy Montgomery
Hancock, New Hampshire
Jonathan Boyd Responds:
I hope there’s a difference between calling someone a misanthrope and asking whether he considers himself one. Asking is what I did to Scott Russell Sanders, not calling. In fact, “asking” is what we need lots more of when it comes to human population control, and it is for his dearth of questions on this subject that I criticized Sanders.
For instance: Which people, which particular people, would be culled from the population in order to reduce it? (That’s where population control and eugenics have historically tripped up—right there.) Can humans be faulted—yes, morally—for multiplying as all other creatures do? Would it be possible to persuade humans to depopulate, or can only natural forces do that? Let me emphasize, I don’t pose these rhetorically, with answers I regard as obvious. They are real questions. I’m afraid that rhetorical questions have occasionally overrun environmentalist discourse to the point that real ones aren’t always recognized for what they are: actual uncertainties. My disappointment with Sanders is keenest when he treats open questions as closed—or doesn’t even raise them.
Long on Attitude, Short on Books
Your editor’s column, “Great Books for a Planet in Trouble” (Winter 2010), contained a surprising lacuna: books!
While I admire your growing sense of a personal environmental ethic, and appreciate your critical distance from both climate change deniers and annoying activists, the title of your column created a contrary expectation. I thought, for instance, you would perhaps present something of a first-draft hierarchy of great books on the environment, or at least some recommendations of readings that have affected your—or our collective—view of related global problems.
For instance, what of global climate change? Why not recommend or reassess Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance or An Inconvenient Truth? Do Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us still have any relevance?
What of the long history of aesthetic appreciations for our natural environment? Why not reassess Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, or the writings of Emerson, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir? Why not assess the preservation-conservation dichotomy in terms of the best books on each side? Has that traditional tension in environmental history become unproductive?
Like you, I too have conflicted interior reactions to environmental activists—despite having some background in the environmental profession. But books help us sort through our conflicts. If they did not, the world of reading would be a lesser place.
Tim Lacy,
Chicago, Illinois •
