More on Good Reads

Time for a confession and a repetition of the thing I'm confessing to. In a recent post, I ranted about the book I was reading at the time, Travels in the greater Yellowstone. Here I vented about the author's condescending and seemingly overly simplistic view toward environmentalism and ecology. Well, as it turns out, as the book continues, Turner's views become more nuanced, to the extent that, in the final chapters, he admits to a certain level of hypocrisy, some of which mirrors the critiques I made in my entry. So i came away from the book with a pretty positive impression of Jack Turner, as well as a resolve to not make hasty judgements about books or authors before I have sufficient evidence before me.

Now to forget that resolution entirely...

My new read is Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an account of her family's one-year project to produce their own food and get off the grid, food-wise. Now, I've read a fair amount of Kingsolver's work (I recently read Homeland and found it a good December book, the kind that you can plow through during break without feeling like you're betraying the integrity of being on vacation), and I find her work well-written, if a bit trite and emotionally over the top.

So far AVM meets those expectations. I'm done with chapter 1, in which Kingsolver, her husband, and their two children, move from Tucson to a family farm in Appalachia. The departure is painful, as 25 years in a place you've come to call home will always be, but this is tempered by an awareness that the rapid growth of the Sun Belt over the past 30 years has outpaced the area's natural resources. At times this sounded like the story of ABQ, although, having visited Tucson, I feel that our climate and topography have hedged us in nicely (the city can only grow so far north, south, and east, due to reservation land and mountains), and ABQ's growth has been more intelligent, relatively speaking.

The basic thesis of the book (which Kingsolver has repeated in various forms at least 6 times in 25 pages--I get it, already!) is that our food industry is broken, inefficient, and unsustainable, and I agree with this. Having seen Summer's efforts to eat better over the past few months (I don't even complain when she replaces oil with baby food in homemade bread anymore) trickle down to the rest of us, and having felt better myself as a result, I agree with Kingsolver that we can eat smarter and feel better, all while treating the earth better.

I suppose this is the lesson I hope to learn from this book, that even in our small circumstances, we can grow some foods (the best cantaloupe I ever ate grew on the rocks in our front yard a few summers ago, and last year's tomatoes were amazing) and buy more locally-grown foods. In the meantime, I intend to hunt around on the website for AVM (the book has a 25-page resources and readings list, so I wager the website's pretty informative too) and see if I can learn a thing or two.