Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest ed. by Scott Slovic

Abstract

B o o k R eviews 125 than live in perfect harmony with nature, tribes like the Cahuilla shaped the land through the selective use of fire, water storage, and transplantation. In recounting the region’s “deep history,” Hogue also talks to anthropologists and park rangers, retraces the steps of conquistadors and cattle ranchers, and tags along with a crew restoring riparian habitat. He returns from the void con­ vinced that the desert’s sense of wildness, as embodied in a chilling nocturnal encounter with a mountain lion, can coexist with human history. Making wild places part of our “native landscapes,” incorporating them within the age-old dance of coevolution between people and places, is preferable to abstracting them into purely imaginary space. Fox’s work is fascinating, studded with rich deposits of fact, revelation, and speculation. But Hogue’s look at the Anza-Borrego, if somewhat less sophisti­ cated, makes a useful complement because of its concern for the experience of a diverse landscape that is complete in itself. In treating the desert as a place of participation rather than exclusion, Hogue considers it a laboratory for new ways of dwelling on the planet. Rather than perpetuating the “illusion of the limitless” that fascinates Heizer and others, the desert here underscores the necessary reality of limits. One of this landscape’s grandest mirages is that an appearance of boundless potential is actually circumscribed by the bedrock laws of aridity. Certainly, the desert stings our perceptual field with flashes of revelatory insight, pushing us to confront the outer edges of mortal existence. But it can also teach those lessons of successfully inhabiting this planet— thrift, adaptation, humility— of which the great cultural critic Joseph Krutch, a trans­ plant to Arizona later in life, wrote forty-odd years ago in The Voice of the Desert (1955). That is a voice we need to hear as a species— today more than ever. Qetting Over the Color Qreen: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest. Ed. Scott Slovic. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. 405 pages, $45.00/$ 19.95. Reviewed by John Clubbe University of Kentucky, emeritus The title of this anthology derives from Wallace Stegner’s well-known essay “Thoughts in a Dry Land” (1972), which argues that to understand brown and tan western landscapes we need to rethink fundamentally our notions about what is “normal” and “natural.” Citing John Wesley Powell on the arid lands, Slovic initially had the Southwest encompassing most of the West. Fortunately, for the sake of focus, most of the works chosen deal with the traditional Southwest, that is, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of contiguous states. Scott Slovic is an experienced anthologist, with an impressive com­ mand of what is going on in both literature and the environment. Along with a bevy of new and newish voices, he offers up a number of established writers whose work has already imprinted itself on the Southwest’s— and the 126 WAL 37.1 Spring 2002 nation’s— consciousness. Like many anthologies, however, this one tries to do too much. Fifty-three writers, several with multiple selections, in less than 350 pages make for a dis­ jointed read. Slovic divides his material into four sections: Forays in Natural History, Adventures in the Wild, Living Close to the Land, Voices of Conservation and Restoration— but works included in one section could easily have landed in another. The selections themselves are of unpredictable length and, in my view, of sometimes uncertain merit. The poems included, mostly in free verse formats, seem overall to contribute less than do the prose selections. An excep­ tion may be the finely expressed outrage of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Sparton Industry.” Several contributions in prose or poetry— Edward Lueders at Big Bend, Terry Tempest Williams at New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache, Robert Michael Pyle on first seeing saguaros— seem hardly more than field sketches or journal entries. Fine writers all, they are ill-represented here. The author bios, tucked away at volume’s end, might have been more helpful prefacing the selections. Reservations aside, this volume is full of good things. A brief notice can only hint at the cornucopia within: John Alcock informed on...