Review by Margaret Higgins Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, P.O.Box 600, Willington, New Zealand. TEL: 64-4-472- 1000/7047 FAX: 64-4-496-5446. SACRED TRUSTS: ESSAYS ON STEWARDSHIP AND RESPONSIBILITY. Edited by Michael Katakis. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991. 283 pp. paper ISBN: 1-56279-056-0. I am neither a fisher nor a hiker. But do not get me wrong, I like the presence of the wild; I savor the canyons and the desert. Their presence allows my children to sense the weight of time. Like Dan Gerber in SACRED TRUSTS, I need to know there is a wildness in the world, even if I were to never see it... It isn't essential to my enjoyment of fishing that I catch fish, only that I know there are fish in the water... (p.70). I travel a lot. Prior to a recent flight, I agreed to review SACRED TRUSTS. After the in-flight news, after the in-flight drinks, and after the in-flight meal, I sought diversion. Now, I thought, is the time to start reading SACRED TRUSTS. And read I did. With growing involvement, and eventually total absorption. I was so excited by what I read that I e-mailed some good friends who have a summer cabin on the Gallatin River in Montana, to tell them of this book celebrating Montana's natural heritage. But -- they knew it all already. That's why they have their summer cabin there. Maybe I wanted them to know that they are right, that they live in a small part of heaven. SACRED TRUSTS eulogizes the wild. The Electronic Green Journal also speaks to those who eulogize the wild. So why preach to the converted? This book should be read by all, but most especially by those who are not yet in love with life outside the four walls of their home. The book is a collection of essays about fly fishing, about saving bears, about life alone in the countryside, about ardor and the encroachment of civilization , and it is about awareness, stewardship, and responsibility. The collection has no apparent structure. An essay on death opens the book. Odd, one may think, in a work about the wonders of life, but not really odd at all. As I was reading it I remembered a meeting with my obstetrician. The maternity hospital was about to be re-located, and the township was up in arms. But, cried the town people you can't do this! The hospital is for the sick; that is where people die! We don't want our babies born where there is death! It was under his tutelage that I came to realize that death is as much a part of life as is birth. Mary Catherine Bateson echoes this in her essay, Into the Trees. Our manicuring, our clearing, felling, civilizing are attempts to reject the natural. These are assertions of power over life, but not only humans have a cycle of life; John Nichols, in a later essay, says that he rarely weeps for the dead but instead, he blesses them, for how intrinsically they focus... all life (p.130). Dan O'Brien writes on page twelve of an intrusive single electric light in the Black Hills of South Dakota -- a light signalling human encroachment into the mountains which are the central feature of his life. He also writes of the Lakota Sioux. In O'Brien's mind, it is the Hills which have been wronged more severely than the Sioux. You don't have to be Sioux or live in North Rapid City to feel impotent in the face of the