Reviews 253 he intercuts his renderings ofSouth Rimgeologywith European thinking about the age of the earth. The frequent cutaways toJames Hutton, “the founder of modern geology,” are especially informative. Later, Saner contrasts the West with Switzerland, where a hunter shot the last bear nearly a century ago. Seldom are Saner’s interweavings more effective than in “Technically Sweet.”This brilliant essay synthesizes the author’s pilgrimage to the Anasazi stone lions in Bandelier National Monument, his own adolescence in the summer of 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer’schildhood and youth, his own visit to Hiroshima during the Korean War, the physicists’ ruminations on the nuclear legacy, and the encirclement ofthe RockyFlatsNuclearWeapons Plant. Saner’s sketch offers fresh insights into his complex genius. In “Naming Nature” Saner meditates on the importance of—and limita tions to—naming things. Once againworking through polarities, he firstevokes theJudeo-Christian beliefthat “in the beginning was the name,”then plays the Taoist side that insists that “the name you can name isnot the name.”This may well be the most thoughtful discussion of such issues to appear since John Fowles’s The Tree. Saner dares to enlist the full stylistic repertoire available to the nature writer: beyond rendering the observer’s stream-of-consciousness, he imagines viewpoints beyond his own. As artists who press boundaries often do, however, Saner sometimes approaches excess; the diction can seem excessively erudite for the subject matter. Yetin “Chaco Night,”a remarkable essay that delineates his fall, head injury, and premonitions ofdeath, Sanerrenders hislong night on the sandstone with directness and power. Though Four-Cornered Falcon might not please all general readers, it will delight the cognoscenti. PAUL REA Southern Utah University Spirit and Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue. Edited by Steven C. Rockefeller andJohn C. Elder. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. 228 pages, $30.00/ $16.00.) The eight essays and concluding dialogue in thisvolume originated as part of an interfaith conference held at Middlebury College in 1990 on the general topic announced in the book’stitle, “spiritand nature.”The intended audience for this volume is the literate layperson interested in spiritual and/or environ mental issues, an audience that certainly includes many readers of WAL. Though the conference presenterswere from diverse backgrounds—they speak from Buddhist, Christian, Islamic,Jewish, Native American, and liberal demo cratic traditions—and though their essays vary considerably in length and in manner, from the brief and intimate remarks of the Dalai Lama to the longer 254 WesternAmerican Literature and more academic presentation ofMuslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, there is broad agreement among these speaker/writers on the chief matter, which is this: the causes of and solutions to the global environmental crisis are funda mentally not technological or political but moral and spiritual in nature. No longer canwelive, or aspire to live, asifwe are the lords ofcreation, and the end is near—at least figuratively, and perhaps literally—ifwe do not radically reori ent ourselves to the earth. In their essays, the writers suggest how their respec tive religious traditions can allow and promote the necessary business of our radical reorientation. This reader—an ozone man, a tree-hugger oflong standing—often found himselfnoddingvigorous agreementswith much ofwhatiswritten here. In fact, I nodded so often that I began to suspect a problem: though the world’s major religions were represented at the Middlebury conference, with the prominent exception ofHinduism, only the fe/iwing ofthose religions is truly represented in these pages (and, I assume, at the conference itself). There is here no religious conservative, no fundamentalistofwhateverfaith, to contest or correct myliberal tree-huggingview. Perhaps because theyhear, or think they hear, the liberals crying wolf, religious conservatives are simply unlikely to attend a conference such as this. Though the conservatives are absent, and conspicuous in their absence, I count it as an important but partial success that religious liberals at least have come together to evince this much agreement on matters environmental. The editorial apparatus includes introductions to each of the essays, cap sule biographies of the writers, and a particularly helpful introductory essay by Steven Rockefeller outlining recent theological thinking on the environment. Appended to the volume is the United Nations’ benign “World Charter...