I finished reading Hope, Human & Wild by Bill McKibben last week.The book is a collection of three stories that promote a message of hope against…a world where resource depletion is almost a contest. The stories are detailed from McKibben’s perspective which may be why I wasn’t too thrilled with the book. I’ve watched McKibben in many documentaries and he seems to have a rather negative world view. Its probably justified considering the number of years he’s been writing about the environment and global warming to seemingly no avail.

The first story is about McKibben’s own backyard: the Adirondack region where he lives. The story detailed is almost an echo of the story of Pennsylvania.

A few years back, I had read an article in the Philly Inqy that mentioned how green Pennsylvania currently was, how there was this canopy of green covering the state. The  reason this story was significant is the same reason McKibben chose to include the Adirondacks in his first story of hope - the North East portion of the U.S. was the first to get completed raped of its resources: trees, minerals, oil, etc, etc as it was one of the first areas to get settled by Europeans. So with the demand for mahogany desks and whatever else people wanted, millions of acres of forests disappeared. Then, just in the nick of time the Louisiana Purchase was sealed and new virgin territory expanded the U.S. borders which came under intense exploration. This gave the depleted North East portions of the U.S. some time to recover. Today new forest growth has changed the N.E. landscape and everything now is just dandy.

Except it isn’t.  Because of how the U.S. economy has changed its focus from one that agricultural and manufacturing based to one that is service based, many of the residents in McKibben’s community live at poverty level wages. And its sad. So the change that the residents make are often into sectors that isn’t feasible in the long term. Shasha Cedar discussed this recently.Not exactly hopeful…but the hope part of this story came from the fact that many of the original native wild animals are beginning to make their way back into the Adirondacks because of the new forest growth.

The second story of hope was my favorite.The subject was a city in Brasil named Curitiba. Its success as a model city that continues to grow with low resource consumption was primarily due to the efforts of its three-time mayor, Jaime Lerner, who implemented a wide variety of programs that had a wide reaching ecological impact. Many of Lerner’s ideas were similar to Jane Jacobs’ ideas and observations in Life and Death of Great American Cities. And the programs worked. For example, Curitiba’s bus system sounds amazing: bus only lanes with connecting routes with buses that run frequently. Old buses get transformed into classrooms that teach people practical skills for a low fee. Another example of Lerner’s ingenious thinking was how he dealt with the flooding problem. He designed and created artificial lakes with parks surrounding the lakes that get filled during the flood season. Lerner also took one of the suggestions from the authors of Rubbish by incentivizizing rubbish collection - so now the bums get a meal and the streets are clean.There was alot of hope here…if we can elect decent people who care enough.

The third story…well I’ve already written about my feelings but I should say a bit more. The story of Kerala and its low resource consumption in the face of other measures of success makes it an anomaly in India and even the rest of the world. But there is a similarity between Kerala and Curitiba - its leaders/elected officials. The leaders of both places cared enough about their people and their home to do something to make it better. They implemented programs with the blessings of the people and listened to their concerns to make life better…

Overall, the book wasn’t bad, but it didn’t actually fill me with hope. Maybe I was just in a lousy mood but I don’t like messages that put the locus of control on some external source like elected officials.  This is probably why I liked Blessed Unrest which I thought had more of a hopeful message than Hope, Human & Wild.In fact Blessed Unrest came highly recommended to me at a time when I was feeling very despondent about the world. Perhaps its because the message was a bit different from Hope, Human & Wild - that a top-down methodology of implementing ideas wasn’t necessary for success to occur. Many of the bloggers whose blogs I read believe in that notion…that we can all do something in addition to electing some visionary thinker or calling our elected reps. And I think that is more of a hopeful message.

 

RATING: 3 out 5 stars.

READERS: medium to dark green readers.