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The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch

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Krutch was an amateur naturalist and a great speaker for the cause of conservation. This is quite simply one of the most important books I have ever read. I had been reading Krutch's nature books one at a time over many years. This representative and highly readable collection brings it all together! Great book.

Joseph Wood Krutch was a popular naturalist/humanist whose writings throughout the early and mid-1900's helped give Americans a moral compass as they faced wildlife and wilderness areas increasingly under threat of eradication. He wrote at a time society was standing at a crossroads - with blithe destruction of the environment going off in one direction - and increasing awareness of the interconnectedness of the environment reaching off in the other direction. Krutch helped steer us down the road of saving grace. However, much remains to be done, and Krutch deserves to be re-discovered and widely read again.

The essays in this book, largely from the 1950's and 1960's, do contain a few archaisms that would either be considered politically incorrect now, or that we have a refined understanding of now. For example, Krutch does occasionally refer to tribal people as "primitives." Then he rather haphazardly refers to Europeans as having "inherited" this land from "the red man." The abrasive, old shoot-`em-up movie designation of "red man" aside - Krutch was writing too quickly here to catch the obvious solecism of the word "inherited." Native Americans hardly made a peaceful bequest of the land to Europeans.

Finally, although Krutch certainly would not endorse any Intelligent Design philosophy, he harbors a somewhat outdated, pantheistic animosity against Darwin's Theory as being too mechanical and too insistent upon survival of the fittest through combat "red in tooth and claw." Many naturalists, foremost among them Stephen Jay Gould, have spent pages correcting our impressions on this point. Darwinian survival is now understood to only rarely entail bloody combat. More often, survival is just a matter of the creature with the slight adaptive advantage leaving more offspring. The advantaged creature wins by making love, not war.

However, the archaisms here are minor compared to the overall, urgent wisdom of Krutch's observations. Some of his opinions seem to come right out of today's headlines. In an essay written in 1961, he deplores how our economic system has come to be based on our having to consume more and more resources in order to fuel growth and maintain material prosperity. He writes, "If, for example, people are urged to go into worrisome debt to buy a new automobile, not because they have a need for it, but because automobile workers will be out of a job and lead the way to economic collapse if the unneeded automobiles are not bought - does that not suggest that we've reached a point where men exist for the sake of the industry rather than industry for the sake of man?"

Krutch furthermore points out how our economy's dependence on growth has caused us to help promote an often particularly destructive form of consumerism around the world. He tellingly points out that whereas missionaries used to invade other countries, labeling the natives "pagans" in need of the Bible - now industrialists invade other countries, labeling the natives "undeveloped" and in need of more consumer goods.

His essays contain many other telling analogies and turns of speech. He coins the word "mechanomorphism" to take to task those who are at the other end of the spectrum of "anthropomorphism." Whereas the latter perhaps commit the error of attributing too many human characteristics to animals - the "mechanomorphists" make the more serious error of assigning all creatures only a capacity for mechanical, automatic, instinctually invariant response.

In addition to such stunningly apt insights, Krutch has included many quiet personal appreciations of wildlife among these essays. He talks about the amazing synchronicity he observed between the arrival of the Pronuba moth and the blossoming of the yucca. He tells about the intelligence he witnessed firsthand among the society of mice who found their way into his desert home. (I only wish he had made this essay longer and continued the chronicle of his mouse family.) He makes the reader see some of the beauties of the Grand Canyon anew, and he gives some interesting geologic detail about how that natural wonder was created more through a "rising" of the land than through a cutting down of it.

Krutch is a definitely a man for all seasons whose essential wisdoms have stood the test of time and make for good reading, anywhere - anytime.