Customer Reviews

Natural State: A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing

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In his foreword, David Brower writes: "The 2 million Californians here when I arrived have already become 32 million. California wildness deserves a chance to recover, and `Natural State' lets us know why." Well said, but with California's population now at 36 million, and increasing over a half-million annually, a staggering growth rate now totally attributable to post-1970 mass immigration and descendants, the bigger question on recovery is HOW?

While "Natural State" is no downer, packed with 40 eclectic selections, among them John Steinbeck's "Flight" into the unforgiving chaparral, Robert Louis Stevenson's mesmerizing "The Sea Fogs," Jack London's liberating "On Sonoma Mountain," it is impossible to read this book without feeling frequent pangs of loss.

Such loss is sometimes explicit, such as in Wallace Stegner's melancholy "Remnants." At other times the reader knows what's to come. In "Into the [Salinas] Valley," 1860, William Brewer writes about the now extinct California grizzly: "A man stands a slight chance if he wounds a bear, but not mortally, and a shot must be well directed to kill. The universal advice by everybody is to let them alone if we see them, unless we are well prepared for battle and have experienced hunters along."

In "Ramblings in Yosemite," approaching the High Sierra in the 1870s, Joseph LeConte is struck by "the great massiveness and grandeur of the clouds and the extreme blueness of the sky," Mark Twain's "Lake Tahoe" is "not MERELY transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so."

Recurrent is the desire to escape the multitudes. In "Climbing Matterhorn Peak," Jack Kerouac's character, Japhy Ryder, "modeled on the poet Gary Snyder," is determined to camp far enough along so that he and his buddies won't "wake up tomorrow morning and find three dozen school teachers on horseback frying bacon in our backyard."

Ann Zwinger, "Trumpets of Light," writes: "More than 706,000 acres, over 94 percent of [Yosemite], is managed as wilderness and can never be developed. A permit system applies to hikers and groups on horseback who plan to remain overnight, thus guaranteeing that hikers are not falling over one another or overusing one area."

Three cheers for good management, but how rarely it is mentioned in such otherwise enlightened accounts that ever growing future populations will mean, by iron laws of mathematics, ever shrinking nature rations for any given individual.

California does seem to have a few natural features even beyond the ability of man's numbers to overwhelm, such as the Tule fog in the Great Central Valley. David Mas Masumoto writes, "The fog continues to roll in. Where it's heading I do not know. It passes in front of the porch like a shifting cloud. If I stare at it long enough it seems that I start to move instead. I imagine our farmhouse cutting through the gray mist like a lost ship, my porch transformed into the bridge."

Very nice. However, while the fog is still rolling in, unfortunately, so are the subdivisions. California farmland is now sinking beneath them at such a rate that the Central Valley has earned the American Farmland Trust's designation as "the nation's number one most threatened agricultural area."

About Southern California, Joan Didion corrects the misconception of an endlessly bland climate, the reality being "infrequent but violent extremes." And Californians experience ever more destructive extremes as greater numbers of people continue their lemming-like advance onto shorelines, cliff edges, floodplains and wildfire zones.

Nor does Los Angeles smog go un-represented. Hildegarde Flanner, "A Vanishing Land," writes, "From the foothills above Pasadena I can see for sixty miles or more ... All this delights the eye, the mind, the heart, with romantic geometries and the pride of home. But not for long. Gradually all those remarkable harmonies and differences of texture fade and flatten while a horizon of spectral murk advances ... a mobile, drifting wall." A problem no longer confined to LA, as anyone can attest who has been enveloped by the enormous wall of Central Valley smog pushing up against the Sequoia.

An eloquent afterward by Gary Snyder advocates "a non-nationalistic idea of community, in which commitment to pure place is paramount [and] cannot be ethnic or racist. Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about places from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land."

Yes, a greater sense of community, but isn't it a little late in the day to be betting the farm on reinventing humankind? Could one warning sign be that among all the peoples of Earth it is probably only those of European heritage who would consider making ethnicity irrelevant to place "delicious"? Or even think it remotely possible?

And how would this work? Would a household, likely European, that champions feminism, live serenely next door to one that devoutly practices female circumcision--all because everyone is joyously wrapped up in a overriding commitment to preserve, say, the Sacramento River watershed? With all due respect, this is what comes of environmentalists living too much within their own heads.

A popular way to avoid taking a position on any controversial un-PC problem, such as Third-World-immigration-driven overpopulation, is simply to call for a "we must" thought revolution. Yes, what a wonderful world it will be once everyone agrees with you and me! But until that great day comes, calling for a thought revolution provides a convenient way to appear courageously visionary and A Nice Guy, while hiding from controversy--as nature burns.

Among its other strengths, Steven Gilbar's fascinating book should serve as a constant reminder of what we are losing--and how fast. The fact remains that population growth is California's, and America's, number-one nature-flattening machine, a machine that is mostly fueled by relentless mass legal and illegal immigration.

What is being lost? Read this excellent book to find out.

Though NATURAL STATE is a diverse and well-written collection of essays on natural history and the general natural landscape of California, it lacks substance. By this I do not mean that the essays themselves have nothing to contribute to one's overall understanding of natural history and its appreciation. Far from it- the essays have plenty to contribute. However, the form their contribution takes irked me as I read the volume. Many of the essays are simply vapid descriptions, while others are so scholarly and technical that one wonders why they are in an anthology constructed for the supposedly "general" reader. Still, NATURAL STATE does a decent job of spanning California's many natural facets, and the diversity of subjects is broad. A better anthology (though I think it's out of print) is Hal Borland's OUR NATURAL WORLD, which is most likely available at local libraries.