Customer Reviews

The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World (The World As Home)

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I had the pleasure of briefly meeting the author, Kathleen Dean Moore, and listening to her read a (too) brief selection of pieces from The Pine Island Paradox, her latest collection of essays. I was so moved by her approach to her work (she is co-founder and Director of The Spring Creek Project, devoted to expanding the connections between the environment, philosophy, and words) and her writing that I ran right out and bought this book.

I was not disappointed a bit. Ms. Moore has a gift for observations of the natural world and the ways western philosophy

This reminds me of "The Web of Life : A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems" by Fritjof Capra as well as his previous book "The Turning Point" on which the movie "Mindwalk" (by Bernt Amadeus Capra, with Liv Ullmann, Sam Waterston, and John Heard) was based. The difference is this book is not written by a physicist but by a philosopher whose engagement with her family and her environs is done in beautiful prose. Even an island is not an island.

What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? The list (p. 35) is interesting and so both are similar. How many things I must love according to this list! But even though they all fit, would I say I really love my car? I suppose I am spoiled by C.S. Lewis' "The Four Loves" which I think gives us some wonderful ways of discriminating among different "loves" and keeping them clearly different in our minds. I suppose the issue would be in the degree of love -- number nine "desperately".

My favorite piece was about the bird hiding the nut in the backyard. What a great ending!

Kathleen Dean Moore may be a philosopher, but as an ecologist and a closet theologian, she explores some of the biggest questions that we, as humans, face. She is also a poet, and writes in a way that touched my heart and yes, my soul, in a way that had me ordering all of her books before I was halfway through with this one. Wild Comfort, Riverwalking and Holdfast all captured my mind and heart, and I found myself falling in love with the places that she explored, the people who accompanied her on her inquiry, and the inquiry itself. This is not my normal genre of reading material, but since reading Pine Island Paradox (actually I've read it about five times now) I am in seach of anything that comes even close to her writing. Buy this book. You're in for a real treat.