Simplify, downshift, sustainability. What does it all mean? Alan Durning returns to his home ground to consciously carve out a new life away from the mainstream of politics and power. This Place on Earth is both a personal journey and a working blueprint for anyone interested in a better life.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Alan Durning spent several years traveling the world as an environmental policy analyst. When a Filipino tribeswoman asked him to describe his home, he found that he could not, answering weakly, "In America, we have careers, not places." Determined to change all that, he brought his family to his native Northwest to make a home--by which Durning means learning the geology and ecology of a place, as well as its human present and past. Durning looks into matters such as recycling, urban planning, and community building, and he proposes ways in which we can all tread a little more lightly on the earth, especially by sharing goods and knowledge with our neighbors. This is a lively, hopeful addition to the literature of place.
From Publishers Weekly
In an amalgam of the personal and the political, Seattle environmental activist Durning speculates on ways to create a society in which residents are connected to one another and to their environment. Using the Pacific Northwest as his laboratory, he provides a historical and ecological context for the area's current growth while discussing alternative plans for economic development. He believes that we can live better while living more lightly on the land. His brief profiles of business people, activists and politicians attempting to move society in this direction are illuminating. Policies dealing with such issues as environment-friendly taxation, land use, transportation, recycling, irrigation, conservation and endangered species are discussed creatively and sensibly. Problems associated with consumerism, central to American environmentalism, are addressed much more superficially than in Durning's previous book, How Much Is Enough? The personal asides, although well enough written, detract from the main message.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not just for Northwesterners,
By A Customer
This review is from: This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence (Paperback)
Having recently moved to the Northwest, this book is great in covering the history in a way that few books do. Although I don't agree with everything he says, he's got some very valid points. Interwoven in the story of "place", is his personal story, and it fits in very well. I liked this book enough I will probably actually buy it (the one I have is from the library) so that I can loan it out to friends. Besides being specifically about the Northwest, the book's premise can be transferred to other areas as well, the idea is you relating to your part of the earth and to your community.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most important books of 1996,
By A Customer
This review is from: This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence (Hardcover)
Durning has written a fascinating book that examines the potential of the Pacific Northwest bioregion and the people that live there. This book demonstrates that the personal is political, and shows readers how his/her own impact on the planet can be lessened. It is, by far, one of the most important books written in 1996, and one of the most important books that you can read in the year ahead
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Well written but could have been so much more,
By A Customer
This review is from: This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence (Hardcover)
Durning pulled his punches on several topics in this book, depriving readers of his valuable insight on some of the most controversial topics in the environmental movement today. The two most glaring examples of this are his cursory discussions of immigration and abortion. He doesn't discuss whether we should address the environmental impacts of immigration, or even write about whether these impacts actually exist. And although Durning goes into great detail about his wife's precarious health during her second pregnancy and his own fears about overconsumption in the US, Durning doesn't dive into why he and his wife decided to carry to term their third pregnancy instead of aborting. Durning has written extensively and eloquently on the problems of overconsumption in the US, it would have been very enlightening to see how Durning reconciled their decision to have a third child with his environmental convictions.
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