Posts Tagged by books

Ignorant of the realities of nature, we imagine a paradise where all is well but for the cruelties inflicted by man. It makes for simple choices and easy moralizing…. Stephen Budiansky

As I was proofing the September/October 2009 issue of Countryside, I came across a letter from a reader that filled me with a profound uneasiness. The reader, a transplant onto five semi-rural acres from a large urban area, was pondering whether or not she was living as “green” as she wanted to. Obviously not, because she began to refer to large conventional farmers as “the browns” and those who lived on smaller acreage, but jetted off to Hawaii for elegant weddings, as “the greens.” Placing labels on others as a way to define ourselves constrains how we as individuals learn and grow. A fact pointed out by Stephen Budiansky in The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, from Yale University Press. (more…)