Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery
By Steve Nicholls
(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Edited by Bill McKibben
(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)
Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)
A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature
By James William Gibson
(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)
Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet
By Edward Humes
(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)
I.
In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.
If the news reports are accurate, Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado has been tapped by Barack Obama to head up the Department of Interior. Let's hope he knows what he's getting into. After the last eight years, the Interior Department has become fairly dysfunctional, and this may end up being one of the most difficult jobs in the Obama administration—not to mention one that gets remarkably little attention.
Two hundred fifty million years ago, a monumental catastrophe devastated life on Earth. We don't know the cause-perhaps glaciers, volcanoes, or even the impact of a giant meteorite-but whatever happened drove more than 90 percent of the planet's species to extinction. After the Great Dying, as the end-Permian extinction is called, Earth's biodiversity-its panoply of species-didn't bounce back for more than ten million years.
There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses or police and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Sometimes neighbors would hear the short, sharp sound of gunfire and then nothing, a silence you can't describe unless you've heard it, which if you're lucky you haven't.
I
Excuse me for noticing, but haven't we been commemorating Columbus's quincentennial in the wrong year? I know that dates and math aren't America's strong suit right now, but it doesn't take advanced calculus to figure that 1492 plus 500 equals 1992.
