Eco-Elders
This is new page, thus a work in progress, see Eco-Heroes and History pages as well. Suggestions welcome.
Overviews
"A Fierce Green Fire" video documentery traces the history of the modern environmental movement, chronicling dramatic battles like the Sierra Club's fight against dams in the Grand Canyon, Greenpeace's campaign to save whales and recent efforts to combat climate change. San Francisco-based director Mark Kitchell, who also made the Academy Award-nominated "Berkeley in the Sixties," (audio interview).
Earth Days is a fantastic history of the American Environmental Movement. ****
People
Edward Abbey earned his place in the Ecology Hall of Fame with two books and one extra-literary creation, himself. The first book, Desert Solitaire, is a classic of environmental literature, combining nature writing, the philosophy of life and death, and political observations regarding freedom, democracy, and the management of National Parks. The other book, The Monkey Wrench Gang, created a whole new branch of the environmental movement. All those who espouse non-violent social protest in the tradition of Ghandi’s satyagraha must consider Abbey’s heroes as their prototypes. Edward Abbey Excerpt from Desert Solitaire. buried by his friend naturalist Doug Peacock, the model for Hayduke (video).
Wendell Berry is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. video interview 10/13, (remarks on captialism); video interview. He is the subject of a new documentary shown at College 8, Green Fire. A recent talk and more. Video 5/12. an appreciation. audio interview 10/12 A Place in Time: Some Chapters of a Telling Story, and new poems.
David Brower President of the Sierra Club who led the fight to save the Grand Canyon. Founder of several other organizations. Brower Executive Director of the Sierra Club, he had a significant impact on green history in the US. Video biography Monumental can be seen on PBS. (short excerpt). An earlier biographical video is For Earth's Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower and is also the name of a book of his essays. Brower is the subject of the classic biography Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. One of his last interviews (video) tells us all we need to know, including the role of corporations, invoking E.F. Schumacher (see below). ***
Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia (1975). McH Stacks PS3553.A424E25 1990. This classic work gave a name to an entire science fiction subgenre. Ecotopia presents a first-person account of a U.S. American journalist visiting a break-away ecological utopia situated in Northern California. video interview. alt link. another talk. His farewell: Epistle to the Ecotopians, a remembrance. a list of his books. See the actual Cascadia secession effort.
Rachel Carson (video) episode of Bill Moyer's Journal (includes play, "A Sense of Wonder" based on her life). Rachel Carson's Silent Spring Excellent PBS documentary McHenry Library VT2457 . Newer 2010 documentary Sense of Wonder another link. Essay on Rachel Carson's influence. Silent Spring’s lost legacy, told in fifty parts by Sandra Steingraber, published in the September/October 2012 issue of Orion magazine. 11/12. On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson by William Souder video interview also he is the author of Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of 'The Birds of America,' a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. See also Eco-heroes.
Commoner, Barry The Closing Circle: the Ecosphere has his four laws of ecology.NYT obit, "Paul Revere of ecology," best known for the Four Laws of Ecology:
- Everything is connected to everything else.
- Everything must go somewhere.
- Nature knows best.
- There is no such thing as a free lunch
(Video). His legacy also Grist remembrance.
Alan Chadwick helped establish organic farming at UCSC and propagate the ideas widely. Film on him at McHenry VT8996 called Garden Song also video interview DVD3952.
Buckminster Fuller (short bio video)(another short bio video) Buckminster Fuller had one of the most fascinating and original minds of his century. Born in 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, he was the latest--if not the last--of the New England Transcendentalists. Like the transcendentalists, Fuller rejected the established religious and political notions of the past and adhered to an idealistic system of thought based on the essential unity of the natural world and the use of experiment and intuition as a means of understanding it. But, departing from the pattern of his New England predecessors, he proposed that only an understanding of technology in the deepest sense would afford humans a proper guide to individual conduct and the eventual salvation of society. New anthology also a new collection of scholarly essays New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller including one by Fred Turner, who spoke on the continuing significance of the counterculture at College 8. Excellent animated intro to his most important idea. various videos. Accessible overview Buckyworks (UCB TA140.F9 B35 1996 c.2). (short video bio) live documentary, The Love Song of Buckminster Fuller. He spoke at UCSC may 1980 (LCD10846 audio recording at special collections). Newer doc by local The Last Dymaxion (trailer).
Lois Gibbs is a pioneering environmental activist who discovered that her son’s elementary school was built on top of a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, NY. Upon subsequent investigation she discovered that her entire neighborhood was built on the same dump, known as the Love Canal. (short video) Gibbs now runs The Center for Health and Environmental Justice. CHEJ can help citizens understand the technical issues and how to get support in fighting environmental injustice. Recent interview (text) with UCSC alum.
Alice Hamilton pioneered industrial toxicology. Her autobiography (full text online).
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is considered the father of wildlife ecology and a true Wisconsin hero. He was a renowned scientist and scholar, exceptional teacher, philosopher, and gifted writer. It is for his book, A Sand County Almanac, that Leopold is best known by millions of people around the globe. The Almanac, often acclaimed as the century's literary landmark in conservation, melds exceptional poetic prose with keen observations of the natural world.
Donella Meadows archive of her articles, one of the best being the 12 Leverage Points. See also her 2008 book Thinking in Systems: A Primer Table of Contents. A summary of the conclusion: Dancing With Systems. Meadows was also part of a team of three scientists from MIT in 1972 who created a computer model that analyzed global resource consumption and production. Their results shocked the world and created stirring conversation about global 'overshoot,' or resource use beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Now, preeminent environmental scientists Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows audio interview 2004 have teamed up again to update and expand their original findings in The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Global Update. summary pdf.
Lewis Mumford was one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers, and the two-volume set Myth of the Machine (Volume 1 is Technics and Human Development; and Volume 2 is The Pentagon of Power) are probably his most important books: the summation of his life’s work. In writing as elegant as it is clear, Mumford makes plain the death urge that has always underlain civilization, which Mumford calls “the machine,” and later “the megamachine.” This is a social structure organized not around any organic human needs, but around the “needs” of the machines that have come to characterize and control our lives. These are crucial, incisive, devastating books. I cannot praise them highly enough (Derrick Jensen).
John Muir new biography: A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir McHenry QH 31 M9 W68 2008 by Worster, Donald. Muir's big fight was to save Hetchy-Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. His writings are on thisextensive site. You can follow his life on Google Earth. Lee Stetson does a one-man show channelling Muir at Yosemite, also in a PBS documentary. 20 min video biography. Restoration of Hetch Hetchy, rematch of the fight that broke John Muir's heart. 10/12. He was important in 1964 Wilderness Act and colorful people who led up to it.
Gaylord Nelson Senator and governor, co-founder of Earth Day with Republican Pete McCloskey, who at age 78 ran against Pombo, who was going to gut the Endangered Species Act and sell public land to coal companies. Video on McCloskey.
John Wesley Powell a forerunner on bio-regionalism (see below). Stegner book. NPR radio story (audio). Cadillac Desert includes Powell.
Wallace Stegner The Wilderness Letter
Introduction to Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs
New book of letters edited by his son and Professor Emeritus of American Literature at UC Santa Cruz, Page Stegner. Two of his short stories read out loud on NPR's Selected Shorts.
Thoreau, at last, video game!
Nikolay Vavilov collected more seeds, tubers and fruits from around the world than any other person in history. Yet the plant explorer, who endeavored to end famine, starved to death in a gulag, and his colleagues starved in the Siege of Stalingrad protecting the seeds. Gary Paul Nabhan, an ethnobiologist, conservationist, farmer and writer, chronicled Vavilov's life in Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. Nikolay Vavilov, the Indiana Jones of Botany Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine (audio interview) Gary Paul Nabhan reflects on What is the Relevance of Vavilov in the Year 2010?:Link
The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by Peter Pringle audio interview.
Stuart Udall (bio). Stewart L. Udall represented Arizona’s second district in the U.S. Congress from 1954 until 1961, when President John F Kennedy appointed him Secretary of the Interior. During his four terms as a Congressman and eight years of service as Interior Secretary, Udall worked tirelessly to promote just labor laws, cooperation with Native American communities and environmental conservation. In 1969, Udall retired from government service, but has continued to make invaluable contributions as an author, environmental advocate, lawyer and historian.
Theoretical Foundations
Bio-regionalism is the idea that human activity should be arranged by nature not arbitrary political lines (literally). See Callenbach's Ecotopia above. Also the Cascadia secession effort. The Republic of Cascadia has a flag and everything. news and culture, also some history, and you can join up.
Bio-regionalism overview 4/15.
Planet Drum is an activist organization that embraces Bio-regionalism.
A Bioregional Reader, Van Andrus (1990) UCSC Library: GF51.H6 1990
Bio-Regionalism by Michael Vincent McGinnis - 1999 (Google preview).
Wiliam Reisner's Cadillac Desert *** explores how crucial the development of dams were to the West. (McHenry Library has the four part PBS series based on the book VT4840 also online. Episode summaries) Introduction. Chapter 1 includes John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War officer who was the first to explore the Grand Canyon by boat. Lynn White (see below) speaks of regionalism, an idea pioneered by Powell. NPR audio.
UC alum Peter Berg (pal of Dasmann) coined the term "bioregionalism" in the early 70s to define an environmental perspective that emphasizes action over protest, lifestyle over legislation. A bioregion is an area that shares similar topography, plant and animal life, and human culture. Bioregions are often organized around watersheds, and they can be nested within each other. Bioregional boundaries are usually not rigid, and often differ from political borders around counties, states, provinces and nations. Ideally, bioregions are places that could be largely self-sufficient in terms of food, products and services, and would have a sustainable impact on the environment. See also Kirkpatrick Sale, an independent scholar and self-proclaimed neo-Luddite from Vermont who writes and agitates for a scaling-down of American society. In his book, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), he charts of vision of decentralism, participation, liberation, mutualism and community. UCSC Library Call number: QH540.5.S25 1985.
Wendell Berry. “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture.” (hard copy) When the environmental movement divides land between pristine and degraded, what place does that leave humans who must make a livelihood? A real chance of impacting the environmental crisis can occur only when environmentalists turns their attention to "kindly use" of the land.Unsettling of America HD1761.B47 1986 Audio version. 2009 interview (audio) : Author, poet and farmer Wendell Berry was writing about the virtues of slow food and sustainable agriculture decades before it became fashionable. He joins us to discuss "Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food," his new book of essays. Berry is also the author of a new book of poetry, titled "Leavings."
E.F. Schumacher. Small is Beautiful UCSC HB171 .S384 1999 (we have multiple copies with different call#). Importance of the principle of smallness as being a good thing. David Brower evokes him here (video). Adbusters celebrates him. See Appropriate Technology.
Lynn White, "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203-7. What does Christianity tell people about their relationship to the environment? White's seminal article spawned great concern in the 1970s about the Western world's unique, and destructive ethos towards nature. 1st page online public Protected full version
