Hello readers! It’s been another busy week on the lines of something resembling the class struggle. So, I’ll just give notice to two books that, in some sense, disappointed, along similar lines.
I wouldn’t call Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water a bad book, by any stretch. But I would say I have been oversold on it - Modern Library put it on that 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century list (which I know is far from perfect but those ML lists did tip me off to some good books), and a copy of the book served as a macguffin in a pretty good ecological scifi novel, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. It’s the rare work on nonfiction, and outside of the category of philosophy or manifesto at that, with a sort of aura around it.
Well, it tells an important, interesting, and increasingly relevant story! The American West as currently inhabited is likely unsustainable in any event, and will see major changes, probably very difficult ones, in my lifetime. We have golf courses in Arizona and major agricultural growing areas in California in large part due to a combination of ecological misunderstanding and engineering hubris. America west of the 100th meridian is arid- it gets some wet years (including some at key times of the US’s westward expansion that led settlers to think it was wetter than it was), but by and large, doesn’t support the same sort of agriculture you get east of the line. The only way to get the kind of water to grow profitable crops is from dams and irrigation. For an extended period, the US federal bureaucracy loved dams. They loved them so much they built a lot of pointless ones, and had not one but two competing corrupt bureaucracies — the Reclamation Service within the Department of the Interior, and the Army Corps of Engineers — building them.
It’s in the long dam sections that Reisner came close to losing me. Maybe I’m just green enough. Maybe I’m too attached to civilization (“Mother Civilization,” one hippie of my acquaintance tauntingly called it in a discussion with me, long ago). But I’m not so pro-building-stuff that A. I can’t see the unsustainable pattern in the West and B. I can’t recognize the appeal of “degrowth” arguments I don’t myself agree with, because they seem to me either romantic, misanthropic, or both. But one basis of anti-growth I’ll never relate to is, basically, “this is a waste of taxpayer money.” If Reisner admires anyone after the death of John Muir and John Wesley Powell, it’s Jimmy Carter. As the book goes on, it takes on this hectoring tone, not so much about the destruction of wilderness or about unsustainability but about “boondoggles.” He doesn’t even talk that much about what else could be done with the money, no “this could feed however many people.” Presumably, this would run into the issue of what a lot of this construction was for- creating farmland. You can’t help but get the impression of a writer less interested in people living well, or even in natural preservation, but in wagging his finger at profligacy for its own sake. Miss me with that. The dudes who built those dams were often pricks, not just for their buildings, but you’re never going to persuade me on a strictly monetary basis. Come on man.
In a roughly similar vein, we have the way worse Appleseed, by one Matt Bell. It’s a novel about three figures: a human in a climate-apocalypse near future, a sort of cyborg-man a thousand years or so in a future frozen by geoengineering efforts, and Chapman, the legendary Johnny Appleseed, who, in this novel, is… a faun? Like he’s got horns and furry legs and hooves and needs his brother to hide him from people? The stuff with Johnny Appleseed was my least favorite of the book. Why make him a faun? Well, there’s a dumb time travel plot that answers that. But also, why make the Chapman brothers the avatars of irresponsible, ecologically wasteful capitalism? Because that’s what he does!
Maybe I’m being sentimental, but I don’t know- Johnny Appleseed seems like one of the more benign white icons of early America? Like I know the apples weren’t just for eating, or even for eating at all, but for making whiskey. And why not? I don’t think it’s the whiskey business destroying the ecosystem! I also don’t think that just wandering around planting trees was the best way for anyone to make a land fortune back then, as Chapman’s human brother is depicted as coveting, and the Chapmans were Swedenborgian-type weirdos who were just generally a lot more… relaxed, than standard frontier-era Americans, both in legend and in what fact we can find.
Both weird bits — why Appleseed as faun and why the Chapmans as representatives of ownership and waste — took me out of the story, and neither the prose nor the story in the rest of it brought me back in. Reminds me of Reisner both in ecological themes, and the particular po-mouthed version of ecological thinking it displays.
Oof! I’ve been reading good ones too, don’t worry. You’ll see. Mithra knows!