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Annie Dillard, whom I remembered as singing the praises of nature in "Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek," was actually quite bitter about what it revealed to her. "I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls," she wrote upon observing the profligate breeding of plants and insects. "I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives."

Reading "American Earth," I considered how pleased the early writers would be about developments in certain aspects of the environment -- the reforestation of the landscape, the control of soil erosion, the recovery of certain wildlife populations. I also thought how saddened they would be by urban sprawl, the disinterest of youth in nature, and the threat of human-induced climate change. I found myself paying special attention to the most recent writings -- Michael Pollan's warning about the health effects of cornfed beef in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," David Quammen's prediction of mass extinctions in "Planet of Weeds." I took heart in Paul Hawken's belief that citizen-based organizations can and will rise up and challenge the status quo where it threatens the environment.

"There is much to be proud of in this literature; the movement it has inspired has won a great many fights it has picked," McKibben concludes. "But there is no closure in the struggle." And so we should continue to read and to write about the environment. In those endeavors, "American Earth" provides great inspiration.

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