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Book Reviews
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Wandering Home
by Bill McKibben
(Crown Publishers, 2005)
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The new century’s ode to bioregionalism sings in Bill McKibben’s most recent book, Wandering Home — A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks. The author backpacks through the most rural slice of the country, seeking signs of an emergent economy, one based on reciprocity, cooperation, and homegrown resources and ingenuity.
This borderland is where McKibben has lived and contemplated, most of his adult life. And though he realizes people typically turn west for signs of ecological innovation and experimentation, the northeastern corner, he argues, is ripe with the California spirit. “There are very few regions that illustrate the possibilities in as close proximity as this region I am trying to construct across the New York-Vermont border,” he writes.
This “cultureshed” — a place he can’t decide to call the “Adimont” or the “Verandacks”— is dotted with pioneers unwilling to succumb to a future of big box stores and homogenized habitat. Some are transplants in Subarus buying produce from Champlain Valley farmers. Others are old-time Adirondackers for whom self-sufficiency is not some voluntary aspiration, but a daily craft done with grace. All are finding exits from the exploitation-driven economy and creating vibrant niches in its riddance.
There’s Vermont Family Forests, a group comprised of woodlot owners who agree to log responsibly (and incur higher costs), which means encouraging demand for local timber species in order to be economically viable. McKibben tastes first-harvest wine with a former u-pick strawberry grower who transitioned to cultivating specially bred grapes and is now entering the novel market for New England wine. Readers are invited to the Middlebury College Organic Garden, a half-acre of vegetables amidst cornfields devoted to cow feed. His students designed the system — the ecological and the economic —from scratch. They figured out which crops they could sell to the campus dining hall, made sure their endeavor wouldn’t snake other local farmers’ markets, secured money from the student government for a well and solar water pump, hooked up seed donations and borrowed beehives.
A hemp-enthusiast friend aptly sums up the gist of the journey: “Local really could be the new organic!”
McKibben wanders a mile or so from where Howard Zahniser drafted the 1964 Wilderness Bill. He notes that last time the landscape was so richly inhabited by visionary folk was the 60s and early 70s, when idealistic homesteaders were a dime-a-dozen. Of Champlain Valley today, he writes: “A new generation of settlers is trying to figure out new ways to responsibly inhabit the land — and enrich [it] in the fullest sense of the word.”
What is particularly unique about this ecology is that it is not virgin earth, but a “second-chance wilderness” – a landscape “not of creation but of redemption.” Nature reclaims abandoned farms; beavers return to a logged landscape, their dams re-invite wetlands; enthusiastic kids re-learn growing native foods without chemicals or 1200-mile transport from soil to table; a seasoned eco-warrior patches together a wildlife corridor. It’s a reconciliation between wild and pastoral, blurring the line separating human and non-, rural and urban, and even softening judgments of right and wrong.
Like any good “nature writer,” McKibben questions which land use practices fall under the rubric of “natural” and which fail to satisfy. “How much can a place change before it loses its essence?” he asks, determining it’s ultimately a matter of appropriateness. Having a small farm next to protected wilderness can be beautiful. A Wal-Mart or golf course, on the other hand, probably isn’t.
By the end of his quest, the author mixes pale ale from one side of the lake with copper ale from the other in a post-hike toast to the human and natural communities working out the kinks of coexistence. The modern “hyperindividualism” being replaced with a revived conversation between the land and the people, and between neighbors, is a promising hope to which we can all raise our glasses.
Katie Renz
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