HOPE, HUMAN AND WILD

HOPE, HUMAN AND WILD
By Bill McKibben
Milkweed Editions, 1995 & 2007
ISBN 978-157131-300-3

I’ve read a few (very few) articles by Bill McKibben and even corresponded with him by email but had never read one of his books. This fall I resolved to do so, and found Hope, Human & Wild in a bookstore while I was on vacation. Buying and reading it was an excellent course of action!

The book is a sequel of sorts to The End of Nature, but it did not matter that I had not read that particular book. McKibben himself states that End of Nature was a negative book, and having seen some signs of promise he decided it was necessary to write something hopeful. Hope, Human & Wild is that, though it is also sober and cautious.

McKibben starts by describing the rejuvenation of the Adirondack wilderness, but concludes that though the rejuvenation has been assisted by a certain amount of political assistance, it is primarily due to temporary economic and social conditions and can in no way be considered permanent. Therefore, he set out to see what sorts of things might need to happen in order to preserve some wilderness places on earth in sufficient scale as to preserve biodiversity. He thinks perhaps that cities must provide the answers.

His search for answers led him to two unlike urban areas: the city of Curtiba, in Brazil, and the region of Kerala in southern India.

Curtiba provides McKibben, and the reader, with a description of a place that has managed to make public life more important than private life, and to do the things necessary from a political standpoint to enhance the public life. Their mass transit system has become a model for the world, and it is all buses. Recent changes in the bus system have involved some expenses but the system itself was designed very simply and run privately at a profit. Its convenience and low cost have meant fewer cars, less congestion, and more community.

But the buses are just an example. Curtiba is a city that gives hard and serious thought to public housing, and the book provides a delightful description of much that has happened in Curtiba on that account. In other examples, the poor are invited to collect garbage in the narrow alleys inaccessible by truck, and offered a bag of good groceries in exchange for collected garbage. This not only keeps the streets clean, it gives work to the poor and it provides a market for small farmers in the region. In another example, retired buses are set up as vocational schools for the poor.

Kerala is a region in India that has managed to become 100 percent literate and break the injustices of both the caste system and the Indian preference for boy children. McKibben and the experts he interviewed all had a hard time defining the roots of such success, but they seem to emerge from some progressive Hindu theologians and from the region’s willingness to experiment with socialism. Instead of seeking more wealth, the region has shared the wealth it had. McKibben points to the breakup of large estates and the current abundance of small farms, as well as the existence of innumerable coconut trees.

These two locales are then offered as alternatives to a world with an ever increasing demand for consumption. McKibben then returns to his home in the Adirondacks, and talks about the problems being faced and how local persons are beginning to imagine a different scenario than what is imposed by the global economy.

The 2007 edition includes an afterward that describes events that transpired in the three places over the 12 year interim.

McKibben knows that he is asking a lot- he is asking the wealthy nations of the world to adopt a lower standard of living, but he suggests that something might be gained if we do. That something is community, summed up by a Gandhian disciple in Kerala: “What is the good life? The good life is to be a good neighbor; to consider your neighbor as yourself.” (p. 155)

It seems to me that McKibben has succeeded in offering a vision of possibilities that though difficult, might just be possible- if we can find the resolve.

George R. Pasley
November 14, 2008