Confession: I consider myself a loyal son of alma mater, but I usually just skim the quarterly Williams Alumni Review before tossing it into the recycling pile. A story in the June issue, however, caught my eye. “The Literary Environment,” by Denise DiFulco, is about the director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), a Spanish professor named, confusingly, Jennifer French.

The article notes that a lot of people have asked French how a Spanish professor came to be named the director of the CES. The answer involves her first book, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), which examined early twentieth century Latin American literary responses to European economic hegemony in the region. Or something like that. Explains French, “Often those writers, including Horacio Quiroga and José Eustasio Rivera, made central to their narratives the deleterious effects of agriculture and other industries.”

Sadly, I know next to nothing about Latin American literature, and I’d never heard of Quiroga or Rivera, but another quotation from the article really struck me: “At their best, environmental history, philosophy, religion, literary studies, and the like engage the underlying assumptions of environmental policy and environmental science.”

Exactly! I thought. This is a view that resonates profoundly with Heather and me—we are, after all, both English majors—and when we eventually begin accepting environmental writers for residencies at Madroño Ranch, we hope to cast as wide a net as possible.

Say the words “environmental writer” and I suspect that most people think of folks like Bill McKibben or William Cronon or Michael Pollan or David Quammen (all of whom happen to be heroes of ours): essayists or historians with a biological or agricultural bent. They, and many others like them, are among the most important writers we have, and we would be thrilled—thrilled—to have them, or their peers, as residents at Madroño. But we also hope to attract novelists and poets and philosophers and theologians and playwrights and screenwriters and memoirists and perhaps even (what the heck) bloggers—pretty much anyone who’s thinking and writing in creative ways about the land and those who have their being on it, and how they affect each other.

Think of the fiction of Wendell Berry, who (much as William Faulkner did in Mississippi) has created a complex and compelling imaginary landscape in Kentucky. (Apparently the American South is particularly suited to this sort of exercise.) Think of the novels of Willa Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop is still my favorite—and Wallace Stegner, which depict the varied experiences of humans confronted with the vast spaces of the American West. Think of the poetry of Mary Oliver, in which the animal and vegetal and geological is a constant, almost sentient presence, and W. S. Merwin, described in the New York Times as “a fierce critic of the ecological damage humans have wrought.” Think of the economic writings of Paul Hawken and Woody Tasch, critiques of modern industrial capitalism’s obsession with short-term, bottom-line profit at the expense of just about everything else. Heck, think of David Winner’s odd little book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—one of my personal favorites—in which he examines how landscape has affected the style of soccer played in the Netherlands.

Closer to home, think of the gracious and elegant memoirs of John Graves and Roy Bedichek, two of the foundational texts of the environmental movement in Texas; or the beginning of The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s epic three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still the best short history of the Texas Hill Country I’ve ever read; or even Witold Rybczynski’s magisterial biography of Frederick Law Olmsted—not a Texan, but an astute observer of the state—which is a wonderful narrative summary of nineteenth-century American thought about nature in urban and suburban settings. Each of these works, I believe, has something original and important to say about community in America, community in this case defined as (to crib shamelessly from Pollan’s website) “the places where nature and culture intersect.”

We’d be pretty surprised to receive applications from Faulkner, Cather, Stegner, or Bedichek, since they’re, well, dead. But would the rest of them want to come to Madroño Ranch? Well, why not? We hope that the offer of beautiful and rugged surroundings, free from distraction, in which to ponder and dream and focus and unfocus (and eat well, of course; let’s not forget eating well) and bounce ideas off peers, will prove irresistible. Are we aiming high? Of course; but if you don’t aim high, you’ll just keep hitting the ground, right? Who knows—maybe Jennifer French herself will want to come. According to the article, she’s already working on her next book, a study of how memories of the War of the Triple Alliance (fought between Paraguay and the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from 1864 to 1870) have influenced attitudes toward land use in Paraguay. Wouldn’t that be cool?

What we’re reading
Heather: Laurie King, Touchstone
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (still)

Meat-eating has been the topic of much discussion recently, at least in what I’ve been reading. Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, has generated a significant buzz; if you Google “foer eating animals,” you get 961,000 results. Foer spent three years investigating meat production in the United States, factory farming in particular. Although he himself is a vegan, he says that he has no interest in converting anyone to veganocity; he just wants people to think about where their food—specifically, their meat—comes from.

Although I haven’t come to his vegan, or even vegetarian, conclusions, I think Foer is right. (Ahem. I haven’t read the book.) In my previous post on carnivorocity (a word my spell-check still doesn’t like), I wrote very convincingly about the ethical precondition necessary for meat eating, to wit: awareness of and gratitude for the sacrifice required to satisfy the appetite of the meat-eater, awareness that demands, for those who are to be sacrificed, a life of comfort in the world to which they are adapted. In fact, I think this awareness needs to be extended to vegetables as well; after all, even vegans require sacrifice—it’s just not as messy. By the very act of eating, all creatures—including, most emphatically, humans—participate in the circle of sacrifice, and a circle it most assuredly is; in nature, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

What sacrifice, then, is demanded of us? This year’s edition of The Best American Essays, edited by Mary Oliver, includes an essay by Wendell Berry entitled “Faustian Economics,” originally published in Harper’s Magazine. In it, Berry rails against the American propensity to confuse personal freedom with unlimited consumption, a fantasy that perhaps arose due to the intersection of the Industrial Revolution with the discovery of vast natural resources in the American West. As a nation, we’re confronting the end of this fantasy and “entering a time of inescapable limits”—an opportunity, according to Berry, to become reacquainted with traditional definitions of humanness. By their very nature, humans are, well, natural, and therefore limited. What distinguishes us from other animals (although I think this topic is being hotly debated) is our capacity for self-limitation, self-restraint, particularly as it is “implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.”

As long as we base our identity on limitlessness, we deny an essential—and liberating—element of our humanity. As long as we base that fundamentally human activity, commerce, on fantasies of limitlessness, it will be inhuman and inhumane, what Berry calls an “economy of community destruction.” Instead, he would have us cultivate a mindfulness of human limits—agricultural, economic, medical, technological, scientific—in order to reclaim “the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.” He cites intact ecosystems like working forests and farms that give inexhaustibly, given the practice of human self-restraint. He compares this practice to the willing submission of artists to the constraints of their art forms—the poet to the sonnet, the painter to the canvas. The work that arises from this sort of discipline has the capacity to feed us inexhaustibly, a capacity we’ve all experienced when revisiting favorite novels or symphonies or buildings.

The title of Berry’s essay comes from Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, first published in 1604, in which Faustus (that’s him in the picture above) sells his soul to Lucifer in exchange for knowledge and power. What Faustus learns—or, more accurately, refuses to learn—is that the human mind and soul are and ought to be subject to limits. When creatures refuse to acknowledge limits, hell is born.

So how do we practice the self-restraint necessary to maintain our humanity? Some, like Foer, argue that abstaining from eating meat is a logical and reasonable sacrifice. I don’t disagree with him, but I don’t think there’s a single way to humane self-restraint. Many indigenous cultures have focused on—even worshipped—the animals that fed them, Native Americans and bisons being a case in point.

I’m not sure any of this will mean much to those people and businesses that value scale and efficiency over humanness. Nor will it mean much to most Americans accustomed to the availability of cheap meat at every meal. But, with Berry, I believe that our humanity is at stake in the choices we make when we eat. When we choose to abet the suffering of animals and ecosystems to feed ourselves, we whittle away at our own humanness. When we choose to limit our choices, we paradoxically open ourselves to the possibility of inexhaustible plenty.

Sounds like a deal to me.

What we’re reading
Heather: Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
Martin: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

And now for the next installment in our internationally celebrated series of lists… and what could be more appropriate from the proprietors of a place called Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment than a list (in alphabetical order by author) of our ten favorite books about the environment?

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability
Mary Oliver, What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

Of course, we’re struck by the many wonderful and influential books we had to leave out to get down to ten, and we’d love to know your favorites. Let the arguments begin!

What we’re reading
Heather: Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Martin: Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey&#8212and Even Iraq&#8212Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport