Category Archives: Books-Libraries

On Writing, Action, and Contemplation

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By chance this morning, I noticed a blurb on the UMass home page advertising a talk by an Italian writer, Erri De Luca, scheduled for 4 pm this afternoon in Herter Hall.  Although I had never heard of the guy, I decided to attend.  I guess I am an ignorant provincial, because Mr De Luca, a novelist, poet, essayist, and translator, is rather well-known, at least in Europe and in his native Italy.  He has written over 60 books, which have been translated into 30 languages; his most recent novel translated into English appeared in bookstores on Tuesday.  I’m glad the room was full and the event organizers even had to bring in more chairs — at least other people in the five colleges realized what a great opportunity this was.

The talk began with a showing of di là dal vetro [“Beyond the Glass”], a short film written by Mr De Luca and in which he stars with his mother.  Oddly enough, it’s produced by the Italian pasta maker Garofalo.  Then Mr De Luca talked for a bit about his life and work and answered questions from the audience.  Finally, we all agreed that we wanted to see the short clip about Naples that he wrote and narrated, so we watched that as the finale to the discussion.  By the way, these were not YouTube-type clips but rather high-quality professional productions.

Erri De Luca was born in 1950, in the exact middle of the tempestuous, revolution-addled twentieth-century, in sun-drenched, tufa-built Naples.  There is a Neapolitan expression which says that one’s homeland is the place that feeds you; if it can no longer do that, you become a migrant, a person who leaves to obtain sustenance elsewhere.  De Luca left Naples at age 18, to feed his hunger in northern Italy where he worked as a manual laborer and began writing.  His first book was published in 1989, and ever since then he has been pondering the effects of time and place on his life, and telling his stories.

I was particularly struck by his reflections on war and poetry:

  • in the old wars, soldiers died — in the new, civilians do
  • the air-raid siren is the soundtrack of the twentieth century
  • aerial bombardment of cities in which civilians are killed indiscriminately is a terrorist act

Between 1993 and 1997, De Luca drove convoys in the Bosnian War, trucking in supplies for the relief of besieged Sarajevo

  • in Sarajevo, he met poets who organized soirees for poetry readings
  • poetry was a method of resistance against the destruction all around them
  • poetry kept the communal heart beating
  • due to fuel shortages, the citizens were forced to burn books; in the first year, it was philosophy, in the second, novels, in the third, drama (Chekhov was the last to go), and in the fourth year, they could not hold out any longer and consigned poetry to the flames

De Luca is self-taught in Hebrew and Yiddish; he learned those languages because he felt in some way responsible for the destruction of the European Jewish culture

  • as a writer, his responsibility is to write
  • as a man, it is to live humanely

The UMass library has a couple of De Luca’s books — I’m going to check them out next week.

Rewilding the World

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The success of the first “Community-Wide Read” last year inspired the Haston Free Public Library to sponsor a second series of programs this year.  This month the Library is hoping that many North Brookfield residents and friends will read and discuss a new book on an important aspect of the conservation revolution, Rewilding the World.  Tonight, the author herself, Caroline Fraser, an old friend of North Brookfield’s Harbor Fraser Hodder, spoke to a diverse and respectful audience on this topic.

Ms. Fraser first exhorted us not to feel discouraged by what may seem like the inexorable decline in the quality of our environment.  Although in her years of research she encountered apathy, incompetence, venality, and greed, she also found an outpouring of generosity, compassion, and intelligent striving.  Her book’s epigraph is “Only connect,” and she reminded us that even in our small town, we can be connected to the larger world.

I started reading the book last week but only finished the first few chapters, so much of what Ms. Fraser talked about was new to me.  In between listening and looking at the PowerPoint slides, I managed to scribble some notes, and what follows is a summary of what I learned.

So what is “rewilding”?  Ms. Fraser described it as the solution to a problem, the problem of the biodiversity crisis.  In all of Earth’s history, there have been five mass extinctions, and we may be on the brink of the sixth.  This extinction appears to be different from the others, in that it is caused by one species, Homo sapiens, and of course it is the first that our species has experienced.  The causes are various, including conversion of land to agriculture and industry and climate change.  Scientists who keep track of these numbers have estimated that within a hundred years or so, we may lose up to half of all species, including 70% of plant species.

So why should we be concerned?  Species diversity has many benefits:   for example, our food, fuel, and medicine are derived from plants and animals, which also provide regulatory services.  Though the benefits that accrue to us from the natural world are difficult to quantify, economists have estimated that they are on the order of two to five trillion dollars annually.

The scientific basis for our current understanding of species diversity was developed about forty years ago by mathematician Robert MacArthur and biologist E O Wilson; their seminal work was published in 1967 as The Theory of Island Biogeography.  In this work, they argued that the number of species populating an island is related to both its size and distance from the mainland.  It didn’t take long for scientists to realize that these same principles would apply to larger areas like continents, insofar as continental habitats are now mostly fragmented and are thus island-like.

A second issue which became critical to the debate over protecting tracts of land in order to preserve species diversity concerned the importance of predators.  While human beings react almost universally with fear and hatred to predatory carnivores, these animals stabilize ecosystems by exerting top-down control of the food chain.   Aldo Leopold’s reflections in the 1920s on the importance of predators proved to be eerily prophetic when the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park began to transform the environment:  aspen, beaver, and trout came back, as well as raptors, songbirds, and amphibians.

Rewilding, with its focus on the “three Cs,” or Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores, was controversial from the start.  Even environmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund were not enthusiastic supporters, in that their emphasis at the time was on saving pristine landscapes, not trying to fix degraded ones.  But the advocates of rewilding pressed ahead.  The first large North American project, named Y2Y, for Yellowstone to Yukon, was intended to establish corridors for wildlife migration.  One of the major problems for wildlife turned out to be the Trans-Canada Highway; building structures that would allow animals to move over or under the highway proved to be enormously successful.

From North America the movement spread around the world, to Central and South America, to Europe, to Africa, and to Southeast Asia.  Ms. Fraser talked about a number of projects, but the two that I found fascinating were the European Green Belt, which will eventually run over 5,000 miles through twenty-two countries, and the Korean DMZ.  Due to ideological conflicts, the border areas between these hostile states became a kind of no-man’s land and wildlife flourished.

The example of the DMZ, with its 2700 species, led rewilding advocates to propose establishing transboundary peace parks, which would not only enhance biodiversity but help normalize relations between warring countries.   The pairing of conservation with development, or addressing problems of systemic poverty in countries wracked by the legacies of colonialism and civil war, created obstacles that scientists were not trained to deal with.  Nevertheless, between 1988 and 2005, the number of transborder protected areas grew from 59 to 818.

Ms. Fraser ended her talk with descriptions of a few rewilding project successes.   In Kenya, the Lewa Reserve was developed in collaboration with the indigenous Maasai.  In Costa Rica, the Área de Conservación Guanacaste became a striking example of the country’s commitment to conservation.  In Australia, tens of thousands of acres have been reforested in the Gondwana Link.

Closer to home, the project called A2A, or Algonquin to Adirondacks, has as its goal to connect and improve habitat in the region that extends from southern Ontario to New York State.  Even here in Massachusetts, various organizations, including the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation, are working on projects like dam removal and restoration of grasslands.  Rewilding can start in our own backyards, Ms. Fraser concluded.

Thank you to the event organizers, librarian Ann Kidd and Friends of the Library president Ellen Smith, and to the program’s sponsors, the North Brookfield Cultural Council, Country Bank, and Friends of the Haston Library.