News of the Earth
Homero Aridjis, Betty Ferber (Translator), Mandel Vilar Press (NOVEMBER), Hardcover $24.95 (350pp), 978-1-942134-09-1
Homero Aridjis’s News of the Earth, translated and edited by Betty Ferber, showcases the range of talent of the Mexican poet and environmental activist. Billed as “a biography of Aridjis’s relationship with the natural world,” the book chronicles his earnest, lifelong defense of the endangered species and ecosystems in Mexico and across Latin America.
News of the Earth is sprawling, collecting op-ed pieces, poems, and official declarations from the Group of 100, which Aridjis founded. This group of Latin American artists and intellectuals dedicated to environmental advocacy includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz. They have advocated on behalf of the monarch butterfly, forests, sea turtles, the atmosphere, and beyond.
Wide-ranging subjects include overpopulation, river pollution, and the destruction of the Lacandon jungle. Battalions of facts and figures buttress points from sources including government agencies, Yale experts, and John Steinbeck.
Aridjis takes a philosophical approach to advocacy, examining big questions such as humanity’s role in the world. Portions of the work are cynical, as when it describes “the Mexican phenomenon of murder victims but no murderers,” but it’s never militant. Well-reasoned arguments are laid out matter-of-factly.
Though sometimes bogged down in statistics, essays display the same degree of craftsmanship as the collection’s well-wrought poems. Prose sparkles with passion and lapidary finesse. Articles are sprinkled with personal observations, such as how Monarch butterflies, now increasingly rare, once filled the streets in winter. The book would obviously appeal to environmentalists, but also has broader literary merits and serves as a captivating historical account of the conservationist movement.
News of the Earth is a thoughtful, engaging work about a man of great conscience, concerned with nothing less than the fate of the planet. Maddy Harland is the editor of Britain’s Permaculture magazine, now celebrating its twenty-fifth year, as well as the cofounder of an associated eco-publishing company. Fertile Edges, a chronological collection of her editorials for Permaculture, is a snapshot of the last quarter-century of environmental developments—both progressive and threatening—and a trove of inspiration for green advocates everywhere.
The concept of permaculture arose in Australia in the 1970s with the work of Bill Mollison, among others, but quickly found worldwide significance. A shortened blending of the phrases “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture,” it refers to ensuring sustainable energy systems for future generations. Harland boils it down to “the fundamental desire to work with Nature, and not against her.”
A timeline and descriptions of major events in Harland’s life and in the wider world precede each section, giving a sense of the sweep of history. Again and again, catastrophes serve as evidence of human damage to the planet: the mad cow disease outbreak in 1996 reveals the dangers of intensive farming, while the increasing frequency of natural disasters reflects climate change and the threat to the Gulf Stream.
Yet whether Harland is recounting a local greening campaign or a trip to Bhutan, she is relentlessly practical and surprisingly optimistic. “Choose your strategy, your campaign, your activism, your research, your passion—however humble—and stick to it not for a year or two, but for the rest of your lives, speak up,” she advises, to be part of he environmental solution.