As a political conservative, it’s taken me some time to get used to the label “environmentalist.” To me, the word conjures up images of angry unshaven protesters who care more about the spotted owl than about their fellow human beings. But over the years, especially after reading Rod Dreher's excellent manifesto Crunchy Cons, I’ve come to a new definition of the word “conservative.” Conservation is the reason I started my humble garden – I wanted a way of making our land useful, of turning some ground that was already there into a useful commodity that would also bring beauty to our home. Conserving means making do, most of the time, with something that works perfectly well – not upgrading every six months to a newer model of vacuum or handbag or car. It means cherishing the wisdom of the past, moving cautiously toward truly useful innovation, and wasting neither funding nor time nor resources.

What better or more valuable resources do we have in this great country than our air, our water, and the land that grows plants that fill our bellies and delight our eyes? Many an author has waxed eloquent in considering these precious gifts and the urgent need to protect and cherish them. Such is the premise behind American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Numbering over just over a thousand pages, this scrupulously complete collection (of essays, poetry and excerpts from longer works) aims to trace the history of American thought since our first inklings that we might not have an unlimited supply of tall trees and rich soil.

As the title makes clear, Thoreau is the first author represented in the anthology. In the Introduction, the editor warns that “Walden is almost scriptural in its pithy discursions. There are five ideas a page; it’s no wonder that the book has never faded.” But even this description hadn’t prepared me for the depth of thought with which Thoreau analyzes the meaning of a fenced-off huckleberry field, formerly open to the public, or the exact cost of his famous cottage ($28.13, of which $1.40 paid for transportation; “I carried a good part on my back”).

Since a complete accounting of the hundred or so represented authors would be impossible, I’ll share some of the most interesting surprises:

• John Burroughs, who in his day was more famous than President Theodore Roosevelt himself. (Roosevelt is also present in the anthology, though only in a few rather disappointingly formal letters.) The editor says Burroughs virtually invented the nature essay; this one, The Art of Seeing Things, is a fascinating discourse about what happens when you walk through a field or forest and really stop to look.


• Gene Stratton-Porter, a naturalist who wrote novels to pay the bills, details a painfully poignant account of what was quite possibly the last passenger pigeon spotted in the wild. It begins when the land was full to overflowing, and farmers used to cut down every tree that stood between him and a piece of arable land: “Nowhere was there even one man who had the vision to see that the forests would eventually come to an end.” It ends with the author alone, staring up at a pigeon whose plaintive call of “See! See!” came across as “a blasting accusation.”


• You cannot top The Fog for sheer environmental horror; the result of a freak temperature inversion wherein lighter polluting gases sank close to the earth instead of rising above it. Centered around Donora, Pennsylvania, home of several industrial mills, it follows a pair of doctors through an appalling week of ministering to sick and dying residents, who eventually come to number in the thousands. It took this kind of disaster to decide that factories shouldn’t just be able to belch out whatever chemicals they please. This story actually had more of an impact on me than Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is also represented here in part.


• Sigurd Olson has a beautiful meditation called Northern Lights – perhaps it appealed to me because seeing them is one of my top 10 life goals. Skating along a frozen pond, he has the incredible experience of seeing the swirls of color both above and beneath him: “At that moment I was part of the aurora, part of its light and of the great curtain that trembled above me.”


• Lyndon Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 was extremely inspiring. The editor points out that the act was really the brainchild of his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, but the remarks still belong to the President, and they were quite moving: “This bill does not represent everything that we wanted. It does not represent what we need. It does not represent what the national interest requires. But it is a first step, and there will be other steps. For though we must crawl before we walk, we are going to walk.”


• Probably the most amusing entry in the group is Colin Fletcher’s A Sample Day in the Kitchen. A famous hiker whose Complete Walker has sold over half a million copies, Fletcher humorously details a day in the life of a hiker who eats, cooks, plans and dreams in his sleep sack.


• A close second in the “most entertaining” category, especially for anyone who’s read the original, is Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra: “Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; curs the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war!”


• Two of my favorite modern conservatives (and I take devious joy in calling them so) are Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan, whose work argues for a simpler, deeper, more careful existence. Kingsolver has an excellent essay, written before Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but about the same piece of property, a summer home that later becomes a year-round residence. Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is another excellent, if somewhat grisly, warning against the unnatural feeding practices of recent years: in this excerpt, he visits a Midwestern feedlot to see what his own steer (purchased for this reason) actually eats. The answer? Lots of corn, some medicine and fertilizer, and well, other cows. (You should really read the whole book; it’s not all this disheartening, but it’s just as fascinating and well-written.)

Two features also worth mentioning are a chronology of American events that begins at 15,000 BC and runs through the present (there are considerably more entries around the time of the latter) and a few dozen color and black-and-white illustration plates that provide a helpful visual for the many people and scenes depicted in the book’s pages.

Bottom line? It’s a great book, the perfect gift for any conservative on your holiday gift list. And if you think they might bristle at that name, buy it for them anyway. If I can call myself an environmentalist, they can handle “conservative” just fine.

You can pick up American Earth on Amazon.com for $26.