2019 read #21: Resurrection of the Wild by Deborah Fleming.

Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio's Natural Landscape by Deborah Fleming
182 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 19 to November 24
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

With a title like that, I expected this book to focus on a subject dear to my heart: the restoration and rewilding of landscapes and waterscapes. It turned out to be a series of essays, some published as long ago as 2000, all of them only vaguely connected by the book's subtitle. The overall theme is not rewilding so much as attempts to create a sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural world we dwell in. There are pocket biographies of John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") and sustainable farming innovator Louis Bromfield; there's an examination of how problematic and coercive Amish communities can be, followed without apparent irony by a wistful account of a young family building a counterculture homestead in the 1970s. Like a Midwestern answer to Roger Deakin's descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, Fleming devotes a chapter to humble-bragging about the history and bucolic charms of her own farm, Wedding Pines.

Much of the rest of the book examines just how thoroughly factory farms, subdivision developments, strip mining, and horizontal fracking have destroyed the land, the soil, the water, the air, the landscape, human health, the natural world, and the future. "I did not think the human race worth saving," she remarks during a tangent about the missionaries who barge onto her farm. Far from resurrection, the impression Fleming leaves is one of defeat and erosion—the loss of our liberties to the wealthy few who keep county commissioners and state agencies in their pockets, a feeling of futility as urban sprawl devours more and more of the land. I've grown to appreciate and love the natural world of Ohio during these ten months of living here, which makes this book all the more depressing.