The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern (review)

Every day on my way to work, I am confronted by the sight of an enormous construction project—the Playa Vista development—rising before my eyes. It sits about two miles from the Pacific Ocean atop what was once a beautiful and wild place, the Ballona Wetlands. There is a chronic need for housing in southern California and this development aims to address at least some of that need. At what cost, however? The intricate web of wetlands that used to run up and down the California coast has all but disappeared. The egrets and herons and terns and kites and other birds that thrived in the brackish waters of the Ballona Wetlands retain a precarious foothold in the tiny portion of the wetlands that remains. But their habitat has been reduced to a poor and thin remnant of what it once was. Their future in this place is uncertain.

What is happening in this place is all too common. Around the world, pristine wild places are giving way to the steady march of human projects—housing, farming, mining, recreation. Often it is the poor, driven by desperate economic deprivation, who encroach upon wild places, a reality that must be taken seriously in any discussion of these matters. But just as often, wild places disappear amidst healthy economic conditions, falling to the inexorable engine of economic progress. With every new loss comes the growing sense that there may be no end to this, that the only end imaginable may be the end of all things—the "end of the world."

It is not easy to know how to respond to such a cataclysmic prospect, whether personally or politically. How are we to describe what exactly is being lost in our current onslaught upon the natural world—in the natural world and in us? Often we cannot even bring ourselves to speak of it. It is too painful. But silence in the face of such enormous loss is akin to silence in the aftermath of personal trauma—it can only breed further illness. Still, the question remains: how can we learn to speak about this growing catastrophe? How can we bring to language the "unspoken dimensions" of the crisis that confronts us? Not simply in order to hear ourselves speak, but as part of a process through which we might begin to discover the inner resources to resist the destruction, the "end of the world?"

It is the great virtue of Shierry Webber Nicholsen's book that she puts her finger exactly on the pulse of these questions. What is more, she identifies them as profoundly spiritual questions, questions requiring a deep and sustained investment of our whole selves. It should be noted that Nicholsen by no means reduces "spiritual" to the merely personal or individual. Spiritual questions for her are always set within a radically inclusive context that encompasses persons, social and political institutions, living beings in the natural world, and the cosmos as a whole. Indeed, it is the subtle and creative juxtaposition of the particular and the whole that gives her work its moral force and depth. She probes with unnerving perception and clarity the "inner reality" of our spiritual lives lived amidst abundant beauty and massive destruction. But her eye is always on something more complex and wild: the whole of reality—our own fragile selves, but also the numinous world that underlies and sustains everything. It is this encompassing and capacious vision, her sense that we are capable of arriving at a feeling for the world that is worthy of it and that can help us to care for it, that makes this book so unusual and so valuable.

"My intention," she notes in the introduction, is to "bring together our sense of connection with the nonhuman environment—its beauty, its mystery, its provision of a sheltering home for us—with the psychological forces that allow...