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The Vanishing White Man by Stan Steiner (review)
- Western American Literature
- The Western Literature Association
- Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 1988
- pp. 83-84
- 10.1353/wal.1988.0070
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Reviews 83 vegetation was wild oats or foxtail. But there’s not a native plant in sight right now. The old government surveyors used to see antelope and elk through here, and the vegetation was always bunch grass. It was here until around 1915 or 1925, and it just disappeared. As a young fella I saw this happen.” On wildlife: “We don’t understand animal reactions because we’re civil ized—we’ve lost our feeling for those emotions. . . . The way to take care of wildlife is to take care of the environment.” Darlington himself writes powerfully of the environment. Abjuring the captive-bird program that recently removed the last living condors from the wild, he urges in the tradition of Aldo Leopold that land be viewed as a com munity—“. . . an animal is first and foremost an expression of its ecosystem; removed from its natural habitat, it literally ceases to be that animal—it is merely a collection of genes in a cage.” Darlington offers strong evidence supporting his premise, concluding, “By extension and no great stretch of the imagination, the entire planet is condor country.” This is an important book. GERALD HASLAM Sonoma State University The Vanishing White Man. By Stan Steiner. (Norman: University of Okla homa Press, 1987. 322 pages, $10.95.) Randolph Bourne, a political theorist, earlier this century excoriated American and European militarism with the sarcastic chant, “War is the health of the state.” Bourne alluded to the fact that although Americans adamantly believe themselves the most moral and peaceful of people, in reality their great material prosperity is largely based upon the fruits of conquest and continues to be maintained by military presence and economic warfare. In that sense war was then absolutely essential to the American way of life. Now, in The Vanishing White Man, Steiner suggests that American (and Western) civilization’s “health” depends just as crucially upon warfare with the environ ment. However, he argues that such war is unwinnable because as the human species continues to eliminate plant, bird, and animal species (Worldwatch Institute predicts that by 2000 up to 66% of the estimated 92,000 plant species in Latin American forests could be lost forever), the health of the whole earth’secosystem will eventually be destroyed. In this present volume, Steiner continues his travels and interviews throughout the American West, finding in the spectacularly energy-wasteful strip mining of coal a perfect miniature of our rapacious relation to the earth. His method is to present a spectrum of interviews with westerners, ranging from Hopi elders to crusty Montana ranchers, BLM officials, and scientists. 84 Western American Literature One interviewee, Gerald Wilkinson, Director of the National Indian Youth Council, sets forth Steiner’s thesis aptly when he observes that, from the Indian perspective, the dominant thrust of American culture appears as “a perversion of life . . . a cancer.” He predicts that the white man will soon render the earth unfit for habitation in the manner to which Western people aspire. Only those, like the Hopi and others who are willing to work with nature by scrupulously replenishing whatever is taken, will be capable of sur viving the coming ecological Armageddon. So once again we turn to the American natives for a disinterested, non western perspective upon what really lies in the pot at the end of the rainbow of the American philosophy of unlimited material growth. One hopes (faintly) that the formulators of American political and economic policy might be more responsive to the signals of coming self-destruction than are cancer cells in a dying patient. Otherwise Steiner will remain a voice crying unheard in the wasteland we seem so determined to create as our monument to the future. JACK L. DAVIS University of Idaho Last of the Breed. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: Bantam Books, 1987. 366 pages, $3.95.) In this novel of a great escape across Siberia, Louis L’Amour writes a fascinating page-turner that shows both his strengths and his weaknesses. His hero is Joe Makatozi, major in the U. S. Air Force, test pilot of some of our most advanced aircraft, and a Sioux Indian. Besides flying military aircraft, Joe is skilled in...