Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday by Julia Corbett (review)

"He's out of the woods," the doctor said to Julia Corbett as she waited for news of her father, felled by a stroke in the trees behind his house (71). He had loved those woods, and a week later, scattering his ashes there, she reflected on all the ironies packed into that simple phrase.

Corbett lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah, and summers in a Wyoming cabin, getting away, à la Thoreau, for a closer view of society and its environmental discontents. Salt Lake City may seem pretty far from the woods, but it's full of provocative scenes of instruction on the interplay of nature and culture. In this sense, "out of the woods" might simply refer to the urban location of these lucid, captivating essays, or to the author herself, who comes around to a deeper, more complex environmental consciousness. To be "in the woods" implies confusion, bewilderment, and a restricted view. The subtitle, "seeing nature in the everyday," suggests an expanded view but also the arc of a journey. Corbett has seen things she hadn't or couldn't before. But why not? Most city dwellers don't think of nature as part of where they live and work; they think of it "out there" in places like Wyoming rather than "right here" in places like Salt Lake City. Moreover, nature is as much an idea as a biophysical reality, and an abstract idea at that. It's often construed as part of an opposition: nature/art, nature/humanity, nature/nurture. So it makes sense that we habitually ignore or undervalue urban landscapes and focus our environmental aspirations toward the remote and glamorous wilds.

But Corbett knows we're embedded in the ecology at local, regional, and continental scales, and she wants to raise our environmental consciousness beyond simplistic, received dichotomies. The more-than-human world keeps intruding on her consciousness as she travels around town, noticing, for example, the junk piled on the curb during monthly trash days when the city will pick up everything. Corbett is dismayed by how much good stuff people throw away, but she takes comfort at the thought of recycling. Turning plastic water bottles into fleece jackets has to be a good thing. But what happens when the jacket wears out, or when it starts shedding fibers into the wash? Where does all that plastic eventually go? Into the ocean, of course, where it clogs the guts of plankton and the bellies of birds and whales. So recycling doesn't really eliminate waste; it just converts it into other forms. Corbett realizes that's not a sufficient strategy. Sustainability requires something more like composting, where one creature's waste is transformed into another's food and all the energy, nutrients, and information are kept circulating within the system.

Other delightful and provocative essays take us through bear encounters in Wyoming, the flower and vegetable beds where she dances with wildness and welcomes native plants into her "freedom lawn," and even the huge new indoor mall opposite Latter Day Saints headquarters that features a simulated trout stream meant to bait shoppers into the "Buyosphere." In "A Regular Day for the Moon," pondering lunar cycles and moon landings leads her to reflect on what is routine and expected, like daybreak, versus what is unique and troubling, like the Anthropocene or extinction. In "The Big Hum," animal, insect, and bird calls remind her that our habitual sound environments have become littered and confused, with noise usurping not only meaning but also our ability to hear and pay attention. "Speaking a Shared Language" explores how the words we use color, distort, or light up our ideas about how to connect with nature: as the old Chinese sages recognized, a "rectification of names" seems requisite for a sustainable world order.

Written in a refreshingly readable and engaging style, with plenty of illustrative vignettes and examples, this book gives...