First published nearly a decade
ago, The
Pine Island Paradox (Milkweed Editions, 2004) remains a
timeless read.
Author and speaker Kathleen Dean Moore takes her readers along on her personal
journey in and with nature on Pine Island, in the Alaskan wilderness. And while
camping with her family on the island, Moore makes some vital connections with
the place and life there.
Moore’s approach toward living in
nature borders on the ecological and the philosophical – a state of finely
tuned consciousness that diffuses the boundaries between one’s “self” and
nature. To Moore, the “harmony of the
whole” is of prime importance, and that shows in her camping experience on Pine
Island where she finds a reciprocal relationship between people and their places:
people and the world are co-creators of
the future. (126)
The imagery in this book will literally
possesses any reader who has experienced the purity of wilderness, but will also
likely engage the attention of those who stay tethered to modern urban settings
and have at least some vicarious experience of unadulterated nature. The
sounds, colors, and feel of being out in the open enrich one’s reading experience
on Moore’s pages – a journal wherein lost connections are discovered.
The Pine Island Paradox has deep ethical implications. Nowhere
preachy, Moore’s work calls for “ecological ethics of care”; it is more a call
for retrieving our lost relationship with our true nature, the one we have
reduced to our ever-rising consumerism. These chapters work against the
divide-and-rule view that has sucked our society in over the decades; it is a
call for a unite-and-thrive way of thinking and living.
Moore’s book raises a number of important
questions for thought. The one that stayed with this writer long after the book
was closed is: If the world was created
by the separation of one thing from another, the seas from the dry land, the
birds of the air from the fish of the sea, will it end with a gradual coming
together? (224)
ISBN: 978-1571312815
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