The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT The Community Of Living Things By William E. Bohn Joseph Wood Krutch, with many an assist from Henry David Thoreau, has again produced an exciting book (The Voice of the Desert,...
...In the first place, it begins to dawn upon us that many of the birds and animals are not so far beneath us as, in our pride, we have fancied...
...It makes no difference what he is talking about--a tarantula, a toad, a turtle, a cactus, a lichen--he sees it under the aspect of the ages and gives due admiration to all the adaptations it has made as the world has turned and changed...
...To live healthily and successfully on the land, we must live with it...
...Any place occupied by living things from the simplest plants on up would have furnished the necessary material...
...Observing them with any degree of understanding enlarges the scope of our sympathy, gives us a bigger world in which to live and think and feel...
...But how can you be so precise as all that...
...Without that something," Mr...
...The future is far from settled...
...I see and hear the birds as they come and go...
...He tells how the crowding in of people, the over-pasturing of the desert, the plowing up of almost non-existent soil and the careless use of the slight stores of water upset the long-established balance of the arid regions and deal death to creatures which had barely learned how to live in the face of stern opposition...
...And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of,the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals of which we are a part...
...He sees and hears and thinks...
...Part of the fun in Mr...
...There are two advantages to be derived from living in friend Krutch's way...
...The wisest, the most enlightened, the most remotely long-seeing exploitation of resources is not enough, for the simple reason that the whole concept of exploitation is so false and so limited that in the end it will defeat itself and the earth will have been plundered no matter how scientifically and far-seeingly the plundering has been done...
...THE HOME FRONT The Community Of Living Things By William E. Bohn Joseph Wood Krutch, with many an assist from Henry David Thoreau, has again produced an exciting book (The Voice of the Desert, Sloane, $3.75...
...Leopold is of the opinion that education, law and public work are failing to bring about effective conservation because something is lacking...
...But, in comparison with the author of this book, I am still deaf and dumb and blind...
...Different creatures have made different adaptations--are still finding different ways to solve their problems...
...This brings him to a man named Aldo Leopold, who is author of an essay entitled "The Land Ethic...
...For the great idea that runs from one end to the other of these essays is that all life belongs together and that man should look at his relatives, no matter how distant, with a seeing eye and an understanding mind...
...The main point is that the book incites you to use both your eyes and your brains...
...These reports of desert plants and birds and beasts start lines of thought which lure the reader's mind off in every conceivable direction...
...Krutch's thinking rises from the fact that he sees the world as a whole and from way back...
...Krutch goes on, "the high-minded impulse to educate, to legislate and to manage become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals...
...Then he wrote a deeply perceptive book about the seasons in New England...
...The man is alive and alert...
...In the end, our author's line of thought brings him to a very practical and useful conclusion...
...I am not as bad as many of my friends in relation to the animals which we stupidly call "lower...
...When I think of this man Krutch, I feel ashamed of myself...
...Some of them, for example, make love much as we do and care for their young in ways which are comparable...
...He sets a standard for the rest of us to live up to...
...In his eyes, the course of evolutionary events has by no means been fixed and mechanical...
...Among the good stories which the volume includes is this one: An Arizona cowboy was conducting a party of tourists over a rocky bed which exhibited the imprints of some long-gone dinosaurs...
...But when I came they told me they was four hundred million years old...
...He could have written essentially the same book about New England or Brazil or Central Africa...
...asked a tourist...
...And I been here four years...
...The fact that author Krutch is talking about the Arizona desert really doesn't matter...
...Now he has been in the Southwestern desert for a few years--and here is this volume about all the adaptations made by living creatures forced to live almost without water...
...Well, of course I don't really know nothing about it myself...
...He used to he a professor of dramatic literature at Columbia...
...We must be a part, not only of the human community, but of the whole community...
...And I am duly appreciative of the insects which fertilize my roses...
...The rabbit which eats the broccoli in my garden seems to understand that I am his friend...
...Them footprints," said the guide, "is four hundred million and four years old...
...Certain outcomes may depend upon answers given by human creatures...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 40
