The Ecology of Eden: An Inquiry into the Dream of Paradise and a New Vision of Our Role in Nature

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Overview

"Dazzling . . . a prose epic." --The Washington Post

A mountain peak, a rolling pasture, a boulevard alive with sound and light--each of us carries, deep inside, a dream of paradise.  In this magisterial contribution to the literature of ecology and the environment, our nostalgia for the myth of paradise--the primeval, self-sufficient, nurturing garden where mankind was born--is the starting point of a brilliant inquiry into what our place in Nature has been and ought to be.    

Writing in lively, imaginative prose and drawing deftly upon disciplines as varied as biology, geology, anthropology, history, physics, and music, ...

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Overview

"Dazzling . . . a prose epic." --The Washington Post

A mountain peak, a rolling pasture, a boulevard alive with sound and light--each of us carries, deep inside, a dream of paradise.  In this magisterial contribution to the literature of ecology and the environment, our nostalgia for the myth of paradise--the primeval, self-sufficient, nurturing garden where mankind was born--is the starting point of a brilliant inquiry into what our place in Nature has been and ought to be.    

Writing in lively, imaginative prose and drawing deftly upon disciplines as varied as biology, geology, anthropology, history, physics, and music, Evan Eisenberg examines the ways in which people have envisioned and tried to re-create the earthly paradise even as they have dealt with the often disastrous effects of their increasing manipulation of the environment. An encyclopedic survey of efforts to heal the dangerous rift between culture and nature, The Ecology of Eden is a landmark work that is enormously suggestive, informative, and a joy to read.
    
"It's a question many writers have tackled, from Paul Ehrlich to E. O. Wilson: How can we survive while population grows, resources dwindle . . . and the threat of global climate change looms ominously? Few have explored it with more originality or historic sweep. . . . A rich harvest, filled with many kernels of wisdom about the future of our elusive Eden."
--San Francisco Chronicle
    
"An ambitious, thickly braided narrative that makes the clearest bid to nudge the dialectic along. . . . Eisenberg traces the story engagingly, energetically, with a remarkable breadth of learning and a metaphor-maker's eye. . . . A vision of substance and genuine insight." -Los Angeles Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

Frederic Golden
A rich harvest, filled with many kernels of wisdom about the future of our elusive Eden. . . How can we survive while population grows. . . species vanish and the threat of global climate change looms ominously? Few have explored it with more originality or historic sweep than Evan Eisenberg in The Ecology of Eden. -- San Francisco Chronicle
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
An ambitious, thickly braided narrative that makes the clearest bid to nudge the dialectic along. In the 1940s, Aldo Leopold exhorted us to reject a narrow species focus and "think like a mountain." Fifty years later Eisenberg calls on us to think like a Mountain-and-Tower-his terms for the opposites, wilderness and city, whose interplay defines our experience. We turn to these extremes as cosmopoles, places where transcendent meaning emerges in mundane life. Some get Commandments from Mt. Sinai or the High Sierras; others build Babel Towers and cyclotrons to spy the face of God. The result is a familiar division, Nature Fetishism versus Nature Management. Eisenberg's message, difficult for explorers at either pole to hear, is that humans live in between. In effect Eisenberg pans the camera a step further back than Leopold, showing us not just Nature whole but wholly within nature-and-culture, a system we need to see entire. The best vantage is historical, and Eisenberg traces the story engagingly, energetically, with a remarkable breadth of learning and a metaphor-maker's eye ... This just might be the only book you'll find whose argument covers the biochemistry of eukaryotic cells and the history of garden design, the tale of Gilgamesh and the laws of thermodynamics. Eisenberg excels at pithy exposition; he's got great short accounts of the rise and spread of sprawl, the ecological history of the plague, the decline of mass transit, the history of the prairie as the seeds themselves might tell it. He realizes the power of the well-wrought image and, a stand-up poet doing rapid-fire shtick, he's got a million of 'em.... All that verbal energy serves a vision of substance and genuine insight.
— Eric Zencey

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780375705601
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 10/1/1999
  • Edition description: 1 VINTAGE
  • Pages: 640
  • Series: Vintage Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.25 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Evan Eisenberg lives in western Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue: Persons from Porlock
1 The Marriage of Grass and Man 3
2 Axis Powers 9
3 Dirt Cheap 22
4 The New Pangaea 35
5 The Human Mushroom 52
6 Life on the Edge 58
7 The Mountain of the Gods 69
8 The Tower of Babel 80
9 The Fiery Sword 86
10 The Rivers of Eden 99
11 Storming the Mountain 111
12 The Highways of Rome 126
13 Arcadia 143
14 Lost Illusions 160
15 The Walled Garden 170
16 Patting Nature on the Head 179
17 The Cloister and the Plow 191
18 Bringing a Statue to Life 201
19 Leaping the Fence 216
20 Westward in Eden 240
21 A Goddess Quantified 262
22 Managers and Fetishers 283
23 Bebop 292
24 The Wild Garden 306
25 The Tree of Life 320
26 The Tree of Knowledge 335
27 The Urban Animal 361
28 Reclaiming Arcadia 379
29 Two Networks 397
30 Hot and Cool 412
31 The Foothills of Eden 422
Notes 437
Bibliography 559
Index 594
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