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 ...

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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

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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
Los Angeles Times Book Review
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
Toronto Globe and Mail
The Ecology of Eden is no ordinary book; it is, in fact, something of a masterwork. Its colourful references to ancient history, desert religions, bacterial cultures, aboriginal farming practices, Roman gardens and medieval cloisters will make most readers dizzy.

Browsing this book is like canoeing a wild river without a map: You keep on hitting intellectual rapids that get the blood rushing.
— Andrew Nikiforuk

Washington Post Book World
The Ecology of Eden combines contemporary ecology with Biblical and Mesopotamian myths to analyze humanity's dominating and destructive role among earth's living things. This surprising blend, in turn, allows the author to express his anxiety about the ecological past and future with dazzling wit and impressive learning, while indulging an extravagant taste for metaphor and paradox. The book is best described, I think, as a prose epic, inspired by serious intellectual concerns and restlessly reaching for conceits, great and small, like those that delighted the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. In short, Milton's epic crossed with John Donne's conceits gives us Eisenberg's prose version of the story of our exile from Eden and all its multifarious consequences.
— William H. McNeill
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
In an encyclopedic effort encompassing fields as diverse as environmental studies, religion, urban studies, history and literature, among many others, Eisenberg ("The Recording Angel: Music in Our Time") labors to determine "humankind's place in nature, real and imagined." In an extended and somewhat strained metaphor, he contrasts two extremes: that of the mountain and that of the tower, or respect for wilderness and control of nature, respectively. The first and last sections of this four-part work are the strongest. There, Eisenberg summarizes the ways humans have, over evolutionary time, dramatically altered the natural world, and he discusses possibilities for our living more in harmony with nature. The two middle parts examining Edenic myths from various cultures throughout human history and looking at the ways those myths have influenced various aspects of Western civilization are less focused and therefore less successful. Eisenberg's message, that a balance between "planet fetishers" and "managers" is both possible and desirable, is obscured by another extended metaphor, that of "Earth Jazz." Environmental harmony is possible, he contends, if we interact with the earth, responding to each other's nuances, in the same fashion that members of a jazz group play off of one another. Perhaps, but while Eisenberg himself plays many fascinating and surprising riffs here, his composition as a whole seems stretched, not quite balanced.
Library Journal
Contending that the fate of our global environment is contingent upon humankind's conception of what "living with nature" means, Eisenberg searches for an "eco-philosophy" to guide us away from environmental disaster. He critiques the ecological state of our planet as an outgrowth of the evolution of human societiestheir needs, beliefs, and myths. The influence contemporary myths and paradigms have on current problems concludes the book. A scholar on the foundations of Western culture and a master of associations, Eisenberg gives his book clout by drawing witty and brilliant correlations among the natural world, the perspectives of people, scientific thought, and how humans have changed the environment. The book contains extensive and valuable endnotes. Important reading for environmentalists and lay readers who delight in intellectual pursuits to make all of the pieces fit. Frank Reiser, Nassau Community Coll., Garden City, NY
Booknews
Offers an inquiry into the dream of a lost paradise and a startling new vision of humankind's role in nature. Traces the interplay between the facts of our lives and images of paradise, and recasts Western history as a tragicomedy whose heroes, from Gilgamesh to Henry Ford, struggle to regain a paradise lost. Integrates diverse sources from myth, biology, urban studies, garden lore, evolution, and the Bible to explore the actual circumstances of our exile from Eden. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Hal Espen
In this intellectual grab-bag of a book, Eisenberg proves to be one of those all-too-rare literary creatures: a serious environmental thinker who is also a sprightly entertainer and a born raconteur. He winningly riffs his way across centuries of history and broad swaths of science, tracing how our notions of "a time or place of perfect harmony between humans and nature" have both inspired hopeful nostalgia and collided with reality. To Eisenberg, Eden represents not just a theological construct- the home of Adam and Eve before the Fall- but also the idea of once-sacred wilderness. Such paradisiacal retreats aren't merely figments of our imaginations, but places that for millenia have reflected "waves of human-led change and the myths by which humans have made sense of them." he maintains, for example, that the genesis story of Adam and Eve's explusion from the Garden may have roots in the decline of agriculture in ancient Mesopotamia. Big-think theories aside, Eisenberg has a gift for memorable facts ("An acre of good topsoil may house 11 tons of insects, worms, nematodes, fungi, and microbes") and for finding fresh ways to frame environmental arguments. He writes of a centuries-old Cabalist theory which contends that "in order to create the world, God had to draw himself inward - to take a step back, as it were," a strategy in "self-retraction" that Eisenberg urges us to emulate. Though his attempt to act as referee for the embattled factions of contemporary environmentalism - earth-centric Deep Ecologists on one hand and technocratic "Planet Managers" on the other - sometimes comes off as Pollyannaish, the book makes up for it with fascinating digressions on climate change, the natural history of epidemics and plagues, and "biomimesis" (technology learning from nature). In the end, to be human is to wander outside Eden in the world of culture, but "what we can do is stand in a right relation to Eden." It's both a prescription and a warning: "The blade that whirls at the gates of Eden is not our enemy," Eisenberg concludes. "If we try to get around it, we end up trampling either Eden or our own humanity."
— The Outside Magazine
Kirkus Reviews
An unsuccessful synthesis of the natural history of mankind, and of the history of mankind in nature, real and imagined. Eisenberg examines scientific, historical, anthropological, and theological ideas of the ways in which humans fit in to the natural world, from the ancient myth of the Garden of Eden to the medieval great chain of being and modern notions of deep ecology and bioregionalism. He does so with labored asides and tangential arguments that are sure to impress the reader with the author's breadth, but not his depth. It's not enough for Eisenberg to discuss the idea that humankind first compromised itself in nature with the introduction of agriculture, our first attempt to manage the world; he must also tell us everything that he has discovered about the way wheat grows, the way rain falls, and the way a plow works, all in the style of an encyclopedia article. Eisenberg's resulting rambling stroll through all of human knowledge reads like a thick stack of unassimilated notecards, the winnowing of which can yield powerful big-picture volumes like Simon Schama's "Landscape and Memory", with which this shares only a sprawling style of inquiry. (Eisenberg's end-of-book narrative notes, maddeningly enough, are often more interesting than the main text, especially when he takes detours into meaty matters such as anti-Semitism in contemporary environmentalism.) Eisenberg hits on many points of interest and delivers nicely ex cathedra condemnations, in the manner of, say, Charles Reich, of what is wrong with the world ("We and our allies have already junked so much of nature that the machinery is starting to sputter"). But he fails, in the end, to pull all his observations togetherto deliver what he promises in his introduction: a book that tells us how and why we came to be exiled from Eden. Huge, unformed, half-baked, and often interesting, this is the basis for a fine book but not that book itself.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780375705601
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 10/1/1999
  • Series: Vintage Series
  • Edition description: 1 VINTAGE
  • Pages: 640
  • Sales rank: 808,124
  • Product dimensions: 5.25 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Evan Eisenberg lives in western Massachusetts.
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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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