A Guide to Living in and with Nature

ON THE ONE HAND, I know that no one has the answers to the questions we face in a warming world. On the other hand, I read M. D. Usher’s wonderful new book, Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World, hoping to find those answers, or at least the vision of a more livable future. Perhaps nothing so flaccid as hope, but a path to believing in humanity’s better nature, one grounded in community and reciprocity. But it’s just not here, not in this book, perhaps not in any book. Usher well knows, I imagine, that building such a trapdoor in a story like the one he is telling does no one any good. We can escape from darkness only into denial or maybe apathy. I don’t know which is worse, or which is better. We cannot go around, Hamlet tells us, we must go through. And what we find on the other side, as Freud later writes, we must learn to endure with resignation.