cover image This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence

This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence

Alan Thein Durning. Sasquatch Books, $22.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-57061-040-0

In an amalgam of the personal and the political, Seattle environmental activist Durning speculates on ways to create a society in which residents are connected to one another and to their environment. Using the Pacific Northwest as his laboratory, he provides a historical and ecological context for the area's current growth while discussing alternative plans for economic development. He believes that we can live better while living more lightly on the land. His brief profiles of business people, activists and politicians attempting to move society in this direction are illuminating. Policies dealing with such issues as environment-friendly taxation, land use, transportation, recycling, irrigation, conservation and endangered species are discussed creatively and sensibly. Problems associated with consumerism, central to American environmentalism, are addressed much more superficially than in Durning's previous book, How Much Is Enough? The personal asides, although well enough written, detract from the main message. (Oct.)