English Pastoral

 English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks is one of the great eco-memoirs of this or any generation. It's an homage to the English countryside, which has operated under a shared local knowledge for millennia. Until recently, that is: the gains in industrial farming over the last few decades have rendered the landscape unrecognizable and deadly to human and non-human life. Rebanks explains this deliberately. He traces his grandfather's practices to his family's modernization to their backlash to the degradation. There's a moral outrage underneath his stories, but he's smart enough to avoid a good/evil binary. There are countless reasons why our food supply exists in its current form. We can decide what future we want. Reading from a non-farming perspective, I learned an enormous amount, and everyday trips to the supermarket are now fraught with complexity.

This slim book stirred me on an emotional level. I thought of a Native American Ecosystems class I took in college, where the thesis for the course was essentially that our landscape has evolved alongside humans, that there is no "untouched" wilderness. I thought of my brother, who bow hunts for elk and catches his own fish. (We just had his elk sausage for dinner.) I thought of the great Steven Rinella, who won't eat "game" unless he harvests it himself. I thought of my friend Kevin, who raises cattle sustainably and humanely. I thought of Wendell Berry and John Muir and Barry Lopez. I thought of my college summer jobs, driving combines and burning fields. James Rebanks is a remarkable man leading a remarkable life, and I am eager to read more of his books and follow his career.