(Counterpoint Press, January 2015, 261 pages, $21.99)
Reviewed by Frank Kaminski
“I consider myself to be a professional daydreamer,” reads the opening line of Courtney White’s Internet bio page. And indeed, White–a fine, imaginative thinker and writer who happens to be related to the legendary William Faulkner–has done a prodigious amount of fruitful daydreaming about the future. This dreaming isn’t of the blithely pie-in-the-sky variety, though. The term White has coined for the era in which humanity now lives, the “Age of Consequences,” will have an ominous ring to many ears. Yet his book of the same title brims with such well-founded optimism that potential readers who yearn for the “hope” promised by its subtitle, A Chronicle of Concern and Hope, won’t be disappointed.
White is very good. Even apart from the stellar literary quality of his books and articles, he has vast amounts of firsthand experience in the things about which he writes. A longtime rancher and conservation activist, he has worked extensively to develop and promote nature-based approaches to solving environmental problems. Some examples include using cattle (often assumed to be a menace to land health) to restore desertified landscapes; devising rainwater collection systems that, even in desert settings, can meet a household’s water needs; and harnessing the natural process of photosynthesis to mitigate climate change. In his writings, talks and activism, White strives to show how small, practical steps like these, rather than ever-more-grandiose advancements in industrial-age technology, are the real answer to meeting the calamities before us.
The pieces collected in The Age of Consequences were all written for the millennial generation, to which White’s two children belong. White first started writing them on Earth Day 2008, driven by a need to preserve some record of today’s issues for posterity.
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