Book Review

In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land
Stephanie Mills
237 pages, Beacon Press 1995

Stephanie Mills' newest and third book is an uplifting, hopeful read. It is also erudite, feeling, funny and written with such remarkable wit and civility that the reader must frequently remind herself of the books' baneful subject matter: the suicidal human compulsion to devastate its nest and everybody else's.

Yet In Service is not an apocalyptic tale. Mills writes with optimism about the human capacity to redress trespasses against Nature through the good, mindful work of restoration. Restoration, Mills explains, is "the art and science of repairing damaged ecosystems to the greatest possible degree of historic authenticity." She then illustrates how people actually do just that.

In Service is, primarily, five restoration stories. Mills, an amiable narrator and keen observer, details her visit to the restored Wisconsin farm of the great land ethicist Aldo Leopold. She next walks through a resurrected Chicago prairie, then moves onto a revived northern California watershed. Mills relates the history of a 25-year-old intentional, utopian community in southern India, where ground "baked terra cotta solid by the tropical sun" has been turned, sow's ear-like, into silken fertile soil. Mills' own struggle to bring ecologic balance back to the Scotch pine plantation that is her Leelanau County home is the story that starts and finishes In Service. It is good to find authors who practice what they preach.

Diverse in geography and character, the In Service stories find unity in a recurring message: Restoration is only half the equation. Reinhabiting what we restore necessarily completes it. To reinhabit, Mills writes, is to become "'fully alive in and with a place. (Reinhabiting) involves applying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its exploiter.'"

Even though restoration campaigns are frequently prepared by so-called experts, Mills makes it abundantly clear that the work can be undertaken by anyone, at the grassroots, and is thoroughly achievable in the absence of computers. The beauty of restoration and reinhabitation, Mills demonstrates, is its essential hands-on-ness, and the attendant transformative effect. By way of illustration, Mills describes an enervating debate between herself and a friend about virtual reality. "That the term 'life' is now applied to things apart from biology is a measure of how rapidly this audacity has proceeded," she says. "Casually we propose to go forward, to go Nature one better: to design plants immune to pests, animals that produce like factories, machines that mimic cells and people invulnerable to death. The human mind can be so lethally self-interested."

Cyberspace, that fatuous, gonzo-techno New frontier concocted by the human mind, is not the realm in which the real ecolocgic work takes place. Mills' book unambiguously asserts that restoring abundance and biologic diversity--that is to say wildness--to our individual places, watersheds and local dwellings is the work of direct experience, dirt under the nails rather than nails on the keyboard. The paragons of direct experience, Mills writes, were "land-based tribal people" whose "subsistence lifeways...worked well for millennia and left only modest traces on the land." They did it without computers, and they did it without environmental organizations.

The ecologic crisis In Service examines must be addressed from many angles, Mills asserts. However, she adds, the long-term solutions won't come out of the environmental movement. It is a stop-gap approach, which doesn't "dare to question our power arrangements, either intra- or interspecies, and only (seeks) to sanitize civilization," Mills writes. "I thought the environmental movement (foresaked) Mystery for policy, wildness for respectability--selling out, in short." Them's not fightin' words, but the voice of long, personal experience.

Mills' critique of technology and environmental reform--i.e. as specific reference points in the book--comprises only a fractional portion of In Service. Her views will no doubt commence a percussive round of chest pounding and protesting too much, which is too bad; a very important point will be missed: The ecologic crisis is a crisis of culture and character. In that respect, In Service, although not prescriptive, is, indeed, an operator's manual for human life in the 21st Century. Change, if we are to make it, begins at home, with the self.

"I have not been able to forge a purely intellectual argument for the sacredness of Nature and against the profanity of industrial civilization," Mills writes. "Nature per se--ancient forests, prairies, termite mounds, and hollow wing bones--ought to be argument enough for humility. Why this is not self-evident eludes me.." It is puzzling. As is the notion that an intellectual work, a book, can jog Big Brain into remembering, then feeling the right way of the spirit. The irony is excruciating. But to read In Service is to "(i)magine a world where the life of the Earth and the human spirit could go on, evolving, diversifying, adapting, changing, and surprising, fearlessly: if it can be imagined," Mills writes, "it can come to be. If it can be recalled, it can be restored."

Return to the Index of Synapse 35, Spring Equinox 1996