Cultural / Environmental Studies: A journey into the environmental humanities. Seems like a perfect match: I picked this up at the Traveler Restaurant in Union CT, on the way to an event at Wesleyan University.

This is a really interesting book of essays about culture and environment, seen through Schaberg's visits each summer to northern Michigan, at the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, where he grew up and now spends summers with his parents and family. It's a place that feels like unspoiled nature, but the idea of the anthropocene, our new geological age, when all the world is touched in some way by the impact of human beings elsewhere.

Occasionally, the Michigan essays started to feel slow, but they were actually fun and very thought-provoking. (The form of the book is a bunch of very short essays that comment on each other, too.) The second half is about airports and the air industry, as seen by a well-informed literary and cultural critic. Like all the book, he does close readings of what is published or said by people in that industry. (I'll backtrack to explain how he did this in the Michigan part of the book: In the first part, he relates close readings of books, movies, speeches and essays and relates them to his observations and experiences while out fishing or hiking in the Michigan woods and lakeshore.) It's fascinating, because he has written extensively about the air industry from the point of view of the humanities; you end up realizing that you know a lot about airports and the air industry from your own travel experiences, but you don't really think about them much at all. He does, and has a lot of interesting observations. Ultimately, he gets to the ways in which air travel is destructive to the environment, in a way we all try to avoid thinking about. It's really, really thought-provoking and interesting. He doesn't prescribe specific solutions: he's just pointing up the complexity of the issue and then giving us what we need to move towards our own roles in society's solutions.

I'm making it sound like a science or social science book, but actually, it's a book of essays to get you thinking about the world around you, written by someone who has been thinking it through, and writes in a very interesting and enjoyable way. It's a book you read for pleasure, even though my write up above makes it sound like something that's only "good for you."
I think that it is inspiring me to see the larger shape of the "anthropocene" all around me, when traveling, or when at home.

Left in the LFL near the playground equipment.