Scott Sanders, in his collection of essays titled “A Conservationist Manifesto,” writes passionately for a serious reconsideration of our relationship with the natural world. In his writing he employs several strategies to convince his readers of the imperative need for a lessening of our consumerism and a growth in our awareness of the world we inhabit. These strategies include the use of various religious scriptures, etymological study, our ability of foresight, traditions of literature and theory, and even appeals to our romantic conceptions of nature and its rejuvenating power, all in order to trace our essential connection to the natural world. For Sanders, what it means to be human is not separable from what it means to be a part of nature, thus his tendency to reduce all of these “laudable” institutions of human creation (religion, language, art, plans for the future, etc) to their very origin in nature and the natural cycles of the world.
As Sanders continues to write throughout his essays, what he imparts on the reader is a heavy awareness of how we live. In his writing, he strives to bring our awareness to routines that, for most people, have become unthinking acts of our daily lives. Sanders argues for a deeper form of living, a type of existence that goes beyond the helter-skelter activity of the modern tradition that propels us to collect and consume. Once this awareness is in place, Sanders’ writing assumes that the moral imperative to “live lightly” will automatically follow—for how can one be aware of the harm we are enacting upon the natural world and not feel the necessity for change?
Overall, I found his work extremely compelling. In instances, such as the opening chapters (and in a few places throughout the other essays), he seems to overwrite the problem…his writing straying from the path of compelling arguments on the need of conservation and “lighter” form of human existence, to inhabit places of sentimental and impractical solutions. But these instances by far represented the minority of his collection of arguments—and if read in the honest spirit of the work, bespeak not of naivety and sentimentality, but of the incredible passion and love required for the essential task of caring for the natural world. Of course the opponents of this work, and those who do not wish to be awoken from their dream-state existence of perpetual economic growth and consumerism, will argue that this work more often abandons its position of compelling reasoning and argumentation than I have proposed here, but, in fact, what this reveals is an inability to feel empathetically.
If this work is reviewed in the light of our current understanding of living and functioning in our communities, then this work appears extremely sentimental. But what Sanders is assuming in his writing is the existence of an empathetic reader. He is asking us throughout this collection of essays to step out of our traditional conceptions of human existence and living in order to critically analyze them; to step outside our selfish and anthropocentric concerns in order to imagine ourselves as part of a large network of life; to ask ourselves, honestly, why we feel the need to acquire and consume so much—he is asking us to consider, for the brief amount of time it takes to read this work, something beyond our selfish wants. If the reader is able to grant this to Sanders, for the few hours its takes to read these scant 200 pages, the work is extremely effective. The awareness that Sanders provokes with his writing stirs a sense of morality in the reader, an empathetic need to live for more than just oneself—and even if he fails to mention concrete proposals for executing the changes required to replenish our Earth, this moral imperative one acquires after experiencing his work could be considered the seed of change that he sows in the reader. If we share this seed of concern and help it to grow and seek expression in the world around us, in our families, and in our wider communities, the morality and awareness that Sanders argues for in his essays will not fail to create real and concrete changes in the world we inhabit.
