Paul Brooks

thumb|We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it...as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property...In America today you can murder land for private profit...You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. Paul Brooks (1909 – December 6, 1998) was an American nature writer, lecturer, memoirist, book editor, and environmentalist. He was editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin's general books department for 25 years. Brooks was awarded the 1965 John Burroughs Medal (for his book Roadless Area, published in 1964 by Alfred A. Knopf) and the 1989 Sierra Club John Muir Award. His 1986 memoir recounts his editorial work with various authors, such as Rachel Carson, Roger Tory Peterson, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Winston Churchill, and James Agee. Quotes A variety of mammals — from fussy little red squirrels to black bear and moose — give life and color to the Superior National Forest border-lakes country, but only one gives it shape. This is the beaver’s domain. Evidence of his work was everywhere along our route. He had formed some ponds and raised the level of others. Newly felled trees floated at the water’s edge, their foliage still green; old snags showed where the water level had been raised years ago. Chips lay on the ground, as neat as if cut with an axe, but marked with the slightly concave imprint of the beaver’s chisel tooth. Beaver houses and beaver dams, enduring fabrics of interwoven logs and twigs, showed the amazing strength and technical skill of the animal t hat was, in the last analysis, responsible for our being in that country at all. Roadless Area The Atlantic June 1954 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/06/roadless-area/641085/ We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it not as just so much air, water, and real estate, but as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property. Land is treated like a commodity when it is in fact a trust. Not so long ago our society permitted one human being to own another — to exploit him and even work him to death and not go to jail for it. This is no longer considered acceptable behavior, either by society or by the law. Yet in America today you can murder land for private profit, as is being done, for example, on a vast scale in the southern Appalachians. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. This situation is what is known in history as a "cultural lag." It has occurred because our understanding has not caught up with our technology: a familiar complaint that has become almost a cliché in reference to dramatic modern inventions like the atomic bomb. It is equally true in respect to less spectacular forms of destruction. You can kill land by skinning it alive or by by slowly poisoning it, and it is murder all the same. In the modern world, no one should have life and death control over his land any more than he does over another human being. The Pursuit of Wilderness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1971) ch. 1, pp. 13–14 It is sometimes forgotten that many biologists and ecologists were well aware of the danger long before DDT became a household word, before this and other pesticides began to be produced by the chemical industry on a massive scale. For example, the American Association of Economic Entomologists, following their meeting in New York in December 1944, issued a statement to correct "misunderstanding, over-optimism and distorted impressions" about the new chemical. The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work publisher]Houghton, Mifflin 1972 9780395135174 (1st part of quote; last part of quote; 350 pages) Under the benign leadership of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Concord writers would engage in what has often been called a second war of independence: against cultural domination from abroad and against religious bigotry and rampant materialism at home. Emerson's first book, Nature (essay) Nature, appearing when Thoreau was still in college, was (according to the latter's biographer) "one of the seminal books of his life." Introduction: A Century of Changing Values Speaking for Nature: The Literary Naturalists, from Transcendentalism to the Birth of the American Environmental Movement Courier Corporation 2014 9780486795478 https://books.google.sn/books?id=BN7zAwAAQBAJ&pg=PR13 xii–xvi (320 pages; quote from p. xiii; 1st edition published in 1980 by Houghton Mifflin) External links The Paul Brooks Collection: A Finding Aid The Walden Woods Project https://www.walden.org/work/the-paul-brooks-collection-a-finding-aid/ Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Science authors from the United States Category:Environmentalists from the United States Category:Editors from the United States Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Memoirists from the United States Category:1909 births Category:1998 deaths Category:1909 births Category:1998 deaths Category:Editors from the United States Category:Harvard University alumni