April 12, 2006
Eat Nature
I took this on the way back from dropping my daughter at school. I usually listen to WDUQ's Sean Doherty and Bob Studebaker banter about sports. But today I was busy trying to take pictures out the window.
On the way to picking up my daughter from school, I usually listen to Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Yesterday she interviewed, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, and the more recent The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan discussed the industrial methods which produce the foods we eat and some of the alternatives. At any moment, I thought Wendell Berry would sprout out of Pollan's chest like something in Men in Black and start reciting to Gross chapter and verse the problems with our techno-industrial agricultural system. Pollan did a pretty good job on his own. I'm going to have to check out The Omnivore's Dilemma; and I might even have to add him to my pantheon of non-fiction writers, which stands as follows:
Fernand Braudel
Finley Peter Dunne
William Whyte
Jane Jacobs
Daniel Kemmis
Lewis Mumford
Stewart Brand
Kevin Kelly
Wendell Berry
Jerry Mander
H. D. Thoreau
A list seems so... linear. Have you thought about graphing or drawing how these writers are or are not connected to each other? Is the shape a tree, or a web, or an archipelago...?
And is Dave Hickey (Air Guitar) on the list?
Posted by: EGP at April 12, 2006 02:53 PM