Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert

Now this is what I call nature writing!

I'd only read single essays by Joseph Wood Krutch before happening upon his 1954 The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation at the recent TC book sale. Already, I'm in the process of adding every single Krutch book to my unofficial wishlist that family members draw on at birthdays and Christmas, because it's just wonderful, wonderful stuff.

It's the kind of book that you just want to wave at people and make them read, rather than offering up selections, but this might be a kind of motto: "It is not ignorance but knowledge that is the mother of wonder" (p.149). Krutch is defending the theory of evolution against its opponents at this point, but it applies to so many of his discussions, whether it's the mysteries of lichen, the speed of a roadrunner, or the slow growth of saguaro.

To some extent, much of the information in the book is common knowledge now, but 1954 was a different epoch, scientifically speaking. For example, we now know that lichen (one of Krutch's many minor passions) is a synthesis of fungus and algae: this wasn't experimentally proven until 1939, though it had been theorized in the middle of the 19th century. For another example, his discussion of dispersed plant and animal populations keeps foundering on inexplicable gaps between locations, such as Africa and North America, but again, he's writing in 1954: the theory of plate tectonics was barely a glimmer until the key research was performed and published between 1957 and 1967. Krutch is writing conversationally and accessibly about contemporary, cutting-edge research, and he's even doing some of it in his desert home. Self-deprecatingly, he describes his own research as if it's merely the pottering about of some random retired gentleman.

And really great prose style, too. There's something so appealing about nature writing of that era, even where the science has been superseded, and even where the sociopolitics are dated. Krutch's politics seem okay to me, at least in The Voice of the Desert, and his science is up to date for 1954, so it all comes together beautifully.

One regular point of interest for Krutch is how to distinguish between the human and the non-human. He has no patience for exceptionalism that places humans at the pinnacle of anything: intelligence is a muddy thing to locate or define, given the complexity with which insects live their independent lives; heroism has no logical connection with intentional action, so he sees as especially heroic the first beings that/who crawled or jumped from the water to see if maybe they could survive on land (rather like soldiers drafted into service whose instincts drive them to actions subsequently labelled "heroic"); and human courting, or "love," is less complex and more utilitarian than the courting behaviour of many other species.

For Krutch, the land comes first. Everything that lives in, on, under, above, or through the land has a fundamental equality, and he's no shy about objecting to exploitation, to anthropocentrism's consequences, and to changing the desert into something more useful (by which he means fertile for crops useful to humans). He's writing a long time before the first Earth Day, but he's engaging with and extending the insights of Aldo Leopold, who has had so much more press than Krutch has ever had.

Okay, I'm just going to interrupt myself at this random place in the discussion. My point, quite simply, is that everyone should read some Juseph Wood Krutch. My first book-length encounter was with this Voice of the Desert, but maybe there are better options. Any suggestions?