Fiona Reynolds, The Fight for Beauty

The former director of Britain's redoubtable National Trust, Fiona Reynolds has been in all the rooms that matter for British natural conservation over the last few decades. Since beginning this work in 1980, and as a student before that, she has developed a masterful command of the history of British conservation, land-use planning, and environmental feeling. All these things are impressively marshalled in her learned, passionate The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future.

It's not for everyone, this book, and out here on Canada's west coast, it's not entirely for me. The uniquely British concerns of the National Trust derive from just how intensely managed the British Isles have been for many, many centuries, and nowhere else on Earth has precisely the same kinds of concerns. It's a kind of "inside baseball" book, in that sense, sometimes densely so with its level of detail.

Still, it's remarkable in its precision and its clarity, and I found it a deeply satisfying read even if it's almost entirely theoretical for me on Vancouver Island.

I'll be pondering for some time, I suspect, her emphasis on beauty. Loosely speaking, her argument is that even though we disagree about the details, people tend to agree that there's such a thing as beauty in the material world, as well as to agree that beauty shouldn't be extinguished, so we should go back to talking about beauty when we're trying to enhance or increase environmental protections.

Here's how she puts it in an early chapter: "in losing the word 'beauty' we have lost something special from our ability to shape our present and our future" (p.59).

It's more complicated than that, of course, but when she argues that phrases like "ecosystem services" or "integrated coastal zone management" are almost toxic in their bureaucratese, well, I don't disagree. I don't know that talking about beauty is the answer, but it's clear that trumpeting "ecosystem services" won't be the music that carries the day, either.

A wise, deeply knowledgeable book.