Ask the Filmmaker: Books? Huh?

posted in: Arcosanti, Other Work | 2

Dear Filmmaker,

Read any good books lately or is it all A Life’s Work all the time?

K.R.

Dear K.R.:

It’s definitely not all A Life’s Work all the time. And in fact, I have recently read a very good book: A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s nonfiction book about walking the Appalachian Trail. It’s funny, sad, scary and enlightening. I highly recommend it.

I would like to share this passage.

…America’s attitude to nature is, from all sides, very strange if you ask me… In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition–either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could co-exist to their mutual benefit–that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.

Here’s a quote from my interview with Paolo Soleri.

Children like very much to be here [Arcosanti]. They can look out and find nature. They can move into nature. That is a very important experience…

So the child growing in the exurban sprawl, unless it is able to take transportation say by car, maybe has to drive one hour or two hours. He doesn’t really get the impact of nature. And that isolation is cruel. A person should be able to experience at a young age, what we are enveloped by.

Have you, Dear Reader, read any good books lately?

2 Responses

  1. Bill

    I take exception to the quote “So the child growing in the exurban sprawl, unless it is able to take transportation say by car, maybe has to drive one hour or two hours. He doesn’t really get the impact of nature. And that isolation is cruel. A person should be able to experience at a young age, what we are enveloped by.”

    That’s exactly what Bryson means about “deifying” nature. Why not tell kids that where they are is where there’s nature? The true cruelty is telling them they are alienated from this wonderful thing and can only be a part of nature if they get in a goddamn car and drive two hours!

    A weed-covered lot ; a tree anywhere; a pigeon dead in the road; they’re all nature — you don’t have to drive two hours to get to nature. And to tell children that they do is part of what’s fueling our messed up relationship with the environment.

  2. David Licata

    Maybe take issue with my use of Soleri’s puny quote.

    I agree with you, Bill, it’s all nature, and nature is all around us. And a parent could use roadkill as a nature lesson. But I think it’s difficult to get a sense one’s place within nature, to get a sense of being part of it and not separate from it, in places designed (suburbs and cities) to give the illusion that nature is something we control.

    I don’t think Soleri is someone who deifies nature. (I’m pretty sure of this, actually. He’d smile at the word deify, for sure.) He is responsible, very knowingly so, of disrupting a fragile desert environment by constructing his “laboratory,” Arcosanti, in it. But he is trying to do so in as minimally and frugally a way as possible.

    But I think now I’m rambling. What was the question again?

    Thanks for leaving the comment.

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