Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders
by Richard Manning
Review by Stephen Uhalley
This provocative, eye-opening work deserves
a place of distinction among the classic environmental wake-up
calls of recent years. Author Richard Manning writes persuasively
and with conviction. A former political writer, he came to
be disillusioned by the politicians' "craven pandering"
to voters with their assurances that "there are no limits."
This has resulted, he says, in our having become "a culture
in denial." Manning finds that it is scientists, contrarily,
who are coming to ask the big, hard, valuable questions demanded
by this dire situation. He characterizes politics as the art
of drawing lines, while science crosses lines in order to
gain understanding.
Unfortunately, in the attempt to construct
politically sound ecological policy based on science, i.e.,
"the endeavor we know as environmentalism," we reduce
its use to a struggle over drawing lines. Those whose interests
are adversely affected by sound environmental approaches control
much of the political process, keeping the debate mired in
a "morass of babel," thus producing the deadlock
that preserves the profitability of the status quo. Greed,
of course, is part of the problem.
Still, the insatiable greed of a few is not
the whole story. The author asserts that it is necessary to
look at a seemingly unanswerable question that will not go
away, i.e., the question of how much is enough. This is a
question that applies to all of us who seem to need larger
homes in order to contain more and more stuff. Manning realizes
the term "paradigm shift" is overused ("so
frequently as to require automatic transmissions"), yet
he believes that here is an instance where it might be applied
appropriately. In this spirit, he goes ahead to propose an
answer radical enough to redirect the nagging question. He
says simply: "We want it all. How much is enough? One
hundred percent. All of it."
This bold postulation leads to novel insights.
The original question "How much is enough?" is also
the fundamental question of wilderness designation. The latter
is a practical exercise that is based on the inherent dichotomy
between wilderness and civilization. Manning makes the "inflammatory"
suggestion that the practice of drawing lines around designated
wilderness areas has outlived its usefulness. He advocates
that we learn to accept the entire environment in which we
live as wilderness, i.e., wilderness without borders. This
is in contradistinction to merely setting a bit of it aside
for preservation while abusing the rest.
Manning's thoughtful observations are based
heavily upon his personal expeditions by light aircraft, boat,
kayak, and afoot, interviewing people who live and work in
the environs of the Pacific Northwest's Inside Passage. The
book abounds with arresting, informed commentary on the awful
degradation of the environment in that beautiful land, whose
wonderful river valleys once provided so bountifully for the
now largely destroyed salmon industry, a principal victim
of the rapacious denuding of forests and power dam construction.
The author includes relevant observations on shrimp farming
in Thailand where the consequences have been unexpectedly
costly, as has been the case with man-made salmon hatcheries
in the Pacific Northwest.
The new approach Manning recommends requires
our "beginning to think about nature's riches, to recognize
that nature has provided us with an inside passage, a passage
that leads, ultimately, within. We can begin this journey
now by reconsidering the words 'rich' and 'enriched.' It all
rests on our understanding the whole world of meaning that
lies in the space between those two words."
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