This Bright Land: A Personal View(4 The Brooks Atkinson)

In 1971, when Brooks Atkinson wrote This Bright Land, the modern conservation movement was being driven by new awareness of science's shortcomings. The early conservation movement, built on John Muir and Henry David Thoreau's appreciation of nature, was well aware of man's ability to outstrip his environment, but until the 1960s society still trusted man's ingenuity to fix any problem, even as mankind willfully depleted his natural resources. However, Rachel Carson's 1962 publication of Silent Spring demonstrated this trust was misplaced. Her research into the harmful effect of DDT demonstrated that mankind's incautious use of science and technology could destroy the environmental base, that it was a fragile base. It was instinctive then that a Thoreau student, such as Brooks Atkinson, would quickly understand not only the old dangers in mankind's choices, such as deforestation, but also newer problems such as hazardous chemicals, or air and water pollution, that threaten both flora and fauna in This Bright Land of America.

Review :
BROOKS ATKINSON GIVES A RAVE REVIEW TO NATURE, A MIXED REVIEW TO CIVILIZATION An elderly English professor of mine occasionally conducted our writing seminars on the patio of his house, hard by a woods on the outskirts of Nashville. One day, while we sipped beer and he played his folk guitar-on such afternoons it seemed we rarely discussed writing-we were interrupted by a songbird that had come to feed in the backyard. The professor stopped his playing and we all listened for a while, amused and somewhat embarrassed. Finally the old man said, "That bird is mine, you know. We understand each other." My English professor and Brooks Atkinson, the former drama critic and foreign correspondent, would have gotten along famously. In This Bright Land (Doubleday/Natural History Press, $5.95) Atkinson writes about the natural wonder of America and its systematic despoiling by four centuries of "civilized" man. Yet his is not the usual polemic leveled against the abusers of our continent. Rather, it is a low-keyed description of our natural resources and an appeal for their preservation. It is not the kind of book that makes one want to throw oneself in front of bulldozers, but rather to take long walks through a Vermont woods or pole a flat-bottomed boat into the quiet of the Florida Everglades. Atkinson tells us what America once was-"Earth's only paradise," in the words of an Elizabethan poet-then gives us a gentle tour of what is left. He takes us down the Mississippi. He guides us through the Grand Canyon, at whose edge the first explorers turned back in disgust, branding it a wasteland. He celebrates the wonder of New Jersey's Great Swamp, which some would prefer as a jetport. He shows us the Everglades, nearly killed by drought a few years back when the Army Corps of Engineers, in the interest of flood control, shut off the imperceptible flow of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee that keeps the 'Glades alive. The point of the book is nowhere stated so cogently as in its last chapter. Atkinson lives in the Catskills near a section of state forest planted in the 1930s when local farms and pastures became unproductive. One August morning, Atkinson notes, "a solitary rose-breasted grosbeak sat in the top spray of a tall spruce and sang with great resonance and beauty.... There seemed to be no practical motive for singing...[but] after thirty-five years, the spruces had created an environment in which a grosbeak felt content, and he said so gloriously." In other words, Atkinson seems to say, we don't need cosmic reasons for saving what we have. The song of a grosbeak on a summer morn will do nicely. Kim Chapin Sports Illustrated June 12 1972 THIS BRIGHT LAND: A Personal View . Brook Atkinson. Doubleday. $5.95 Retired from playwatching, the longtime New York Times drama critic, Atkinson has for some years immersed himself in birdwatching and the pleasures and protection of nature. Atkinson the naturalist-ecologist is no whit less interesting than he was in his former role. The beauty of his book lies in the purity of his feeling as he writes of the Great Swamp in New Jersey's flatland, the vanishing California condor, the redwood, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, the once great Mississippi River and Florida's South Biscayne Bay-all classical subjects for the militant ecologist. Atkinson brings little fresh information to the veteran reader in this genre, but his civilized horror at what civilization has done to our land and water, and his blend of learning and style, are attractive. Illustrated with linecuts. March 10, 1972 Publishers Weekly