The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 8 March 2012
by Janisse Ray
There are vast environmental disasters going on around us at all times. Like a tsunami, some are obvious. Like a tiny vanishing species, most are slow and hard to see. Our environmental losses creep up on us. Our beaches erode, our air grows more polluted, our ozone layer vanishes, our native forests are cut down and hauled away. In general, humans are not very vigilant about their deteriorating environment. There are too many forces at work for which environmental destruction is a matter of immediate profit. And, on occasion, a matter of personal survival. Janisse Ray, raised in the shadow of a vanishing long-leaf pine forest along coastal plains of Georgia, recognizes these facts in her sensitive memoir of life in the region. She was raised in a junk yard run by her father, out on a highway outside of Baxley, Georgia. There, she endured a strict but very loving childhood, in a strongly religious environment within the Apostolic faith, as well as one that displayed its conflicts between heaps of scrap metal and deep and beautiful pine forest often enlivened by the destructive power of fire. Ray shows us her own youth, the earthy history of her family, and links the nature of her upbringing to her culture's relationship with the land and its history. Millions of acres of old-growth long-leaf pine forest have been logged down to a mere patchwork of tiny fragments in a sea of forest farms that encourage monoculture, non-native species, and the annihilation of rare species of birds, reptiles and mammals. At the same time, a history of conflict and poverty, development and profit-oriented clearcutting, has resulted in the blasted landscape in which she found herself. This reader has been to Baxley and its environs. It is a beautiful countryside, and it is not immediately obvious what has been lost. It is, however, a fact that a grand and beautiful living environment has been very nearly destroyed. Janisse Ray is compassionate about the causes of this destruction. She knows poverty, the need to develop the forest for survival. But she loves the forest, too, and recognizes some of the potential solutions that could restore some of the diversity that has been so miserably lost. The book alternates between elegiac reflection on the beauty of an old-growth forest, and the gritty reality of growing up in rural Georgia in the 1960s and 70s. The book is sensitive and grounded. It is often moving and troubling. Ray hopes for a brighter future, someday, in a restored long-leaf pine forest. The book, though, may leave the reader unsure which way all of this is leading us.
Also by Janisse Ray: [Drifting into Darien]
[Other books by Women Authors]