Ill Nature [Paperback]

Best known as a novelist, but also an accomplished journalist, Joy Williams has a great gift for inducing guilt trips. No one is safe: in the opening pages of Ill Nature, she implicates every inhabitant of the "First World" for causing the death of the natural world, the victim of our material urges. She writes that the thousands of new digital television towers being erected today, for example, are responsible for the death of millions of songbirds that unwittingly slam into them or their guy wires in mid-flight; by extension, anyone who owns a digital TV set is partly to blame for this unforeseen episode in the larger ecological crisis, no matter how well-intentioned those viewers may be.

Turning a sharp eye on ecotourists, zoo-goers, hunters, politicians, developers, expectant mothers, carnivores, conservatives, liberals, and just about anyone else who crosses her path, Williams decries the rapid loss of the wild, which in her eyes is no mere abstraction. Sometimes hyperbolic, but more often right on target, she argues that it will take more than a few cosmetic fixes to mend all the wounds that the environment has sustained. Dystopian to the last (as she writes, "You are increasingly looking at and living in proxy environments created by substitution and simulation," and not the real world at all), Williams brings plenty of heat to the page--and plenty of light, too. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Sharp, sarcastic and uncompromising, Williams tackles a host of controversial subjects in this collection of 19 impassioned essays dealing mostly with humans' abuses of the natural world. Two of the collection's strongest essays deal with animal rights: "The Killing Game," an antihunting essay first published, to great furor, in Esquire, and "The Animal People," which casts a harsh eye on the agricultural, medical and environmental establishments for their treatment of animals. Other pieces note the diminished state of African wildlife ("Safariland"), the increasing number of babies born in the United States despite the threat of overpopulation ("The Case Against Babies") and the impact of consumer culture on the natural world ("Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp"). An acclaimed novelist (The Quick and the Dead) and Guggenheim fellow, Williams writes that her essays, unlike her stories, are "meant to annoy and trouble and polarize"; she terms her own nonfiction style "unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided." Readers will likely find all this true. At times, the collection falters under the weight of Williams's anger and moral indignation, and a few essays that are only loosely nature-related ("Sharks and Suicide," "The Electric Chair" and "Why I Write") undermine its momentum. However, her forceful writing and vivid depictions of habitat destruction and animal abuse ("Neverglades," "Wildebeest") make for compelling reading. Williams believes that the "ecological crisis" facing us is essentially a "moral issue," one caused by "culture and character, and a deep change in personal consciousness is needed." While it is unlikely that her combative rants will win new converts, some environmentalists may find this book a powerful call to action.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Adult/High School-These 19 essays were first published (some in different form) in magazines as diverse as Esquire and Mother Jones. Alternating long essays with short ones, Williams looks at the state of nature and the destruction wrought upon it by humans from rich nations-and the inexcusable obliviousness of those people to what they are doing. She charms with wit and passion: as she says in the last essay, "Why I Write," "The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life." These are, by that standard, good pieces of writing. The title of one chapter, "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimps," conveys something of Williams's freewheeling style. "The Case Against Babies" (another knockout) might come as a revelation to many young women, even as it outrages some of their parents. "The Killing Game" is probably the best-known piece here because of the hate mail it provoked when first published. There are no "pros and cons" here: wrong is wrong, as every child knows (and many teens have not yet forgotten), and Williams knows her own mind. Though the subjects are often distressing, many teens will identify strongly with her moral outrage at injustices and cruelties inflicted upon the defenseless, and will be heartened to find a writer who so effectively expresses so much of what they feel. The book has a hideous cover but readers who get past its off-putting face will be rewarded-whether they hate it or love it-with a truly colorful reading experience.

Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

This is not a comfortable book; nor can it be cast aside as just another tiresome list of environmental ills. In this collection of essays, Williams decries the ecological devastation caused by development, technology, and an out-of-control population. She minces no words in her treatment of hunters, wildlife managers, scientists who use animals in research, and a general public addicted to consumerism. Her writing is heavy with sarcasm and irony. It is also compelling, and the ten chapters go quickly. Williams is a seasoned writer, the author of several works of fiction (The Quick and the Dead) as well as nonfiction and recipient of a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Although the chapters "Sharks and Suicide" and "Hawk" diverge from her environmental theme to follow other musings, as a whole the work is effective and will likely leave the reader angry, frustrated, distressed, or depressed, which is, after all, her intent. Highly recommended for environmental and general collections.DMaureen J. Delaney-Lehman, Lake Superior State Univ., Sault Ste. Marie, MI
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Sharp and satiric in her novels, which include The Quick and the Dead [BKL O 1 00], Williams is even fiercer in her essays. She will not soft-pedal or sweet-talk; she means to incite, rattle, and pique. Extremely well informed, Williams writes, in a froth and a fury, about the ravaged state of nature. In "Safariland," she both marvels at the wonder of elephants and vanquishes the fantasy that wildlife still roams free in Africa. Williams calls the Everglades the Neverglades because that great wilderness is no more. She cuts through the self-serving rhetoric hunters spin to justify their lust for blood; questions extravagant artificial insemination procedures; and bluntly describes the brutal transformation of animals into myriad, thoughtlessly consumed products. And she looks directly into the heart of wildness in wrenching tributes to a beloved dog who suddenly turned vicious and to the fabulously crazy punk-rock performance artist Wendy O. Williams. These howls, protests, and pleas for sanity are lacerating, brilliant, and necessary. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

“Enchanting and explosive.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Glows with fire-and-brimstone passion.” –The Boston Globe

“Rise[s] above the din of dreary environmental writing and smack[s] us in the face with the sorry state of our natural affairs.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Joy Williams brings her fierce compassion to bear on subjects she holds dear: the vanishing Florida Everglades, the miracle of animals in our lives, why she writes. Her words are tonic, wholly original; she is a writer to reckon with.” –O: The Oprah Magazine

“Joy Williams’ essays . . . manage to articulate with wit, elegance, intelligence, and appropriate disdain, the enterprise in which we are all implicated.” –W. S. Merwin

“Joy Williams has been one of our best writers for ever so long, and now she has written a scorcher: a truth-teller’s expedition, and true to the heart.” –Edward Hoagland

“Reading Joy Williams . . . is like falling down into some deep blue subaqueous place of mesmerizing wonder.” –Rick Bass

“Funny, piercing and brilliant . . . Ill Nature destroys a number of our culture-wide illusions and exposes them for the cruel, cowardly and downright stupid attitudes and beliefs that we often have toward the natural world.” –Sun-Sentinel

“Williams makes her case with such wit and weight that her punch lands like a John Ruiz haymaker.” –Entertainment Weekly

Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving, Ill Nature is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.

“Enchanting and explosive.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Glows with fire-and-brimstone passion.” –The Boston Globe

“Rise[s] above the din of dreary environmental writing and smack[s] us in the face with the sorry state of our natural affairs.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Joy Williams brings her fierce compassion to bear on subjects she holds dear: the vanishing Florida Everglades, the miracle of animals in our lives, why she writes. Her words are tonic, wholly original; she is a writer to reckon with.” –O: The Oprah Magazine

“Joy Williams’ essays . . . manage to articulate with wit, elegance, intelligence, and appropriate disdain, the enterprise in which we are all implicated.” –W. S. Merwin

“Joy Williams has been one of our best writers for ever so long, and now she has written a scorcher: a truth-teller’s expedition, and true to the heart.” –Edward Hoagland

“Reading Joy Williams . . . is like falling down into some deep blue subaqueous place of mesmerizing wonder.” –Rick Bass

“Funny, piercing and brilliant . . . Ill Nature destroys a number of our culture-wide illusions and exposes them for the cruel, cowardly and downright stupid attitudes and beliefs that we often have toward the natural world.” –Sun-Sentinel

“Williams makes her case with such wit and weight that her punch lands like a John Ruiz haymaker.” –Entertainment Weekly

Joy Williams lives in Arizona.

Save the Whales,

Screw the Shrimp

i don't want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately--that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly . . . anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there--some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers--well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out--maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out--such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

Pascal said that it is easier to endure death without thinking about it than to endure the thought of death without dying. This is how you manage to dance the strange dance with that grim partner, nuclear annihilation. When the U.S. Army notified Winston Churchill that the first A-bomb had been detonated in New Mexico, it chose the code phrase BABIES SATISFACTORILY BORN. So you entered the age of irony, and the strange double life you've been leading with the world ever since. Joyce Carol Oates suggests that the reason writers--real writers, one assumes--don't write about Nature is that it lacks a sense of humor and registers no irony. It just doesn't seem to be of the times--these slick, sleek, knowing, objective, indulgent times. And the word environment. Such a bloodless word. A flat-footed word with a shrunken heart. A word increasingly disengaged from its association with the natural world. Urban planners, industrialists, economists, developers use it. It's a lost word, really. A cold word, mechanistic, suited strangely to the coldness generally felt toward Nature. It's their word now. You don't mind giving it up. As for environmentalist, that's one that can really bring on the yawns, for you've tamed and tidied it, neutered it quite nicely. An environmentalist must be calm, rational, reasonable, and willing to compromise; otherwise, you won't listen to him. Still, his beliefs are opinions only, for this is the age of radical subjectivism. Some people might prefer a Just for Feet store to open space, and they shouldn't be castigated for it. All beliefs and desires and needs are pretty much equally valid. The speculator has just as much right to that open space as the swallow, and the consumer has the most rights of all. Experts and computer models, to say nothing of lawsuits, can hold up environmental checks and reform for decades. The Environmental Protection Agency protects us by finding "acceptable levels of harm" from pollutants and then issuing rules allowing industry to pollute to those levels. Any other approach would place limits on economic growth. Limits on economic growth! What a witchy notion! The EPA can't keep abreast of progress and its unintended consequences. They're drowning in science. Whenever they do lumber into action and ban a weed killer, say (and you do love your weed killers--you particularly hate to see the more popular ones singled out), they have to pay all disposal costs and compensate the manufacturers for the market value of the chemicals they still have in stock.

That seems . . . that seems only fair, you say. Financial loss is a serious matter. And think of the farmers when a particular effective herbicide or pesticide is banned. They could be driven right out of business.

Farmers grow way too much stuff anyway. Federal farm policy, which subsidizes overproduction, encourages bigger and bigger farms and fewer and fewer farmers. The largest farms don't produce food at all, they grow feed. One third of the wheat, three quarters of the corn, and almost all of the soybeans are used for feed. You get cheap hamburgers; the agribusiness moguls get immense profits. Subsidized crops are grown with subsidized water created by turning rivers great and small into a plumbing system of dams and irrigation ditches. Rivers have become conduits. Wetlands are increasingly being referred to as filtering systems--things deigned useful because of their ability to absorb urban runoff, oil from roads, et cetera.

We know that. We've known that for years about farmers. We know a lot these days. We're very well informed. If farmers aren't allowed to make a profit by growing surplus crops, they'll have to sell their land to developers, who'll turn all that arable land into office parks. Arable land isn't Nature anyway, and besides, we like those office parks and shopping plazas, with their monster supermarkets open twenty-four hours a day and aisle after aisle after aisle of products. It's fun. Products are fun.

Farmers like their poisons, but ranchers like them even more. There are well-funded federal programs like the Agriculture Department's "Animal Damage Control Unit," which, responding to public discomfort about its agenda, decided recently to change its name to the euphemistic Wildlife Services. Wildlife Services poisons, shoots, and traps thousands of animals each year. Servicing diligently, it kills bobcats, foxes, black bears, mountain lions, rabbits, badgers, countless birds--all to make this great land safe for the string bean and the corn, the sheep and the cow, even though you're not consuming as much cow these days. A burger now and then, but burgers are hardly cows at all, you feel. They're not all our cows, in any case, for some burger matter is imported. There's a bit of Central American burger matter in your bun. Which is contributing to the conversion of tropical rain forest into cow pasture. Even so, you're getting away from meat these days. You're eschewing cow. It's seafood you love, shrimp most of all. And when you love something, it had better watch out, because you have a tendency to love it to death. Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. It's more common on menus than chicken. In the wilds of Ohio, far, far from watery shores, four out of the six entrees on a menu will be shrimp something-or-other, available, for a modest sum. Everywhere, it's all the shrimp you can eat or all you care to eat, for sometimes you just don't feel like eating all you can. You are intensively harvesting shrimp. Soon there won't be any left, and then you can stop. Shrimpers put out these big nets, and in these nets, for each pound of shrimp, they catch more than ten times that amount of fish, turtles, and dolphins. These, quite the worse for wear, are dumped back in. There is an object called TED (Turtle Excluder Device) that would save thousands of turtles and some dolphins from dying in the net, but shrimpers are loath to use TEDs, as they argue it would cut the size of their shrimp catch.

We've heard about TED, you say.

At Kiawah Island, off the coast of South Carolina, visitors go out on Jeep "safaris" through the part of the island that hasn't been developed yet. ("Wherever you see trees," the guide says, "it's actually a lot.") The visitors (i.e., potential buyers) drive their own Jeeps, and the guide talks to them by radio. Kiawah has nice beaches, and the guide talks about turtles. When he mentions the shrimpers' role in the decline of the turtle, the shrimpers, who share the same frequency, scream at him. Shrimpers and most commercial fishermen (many of them working with drift and gill nets anywhere from six to thirty miles long) think of themselves as an endangered species. A recent newspaper headline said, "SHRIMPERS SPARED ANTI-TURTLE DEVICES." Even so, with the continuing wanton depletion of shrimp beds, they will undoubtedly have to find some other means of employment soon. They might, for instance, become part of that vast throng laboring in the tourist industry.

Tourism has become an industry as destructive as any other. You are no longer benign in traveling somewhere to look at the scenery. You never thought there was much gain in just looking anyway; you've always preferred to use the scenery in some manner. In your desire to get away from what you've got, you've caused there to be no place to get away to. You're just all bumpered up out there. Sewage and dumps have become prime indicators of America's lifestyle. In resort towns in New England and the Adirondacks, measuring the flow into the sewage plants serves as a business barometer. Tourism is a growth industry. You believ...