The weakness in this book, for me, is that it could have been written in the absence of the 'long walk' referred in the title. Too much of the content deals with issues that the author could have mused about without this walk and not enough was about the actual events of the long walk. ( )

Read???

I picked up my copy of Wandering Home during a recent trip to Vermont. While there, as I often do, I asked a book store clerk to point me in the direction of a local author or a book set in the area. In this case, I was pointed to Wandering Home and David Mamet's South of the Northeast Kingdom. I'd not read anything by either writer and both books looked perfect for my purpose so I quickly made my purchase excited by my soon-to-be-had literary travels.

Wandering Home was a very good book on the Lake Champlain area of Vermont and New York. The author, Bill McKibben, is an environmentalist author who takes you along for the ride on his hiking journey from his home in the Champlain Valley on the Vermont side to his home in the Adirondacks on the NY side. The book was stimulating in its description of the area and his hike but its greater good was its ability to show the "right habitation of a place". McKibben makes the case that extreme naturalists (everything must be wild, humans be damned) are unrealistic. He also makes the case that nature holds precedent - not the other way around. In other words, he leans a good bit more towards the extreme naturalists than the humanist. This was new territory for me.

I thought McKibben made a strong case for his way of life and those that he hikes with along the way. It is no doubt gratifying to live with nature in the way that they do. I love the idea of buying locally produced items, caring for the environment, and such. Oddly enough, the book left me with as many questions as answers. I wonder about McKibben's take on living in the general population. Surely he doesn't expect everyone to live as he does. For example, I doubt there's the space to empty NYC into the surrounding area. Even if it did, do we let the City "go natural"? Living as he does, in the area he does, it makes all the sense in the world to buy locally produced food. But if NYC started buying only local can they possibly remain the small local farmers? Would they not get so large as to begin doing damage to their areas again? More personally, I sensed some distaste for vacation homes in the area belonging to city dwellers. For those like myself who agree with much of what he's said, but are unwilling to dive in to the deep end immediately, should we disavow any place in the woods to experience?

It's unfair to pin the expectation of answers to these questions on this book. It wasn't its intended topic. Nonetheless, these are topics (among others) raised to one extent or the other so it left me with many questions. I suppose I'll have to read McKibben's new book (that I had seen but didn't realize was his) Deep Economy or one of his previous works for answers.

Wandering Home was a treat for hearing more about the area surrounding Lake Champlain, including areas I'd recently visisted like Bristol andMiddlebury. It also opened my mind to an area of social responsibility to which I'd been unaware. I look forward to digging in for more answers from additional resources.

Favorite quotes:
"The battle for the future is precisely between those who are willing to engineer every organism for our convenience, who will countenance the radical change of our climate rather than risk any damage to our cosseted and swaddled Economy, and those who are willing to say there is something other than us that counts. Wilderness and Gandhian nonviolence were the two most potentially revolutionary ideas of the twentieth century, precisely because they were the two most humble: they imagine a whole different possibility for people."

"There is a surprising glory in our right habitation of a place - it's the orderliness of the college garden, the calm of Mitchell's pasture, the humming industry of Kirk Webster's hives, the sweet draught of Granstorm's wine, the endless slow bounty of David Brynn's forests. It's the glory of the land and the human making sense of each other. (emphasis in book) That conversation has almost died out in our nation, drowned by the roar of thoughtless commerce, pointless ease; that's why it's so fine to see places like the Champlain Valley where you can still hear it going on, indeed hear it growing a little louder." ( )