By Kate J. Neville
Texas Tech University Press, 2024, The Sowell Emerging Writers Prize Winner
I read Going to Seed right before the U.S election, when I was full of hope for the future of the earth, frantically writing postcards and going to purple states to canvass door-to-door, ready to usher in a woman president. Then, by the time I was able to focus on a review, that future had turned upside down and I was left holding a sad, deflated bag of hope. And that’s when I truly gained appreciation for the calming intelligence of this collection of essays by Kate J. Neville, a professor of environmental politics. She is Canadian, so, one, she is a keen observer of American hyper-activity, and two, more than one of these essays references the beaver. The more I learned about this patient animal, the more I realized it would make the perfect talisman in the coming four years. I plan on adopting its plodding persistence as I slowly arrange my carefully chosen sticks and mud against the oncoming stream. Then I’ll just float in my placid pool and stare at the clouds for a while.
Neville follows a long tradition of essayists such as Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson, who defended idleness, arguing that personal growth and healing come from slowing down and simply observing. Going to Seed makes the same case for the natural world. We want to aggressively “fix” our damaged earth, but Neville suggests the best way to go about that is to do nothing. In other words, stop whatever it is we’re already doing. Beavers were hunted almost to the point of extinction so that men could wear silly top hats. When their pelts were no longer available, commercial demand halted and the beavers rebounded. Without human interference, Neville writes, nature can often heal itself. The same with farming and lumbering. Letting land lay idle, instead of forcing it to bear, gives wildlife time to regenerate. But she is hardly suggesting that we turn a blind eye to the urgency of the planet’s situation. Her aim in these essays is not “should we work or be idle,” but to ask ourselves “what work is needed, when, by whom, for whom, and at whose expense.” What else might we be doing with our lives? Neville wants to give us permission to absorb the world instead of always acting upon it. Attention, she writes, is a form of reverence, even worship. Reading, the taking in information instead of always doing, is also a way of absorbing the world, and in that light I bring your attention to the astounding bibliography in Going to Seed which will help feed any environmental imagination.
“Idleness provides space to imagine the world otherwise,” as she quotes novelist Mark Slouka. Now, more than ever, those of us who champion the planet need to regroup. “Being constantly occupied, whether in waged labor or in commercialized forms of leisure, leaves no space to form our own values and views and ethical judgements, and so leaves us ill-equipped to contribute to a collective social and political life. Instead, we are too harried to mount and challenge inequity, servility, creeping authoritarianism or even its fully fledged version. Idleness, then, might be a crucial emancipatory project.” We are so stressed by our political moment, maybe the best thing to do right now is to slow down and pull back, taking in the long view. Dormancy is a good and necessary thing, so is hibernation. We need to build our strength, and when the time is right, like the bear emerging from the den, we can return to the world steady and fearless. In the meantime, I try not to project the worst that can happen to this fragile earth. Empires rise and fall throughout human history, disappearing with time. Let us hope we have enough of it.
JoeAnn Hart writes about the pervasive and widespread effects of the climate crisis on the natural world and the human psyche. Her most recent book, Arroyo Circle, a story of reclamation in a time of loss, was released by Green Writers Press in 2024. Her other books include the prize-winning environmental and animal fiction collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, the crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean published by Ashland Creek Press, and Addled, a social satire. She is a regular reviewer of climate and animal fiction at EcoLit Books.
