In Praise of the Earth and Not Throwing Up One’s Hands
Homing, Alice Irene Whittaker. Freehand, 2024.
Who among us has not been tempted to throw their hands up and proclaim, “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” as they press “buy now” on their Amazon cart? Who has not wanted to quip, “At least I didn’t spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico” as they reach for the plastic shampoo bottle on the shelf of the big-box store instead of the eco-friendly shampoo bar packaged in unbleached, compostable cardboard at the co-op?
In the face of the climate crisis, it is easy to feel helpless, paralyzed by a belief that any ethical choice one might make for the good of the planet is but a single drop in a rapidly warming ocean. It is easy to feel powerless and ineffectual when the opponent is a do-nothing government or a mercenary multinational. It is easy to feel the end of the world is fast approaching as we watch pop stars on their leisure trips to space and read about the bunkers the billionaires are building where they might one day thrive while the rest of us languish bunker-less on an inhospitable planet. It is easy to become apathetic.
What is not easy is trying to live ethically and sustainably despite the economic and political systems that seem to rob us of our agency and power. “What do you do,” Alice Irene Whittaker asks in her memoir Homing, “when you have a mammal body with a human mind, made of earth and water, grieving human suffering and the disappearance of nature and creatures so deeply that the despair threatens to suffocate you?” It is easy to despair.
What I cannot imagine to be easy is writing this book. For one thing, Homing is impressively researched — much of that research original. Whittaker conducted many of her own interviews with experts (see her four-page interview list at the book’s end). She recounts, for example, her two-day interview with Hunter Lovins at Lovins’s regenerative ranch in Colorado. She chronicles her travels to the 2019 World Circular Economy Forum in Finland, and to Portland, Oregon, to attend the Sustainable Fashion Forum. She visited the Ottawa Tool Library and learned from friends how to build Passive Houses. She read extensively (her twelve-page bibliography stands as testament).
Homing also documents the personal quest Whittaker undertakes to care for herself and the earth. Part of that quest involves moving out of an old farmhouse in a rural town, from which Whittaker suffered a four-hour, shame-filled commute, and downsizing to a smaller, more sustainable home — a cabin in the woods of Québec. There are also the three children Whittaker is raising to be good stewards of the planet. There is the quest to foster a more intimate relationship with the land around her. And then there is the quest towards selfforgiveness. Though perhaps, as Whittaker muses, “quest” is the wrong word. “What is the opposite of a quest?” she asks. “What do you call the purposeful and beneficial fleeing of that which you know so well, but which you must abandon through a journey? Perhaps a liberation.”
Whittaker takes the reader on this journey towards liberation in an openhearted fashion. Her ethos is one of nonjudgement, genuine curiosity, and respect. She repeatedly recognizes her privilege, she is never not self-reflective, her empathy always on full display. Here is a writer who bursts into tears upon seeing a baby snapping turtle. While at times she wonders if she cares too much, she knows her “heightened sensitivity, that connection to suffering at seeing the dead body of a raccoon on a highway or a bird struggling to fly, is natural and good.” I think readers will agree.
Whittaker not only names problems but suggests solutions — some smallscale and tangible, others large-scale and conceptual. Whittaker’s memoir serves as a reminder that there are things we can do both as an individual and as a community, the first of which is to refuse: “Not reuse — but refuse.” It is one thing to buy sustainably-made products, but it is another — more beneficial thing — to limit what we accumulate in the first place. What else can we do? Live more simply, democratize the fashion industry, support a circular economy, encourage corporations to employ degrowth strategies, strengthen our communities and share resources with one another, denounce individualism and hero worship. What else can we do? Remember we are citizens of the Earth first. Investigate our past. Leap towards uncomfortable change. It is a lot of work to be sure, but Whittaker makes this work feel both necessary and doable — or at least less daunting.
Whittaker’s personal journey requires the rejection of the perfectionism that dominated her youth as a student and a dancer. She absolves both herself and the reader of the need to be perfect, letting us all off the hook for the odd Ziploc bag or Costco shopping trip. We get nowhere letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and we get nowhere knee-deep in the muck of our own guilt. As Whittaker comes to understand, “Fear of failure and addiction to perfection uphold white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental domination.” Believing in herself as beneficial to this planet — not as perfect but not as harmful either — provides Whittaker a “deep and unfamiliar freedom.” It is in the space of this freedom that we might tend to the necessary and doable work at hand.
Homing is at its best in its lyrical descriptions of the natural world. Here Whittaker grants her voice the freedom to deftly construct an image, wield a metaphor, and revel in the beauty of words, her poet’s sensibilities guiding the prose. This is especially true when she writes of the fauna and flora for which she clearly cares so deeply. The gorgeous lushness of Whittaker’s nature writing is evident immediately in the opening passage of the prologue, which describes the thimble-tall nest of a hummingbird, its structure lined “with wooly lamb’s ear and down of milkweed,” the outside quilted “with moss and grey-green lichen,” anchored by its silver threads, which “saddle the small cup to the fork of a tree branch.” Whittaker runs beneath this nest with her dog, “two wet creatures running across a canvas of fringed forest.” When Whittaker treats her page as a canvas, the prose takes on a richness that sends me scrambling for my own notebook.
While readers who are already deeply committed to sustainable living practices may not feel this book uncovers completely new ground, and readers desiring a pure memoir may feel somewhat dissatisfied with the at times guarded tone and level of distance with which Whittaker writes about herself and her life, Homing will resonate with and provide hope to the many of us who do not want to throw up our hands, the many of us who plan to continue caring for ourselves and the earth.
— Hollie Adams is a writer and assistant professor of English at the University of Maine.
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