Stefene Russell’s review of Curt White’s The Barbaric Heart was too thoughtful to paraphrase. Here’s the whole thing:

Last June, I read Curtis White’s essay “The Barbaric Heart,” in Orion Magazine. It got me right in the solar plexus, so when I learned it was being expanded and released as a full-length book in the fall, I pre-ordered a copy. I’m not the sort of person who does that—most often, I build my library by ambling through book sales at the Y, because it doesn’t matter to me whether the text is contemporary or 1000 years old.

The day it showed up in my mailbox, I burned through the introduction (written by the editors of n+1) and the first few chapters. Then I entered a gear-grinding phase, got busy and put it down. It was only due to some airport time last week on my trip home to Utah that I got the time and space to finish it. (It now goes into the canon of appropriately transcendent books read on airplanes: Hesse’s Siddhartha, and Bolano’s Amulet.)

If you didn’t see the essay, you can still read it here. And if you haven’t read the book, its thesis is explained by its subtitle: “Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature.” That is, White believes our current ecological crisis has its roots (and they are very deep roots—he begins the book with a quote from Edward Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire), in a way of being he calls “the Barbaric Heart.” It was what gave shape to the relentless and bloody expansion of the Roman Empire, and is the fuel behind global capitalism’s push for infinite growth, no matter what the collateral damage. White admits that the Barbaric Heart, in its own way, is admirable—it certainly is intoxicating, which is why the world’s been in thrall to it for so long—but trying to talk it into playing nice is pointless at best, a Faustian bargain at worst. In fact, White feels that the environmental movement is deadlocked in a diabolical arm-wrestling match with the Barbaric Heart, trying to make minor changes in a system that needs to be displaced, rather than revised.

White has said that this book is “symphonic in its architecture,” and I’d agree. (That quote comes from this great blog post, where White suggests a musical playlist for the book.) Rather than a self-helpish book with the narrative trajectory of a bullet, White, who is also a novelist, draws a portrait of the Barbaric Heart throughout history, quoting Asclepius, Rumi, William Blake, Tom Waits and Adam Smith. The text is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and its evocation of art as well as science defies the dry, spiritless, hyper-rational way of being that White feels strips the natural world of its mystery (and is at the core of its destruction). Ironically, some of the reviews prove White’s point about how pervasive this hyper-rational way of thinking really is—they complain White is great at pointing out problems, but not solutions. But early in the book, he addresses this plainly:

“What would I put in capitalism’s place? In reply, I am always tempted to quote Voltaire’s response to the complaint that he had nothing to put in the place of the Christianity he criticized. ‘What!’ he said, ‘A ferocious beast has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, what shall we put in its place!’ Unlike Voltaire, I would also suggest that what has the best chance of defeating the ‘beast’ is spirit.”

Spirit? That’s no solution! Or at least it doesn’t seem so to a culture snuggled deep inside the Barbaric Heart, bred to love those easy-peasy “50 Ways” books, and This-and-That for Dummies, with their checklists of concrete quick-fixes, where the only thing that matters is matter. White points out that we cannot extract ourselves from our ancient cognitive errors with little checklists, or bamboo sheets for that matter. He advises instead embracing what he calls “thoughtfulness,” which is not just a spiritual thing, but an aesthetic thing too: “‘Don’t think profit,’ it argues, ‘think beauty. The beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled natural world.’”

The Barbaric Heart is a pleasure to read (with Edward Abbey long gone, it’s nice to see another cantankerous guy with a sense of humor and an ability to tell a story writing about ecology). Though it’s a slim book, it’s not—well, at least not ideally—a “quick read.” It is intellectually rigorous, dense and provocative, part of the current movement (partially spearheaded by Orion’s editors) to align Nature Writing with the realities of the world–i.e., it’s all “nature.” (Granta published a brilliant issue, “The New Nature Writing,” that grappled with this as well.) There is no need for exile or separation—not for us, or for the birds and the plants and the rocks, either. Or as White more eloquently puts it, “We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the impossible and calling it Beautiful.” White demands the seemingly impossible—the discarding of global capitalism in the name of the natural world—and I’ll call it beautiful, and recommend it to all, robots, tree-huggers and barbarians alike.