How to live well in a dying world? The essays that comprise Following nature’s lead gather an enormous cast of writers from Greek antiquity through the present to respond to this challenge. Usher describes his writings as “akin to sermons”: each chapter takes “ancient scriptures” as a point of departure and then delivers “an edifying contemporary message” by drawing connections between old and new. Usher thus illustrates the value of “older ways of thinking” by showing their relevance to crises of the present moment, in particular ecological and economic crises that imperil life as we know it. We should get back to nature, Usher tells us. Although this is a twenty-first century phrasing, Usher shows how the sentiment has an ancient history.
Chapter 1, “What Chemistry!” begins with what Usher calls Epicurus’s “ecological hedonism” (16). While pleasure was central to Epicurus, Epicurean pleasure differed from today’s: it was frugal, even ascetic. These ethics stemmed from appreciation of how nature conserves its resources: “What chemistry!” exclaimed Walt Whitman as he rhapsodized about compost. Usher joins Lucretius to Walt Whitman to illustrate how transformation happens within a closed system. Karl Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicureanism, and Usher points to this connection to show how, despite their vast political differences, Lucretius and Marx were both committed to aligning values with “first principles” evident in nature: there are limits in nature to which all must agree. Facing these limits to growth requires humility, a lesson worth drawing from these ancient scriptures.
In “There Are Gods Too,” Chapter 2, Heraclitus inspires Usher’s sermon. “Cryptic [and] paradoxical” as Heraclitus is, he was also trying to articulate “a whole-systems philosophy” (53). Heraclitus’s observation that “there are gods here too” illustrates his “deep ecology” (54): all things are one, interconnected, and comprehensible through logos. Usher connects this sensibility to the biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt and its capacious sense of environment. Heraclitus and Uexküll join Aristotle in agreeing that “nature does nothing in vain”; the dynamics of the Umwelt are not the work of particular agents but rather “co-evolutionary processes.” Rather than seeing ourselves as agents, Usher suggests “participation” is more accurate. Here Usher adduces Plato and quantum physics: both argue that “there’s more than meets the eye in the world.” We participate in this greater, complex world; we’re not masters of the universe but subjects to it. This idea also holds ethical implications: if you believe this about the world, Usher asserts, “you are more likely to treat it with intense respect, even reverence, not carelessly or with contempt” (71).
Chapter 3, “Cosmos Out of Chaos,” mostly resides in 19th century Massachusetts, specifically the woods Henry David Thoreau inhabited near Walden Pond. But Thoreau’s exhortation—“simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”—leads Usher back to Diogenes of Sinope. Paradoxically for both Diogenes and Thoreau, freedom comes through conformity to nature’s laws. Thoreau’s meditation on a deep cut sliced by the railroad tracks beside Walden Pond prompts him to see Nature’s beauty even in the built environment. This beauty—a “tonic of wilderness”—also animates hope for regeneration: the scarred landscape reveals new life; the streams flowing down the bank remind Thoreau “of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds” (109), all testimony to “nature’s prodigality.”
“THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE” (all capitalized) announces the theme of Chapter 4: human economy and its purpose, which ancients (Aristotle) and moderns (John Ruskin and George Bataille) agree is not profit but sustenance of human persons. Aristotle draws attention to the original meaning of economy as concerned with the nomoi of the oikos. Writing in the 20th century, Bataille introduces the modern problem of excess and the need to use it well—a problem that did not face Aristotle’s readers almost 2500 years before. To elaborate on an Aristotelian response to Bataille, Usher turns to Ruskin and his declaration that “there is no wealth but life,” which appears in the culminating chapter of his Unto This Last (published in 1860). The economy must serve life, not production; we need to learn to consume well to live well, which means above all spending our time on living the good life, not accumulating more goods.
In the book’s epilogue, “Taking Stock,” Usher names the underlying perspectives he has sought to dislodge: anthropocentrism and its corollary belief that nature is a mechanism human beings can manipulate. Instead, human beings need to take their place among other animals and return to the sustainable forms of life Nature prescribes. The arguments in the book culminate in practical advice on how to live now: “simple, mindful living, a recognition and embracing of natural limits, an affective deference to Nature’s organization and natural laws . . . and an underlying nonreductive physicalism” (176).
Following nature’s lead is not an academic book. The sheer breadth of ideas in a short book makes deeper engagement with any particular theme or thinker impossible. The book’s endnotes are restricted to references for specific quotations in the text. Usher thus declines to engage with contemporary scholarship. He— describes his argument as “just one interpretation of things,” which he confesses may be “an idiosyncratic one” (xi). This decision limits the persuasiveness of his claims and, more importantly, the development of the ideas presented.
The argument of Following nature’s lead seems to presume that simply showing the reasonableness of aligning with nature’s laws will lead readers to change their behavior. “Misplaced human wants and desires” are “the source of our catastrophe,” writes Usher (9). We need to choose to act in accordance with nature, to change our values. He praises the early Cynics as “firm rationalists,” suggesting we ought to emulate them. Change is a matter of listening to reason.
Would that it were so straightforward. On the contrary, the climate crisis presents one more example of human irrationalism. As environmental scholars have demonstrated, human beings have developed sophisticated forms of explaining away, if not outright denying, the catastrophic effects of climate change. Despite being presented with irrefragable evidence of change around them—snows coming months later than normal or not at all, an ever-increasing wildfire season, unending droughts, etc.—“living in denial” has become the norm. Anthropologists such as Kari Maris Norgaard have pointed to the social organization of unreason as one factor: information is known and circulates but it remains disconnected from ordinary life, which adjusts and accommodates to the changes without ever considering the need for change.[1] Persuasive reasons make no headway.
Not only does overlooking human irrationalism weaken Usher’s persuasiveness; it also marks a missed opportunity to develop his plea for the usefulness of ancient sources. How to inspire collective change when reason fails? Many of Usher’s ancient “scriptures” deal with precisely this problem, from Heraclitus to Plato to Diogenes. Heraclitus’s paradoxes do more than articulate a “deep ecology”; they also raise questions about the very knowability of nature—who loves to hide herself—and any logos capturing that nature. Plato’s Republic details the corruptions of the soul that make citizens so impervious to wisdom that they might kill someone who questions their opinions. And Diogenes famously mocks the wish for reasons, murmuring gibberish until crowds draw near and then laughing at their gullibility.
Usher might deflect the preceding points about Heraclitus, Plato, and Diogenes as versions of what he calls “whataboutery” (172)—scholarly quibbles that rest on different interpretative emphases. But these three figures also share a deeper feature worth bringing to the surface: each wrote or acted in innovative ways meant to disrupt the consensus; each thus models imaginative and provocative—not merely rationalistic—modes of engagement with a public. Heraclitus’s elusive style draws readers into further inquiry. Plato’s mythmaking suggests the need for new stories, not just arguments.[2] Diogenes’ provocations puncture the complacency of his spectators without instructing them directly. If “consciousness is the real wrench in the works,” as Usher writes (175), then Heraclitus, Plato, and Diogenes (as well as many other ancient figures) show how to shift consciousness by disarming, evading, or simply destroying its rationalistic defenses.
In the prologue to Following nature’s lead, Usher describes his ideal reader as “an ordinary person” looking for “change of perspective . . . at once personal and systematic, whose concern is both local and global.” The perspective that concerns Usher is not, as the title of the book might suggest, a perspective on nature. It’s rather a perspective on the value of studying literature, history, and philosophy. Are these older ways of thinking “worth our time?” Usher asks. “Are they viable modes of engagement with the world today?” (xi). Following nature’s lead presents an abundance of reasons drawn from these sources for why we ought to change our behavior in response to the ecological crisis unfolding around us. Yet it’s not for lack of reasons that the human species seems to be careening toward disaster. The good news is that the very “scriptures” to which Usher leads us can help with this dilemma. Perhaps this was his ultimate intention—to lead us to “fall in love with old truths” and thus be changed by them even when we cannot be persuaded.
Notes
[1] Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2011).
[2] Melissa Lane’s Eco-Republic (Princeton, 2011) develops a reading of Plato’s Republic along these lines that shows how it presents “an intuitive and imaginative model” for shifting readers at a psycho-social level. See my review in BMCR 2012.05.31.