White Beech
The Rainforest Years
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
Starred review from March 31, 2014
Greer (The Female Eunuch) has written a love letter to a rainforest, one that she just happens to own. In her middle years, Greer set out to find a property in her native Australia that she could restore to its state before white colonists imposed clear-cutting and invasive species. After a long search, she settled upon a 60-hectare dairy farm in southeastern Queensland that had suffered all the depredations of human intrusion. Greer began the painstaking process of rehabilitation and found that while the work was difficult, it wasn’t quite Sisyphean. Greer is a scrupulous scholar with a deep interest in botany, and the level of detail in her research is impressive. One of the most interesting devices in the book is her exchanges with her sister, a professional botanist, who pushes her more famous sibling to precision and clarity. There’s a fair amount of tendentious proselytizing, and even worse, Greer lets the narrative focus disappear in endless debates over the minutiae of plant classification. Still, the range of Greer’s knowledge and interests provide fascinating insight into the thoughtless transformation of a continent.
June 15, 2014
A controversial scholar/journalist's quasi-academic account of how she helped transform Australian land dedicated to dairy farming back into rain forest.Though based for much of her career in England, Greer (Shakespeare's Wife, 2008, etc.) had always intended to return to her native Australia. For 20 years, she roved across the continent's desert interior "hunting for [her] own patch of ground." The land she would eventually buy was in southeast Queensland, not far from the Gold Coast and near areas overrun by tourists. Partly inspired by her botanist sister, Greer decided to rehabilitate the remains of a rain forest growing on her property, "[b]attered by clearing, by logging, by spraying and worse." Not only did she seek to heal a small piece of her beloved Australia; she also wanted to demonstrate that restoring the land to itself was the work of "dedicated individuals." Government efforts at environmental conservation had been a failure. The little money delegated to preservation had been used to "protect the tourists from themselves." None had been spent on restoring Australian flora threatened by plant species brought to the continent by early settlers with the "civilizing" aim of making their new home look more like Britain. With seemingly limitless vigor, Greer documents her rain forest finds-including Australian white beech trees nearly logged out of existence-and the indigenous and post-colonial histories of the land she would call the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme. Her late-life foray into environmentalism and the establishment of a charity that would preserve the land on which she cheerfully spent her life savings are nothing short of extraordinary. At the same time, her enthusiasm for spreading the gospel of biodiversity is also a source of narrative weakness. The scholarly presentation of textual material and lack of more personal details regarding her Australian rain forest venture will strike readers as overly fastidious and tiresome.Passionate and well-intended but not especially accessible.
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February 15, 2014
An unexpected book from feminist Greer, this memoir celebrates the nature of her native Australia. At 62, Greer was in a despairing frame of mind when she became entranced by 60 hectares of dairy farmland in southeast Queensland. On the land, she spotted a few of the 120-foot-tall white beeches almost completely logged out by white settlers, and she was determined to bring the beeches back.
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