Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books, 2018. 288 pages. $23.95.
“How do you stop inertia?” This seemingly straightforward question surfaces or lurks in the most surprising of places throughout Nicole Walker’s rollicking new essay collection, Sustainability: A Love Story. The collection itself mercilessly probes Walker’s daily life as she examines marriage, child-rearing, and our environmental crises through the lens of inertia. The result of this scrutiny is a multi-level exploration of the allure and fallout of our inclination to operate within our default setting. What is revealed about the force of our habits as Walker recounts a heated fight with her husband in the grocery store checkout line? How is the condemnation of a bibleless environmentalist connected to thousands of years of Christianity? Is talking to your kids about climate change productive, or just terrifying? Walker refuses to bow down to inertia, to live on autopilot amid unfolding environmental catastrophes. Instead, she has crafted an essay collection that attests: our own attention can be the acting force that changes the state of an object—matter, human included, can actually shift its own course.
It doesn’t take long to notice that Walker unfailingly stitches the piecemeal happenings composing her life into our larger Anthropocene context. A highly reflective English professor living in Flagstaff, Arizona, she is acutely aware that buying paper towels, making ground beef tacos, and drinking bottled wine all while knowing that sic “the planet is a big mess” might make her a hypocrite. And so, Walker wonders: “how do you stop inertia?” And she asks, us as well as herself, what hard work does it take to “make reality good”?
In an essay entitled “Love in the Time of Global Warming,” Walker and her husband spend their Saturday morning grocery shopping at Sam’s Club. The piece begins with an assertion that, “If I’m going to eat meat, I’m only going to buy . . . grass-fed, local, $6.99/lb meat from Flying M Ranch.” A few sentences later, a sudden craving for tacos has Walker tossing cheap ground beef into the cart. The real meat of this piece, however, isn’t the tension of failing to meet your own carefully curated expectations. As in essay after essay, it’s Walker’s blunt analysis of the emotional impacts of failure that really captivate—and make you laugh out loud. “I hate being a hypocrite, which just makes me more of a hypocrite,” she writes, chronicling the rise of her frustration. This leads to the checkout-line blowout, which ends with Walker screaming at her husband: “Tell the kids to their faces that you don’t care if they have any trees left after we die!”
It is this tension between bemoaning personal shortcomings while still desperately wanting to live a defensible, even admirable, life that makes Sustainability so salient today. Knowledgeable, connected, and aware of oh-so-many consequences of her actions, Walker candidly suffers as she tries to make and live with arguably unavoidable choices that hurt the planet and her family—without becoming mired in depression or ending up “with a needle in [her] arm.” Walker’s engagement with research and her own loop-de-loop thinking create a world where fragmented ideas and abrupt about-faces force you to truly pay attention, to be mentally agile and ready to perform intellectual gymnastics at a moment’s notice. As a poet writing braided nonfiction, Walker gets under your skin. Many of her sentences beg to be read aloud as they wallow in all the English language has to offer. “All confessions require some self-deception,” she writes. “Conduct your myth. Organize your clouds.” This is decidedly not a book written by a complacent environmentalist who sees the world in black and white. Despite the rigor of Walker’s thinking, the force of her incisive diction, and the urgency of her struggles, she also makes you laugh. A lot.
The result is one idiosyncratic account of a life at this time, in this place, from this perspective—a book to press into someone’s hands fifty years from now when asked, How could you let this happen? What were you thinking? How did you feel? While these essays may not design a blueprint for coming safely out of our climate crisis, they offer something only slightly less essential: a balm for the pain of living as a US citizen aware of our ecocide and worried about it, sad about it, scared of it, yet unable to stop—it or ourselves. Walker’s suggestions: pick up trash, commit tiny good, and stop dividing things.
Picking up trash as one way to change reality and possibly avoid having to ski on sand in the not-too-distant future is explored in the essay “Pipeline.” Snow is so cool, Walker proclaims, because, “One flake at a time builds a whole watershed.” Though many argue that systematic change and international paradigm shifts are the only way to effectively address climate change, Walker likens this to the A.A. philosophy of submission to a higher power. Both approaches, she notes, will leave you thirsty. Citing the unlikeliness of a national policy shift, Walker writes: “If you’re going to change reality, you’re going to have to go outside.” After detailing the art of picking up trash, she concludes, “This won’t stop global warming, but notice how . . . there is no rubber tie-off wrapped around your arm.” Such an act of engagement is one example of the kind of tiny good that Walker believes can lead to big good.
In “Teeth,” Walker argues that finding cause for connection can let us believe for a minute that we can see from a different perspective, that we can have access to “knowing what it’s like to live where it’s too hot, too cold, too rainy.” And then maybe, since we all dance in the rain and sing with children, we can also all ride bikes, decide that “hamburgers from McDonalds taste like soy burgers anyway,” and remind ourselves that, “solar panels don’t put you in more debt than a car.” The power of connection is revisited in “Judgey McJudgerson,” where Walker notices: “The best propaganda makes us think about ourselves. The best stories make us think about other people.”
The essays in Sustainability: A Love Story, luckily, make us do both. In Walker’s ruthless refusal to present a polished version of her own life, she invites us to truly examine our own. “If we knew each other’s thoughts,” she suggests, “we would not be so afraid of our own.” With Walker’s guidance, maybe we can all find more ways to “create big good through tiny good” and, in doing so, take better care of ourselves and our planet. Sustainability offers honesty in a time of deflection and accusation. Time and time again, Walker scoops up a handful of mud and lets the sun ooze through it.