Look at the Land: Aerial Reflections on America

Book by McKibben, Bill

Time and again, MacLean's exemplary aerial photographs recall George Gerstner's in the stunning Amber Waves of Grain (1990). But MacLean's, although they certainly illustrate the hand of agricultural man upon the land-- sometimes virtually duplicating Gerstner's efforts, as in d{‚}ej{…}a vu-inducing pictures of cranberry farming--also show what effects industry and architecture have wrought upon land, water, and air. As in Gerstner's pictures, what is beautiful in MacLean's is not always benign; effluents from smokestacks and drainpipes probably are polluting to some extent. The mercifully scanty text here, unlike that of Amber Waves, harps on the latter fact and also points out what elitist ecological doomster McKibben says is the "silliness of our arrangements" for living in housing developments of virtually any sort. Indeed, McKibben's economically and scientifically vapid preaching seeks to put an exclamation point at the end of the book's title and make a melodramatic verb of its first word: just look at the land! Well, ignore his fashionable hysteria and enjoy MacLean's pictures for their beauty and the levels of information in them. Ray Olson