Island Within Book

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, to anyone interested in relations between humans and the living world. For me it was thoroughly formative, probably more so than anything else I have read. Extraordinarily deep lyrical meditations on the food web and our place in it, and on appropriate relations with other living beings and the world around us. This is possibly the only book that has ever made me cry. (Spoiler alert) The title derives in part from Nelson's profound reflections on the fact that all organisms - including us - are literally made from each other and from the materials of the environment, with matter constantly cycling among the members of ecological community.

When I read a book I think is going to be important, I like to make notes and copy out key passages. I nearly wore out my keyboard with this one! I am tempted to throw up a few choice quotes but no short quote would do the work justice. Mixed in with the environmental philosophy is intensely descriptive natural history, and a bit of personal memoir. I wouldn't have minded if there was less of each, and did skim through those passages a little. It would take a lot more than that to dampen my enthusiasm for the philosophical content of this work.

A good taster of this book, for those sitting on the fence, is the final chapter of Nelson's later book, Heart and Blood. Its thirty-odd pages covers a lot of the same ground as The Island Within, though in its brevity, this chapter naturally misses much of the poignant lyricism of the much longer book.