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    Will Sarvis is a freelance writer in a wide variety of genres.

    Latest nonfiction book

 Embracing Philanthropic Environmentalism: The Grand Responsibility of Stewardship (McFarland & Co., 2019).

    This book offers a guardedly optimistic interpretation of humanity’s place in nature and our unique caretaker role. A broad range of subjects are addressed, including urban ecology, green technology, problems with climate change prediction, chemical groundwater contamination, invasive species, and other topics. In the process, this study counters misanthropic environmentalism, an odd philosophy that tends to view humanity as a discrete agent despoiling nature. This book presents a common-sense analysis of environmental science, belief, and philosophy — and debunks eco-apocalyptic thinking in the process. The author reveals much compromised science masquerading as authority for the purposes of raising funds and influencing policy; these are the crusades of the environmental elite, which overshadow unambiguously serious problems like environmental racism. Written in an informal style sprinkled with first-person sketches, this is a well-reasoned original work that draws upon both scholarly and media sources.

Accidentally Omitted Photographs

In the editing process, I mistakenly removed too many photographs from Oregon, including those pertaining to three particular places that were vitally linked to the text. So here is the text from pages 46-48 with the relevant photographs re-embedded:

Among the more flagrant examples of fake Eden around Eugene include the Cheshire Prairie, Delta Ponds and the “natural landscape” feature at Lane Community College. The latter features irregular tree spacing and native flora species, without irrigation, mowing, or fertilizer. As a result, more trees than those in the forest just simply die. This is classic token environmentalism. Ignored is the ambient heat from abutting masonry buildings and the heat island effect of the campus in general. The soil configuration beneath the “natural landscape” was long ago disrupted when the area was logged, possibly farmed, and then radically altered (bulldozed, refilled, and graded, then seeded in grass) decades earlier to create the campus itself. Then there is the completely “unnatural” precipitation run-off from surrounding concrete and asphalt, air quality infected with tailpipe emissions, et cetera. And what natural state does the landscape pretend to represent? The pre-aborigine landscape? The pre-Columbus landscape? What about the pre- glaciation landscape of tens of thousands of years ago? Instead, this landscape is obviously contrived; neither “natural” nor cultivated by stewards, and thus the worst of all worlds. It is a fraud.

There are many other examples of fake-natural landscapes in Eugene, including Hendricks Park, an artificial creation admonishing against invasive species seeds. The west Eugene “wetlands” is actually a drained swamp, a result of the Army Corps of Engineering digging a massive trench to channel the Amazon Slough. The Cheshire Prairie features a patch of invasive thistles and native plants that accommodate homeless campers during the summer before late summer’s fire hazards apparently necessitate the city’s annual autumn mowing (with organic, solar-powered electric lawnmowers, as nature intended it before the white man arrived).

But one of the more egregious examples of token environmentalism and a lost opportunity lies with the Delta Ponds. These are leftover human-made gravel pits adjoining the Willamette River that (ironically) came to function as valuable aquatic habitat. The river water feeds into the old pits through small, slow-current channels. This is one of the most obviously human-altered environments you can find around here, and yet now we are supposed to leave it “untouched,” as if it were a wilderness, as if it were Eden. Again, what we get is the worst of all worlds. It would be better to embrace the Delta Ponds as a human-created environment and proceed to make it into a park with features such as an arboretum, footbridges to islands, pagodas and tea houses situated along the existing foot trails, and any number of cultivated landscape features. It could become a jewel of the West Coast if only we would render Cosmos out of Chaos and stop pretending that a bastardized landscape constitutes some approximation of nature uncorrupted by human beings. Here, Eugene might take a cue from eastern Germany, where people are flooding former lignite mining pits in an effort to transform the place into a “lake district” for recreation.

Image Enhancements

The images in this book described as "enhanced" were merely upgraded for resolution (from 70 dpi to 300 dip) and were altered in no other manner.

Errata

I tried in vain to get the publisher to correct typos, but never heard back and have no idea if they made the corrections or not. In any case, here they are:

page 3:

For example, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS and other media outlets both

[TO]

For example, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, BBC and other media outlets all

page 3:

"Alan" Freeze should be "Allan" Freeze

page 10:

an array to real environmental problems

[TO]

an array of real environmental problems

page 41:

wrote that wilderness was an non-renewable resource

[TO]

wrote that wilderness was a non-renewable resource

page 43:

fake Eden shows up here in many places here

[TO]

fake Eden shows up here in many places here

page 50:

which almost always creates gaps

[TO]

which almost always create gaps

page 51:

before that people working in the fields we call

[TO]

before that, people working in the fields we call

page 54:

any yet

[TO]

and yet

page 68:

Work experience can be wonderful way to learn

[TO]

Work experience can be a wonderful way to learn

page 85:

futureologists

[TO]

futureologist

page 133:

demise of last red spruce

[TO]

demise of the last red spruce

page 143:

"Bryon" Stevenson should be "Bryan" Stevenson

page 151:

launched the environmental justice movement in 1978

[TO]

launched the environmental justice movement in 1982

page 152:

goes up. [first words on the page]

[TO]

go up.

page 161:

bogeyman

[TO]

atomic trickster

page 177:

To a some degree

[TO]

To some degree

page 178:

olive tree grove

[TO]

olive tree groves

page 192:

Deer, elk, and moose exists

[TO]

Deer, elk, and moose exist

page 193:

would certain constitute one.

[TO]

would certainly constitute one.

page 202:

is lost in through sleet

[TO]

is lost through sleet