Books Behind Ecocinema Studies Part I

Even though we grew up in different regions we have always loved the natural world, hiking and camping with scouts and climbing neighbors’ trees as children. But the books we read promoted respect for animals more than a broader vision of the environment. 

We both fell in love with monkeys after reading Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with the Circus, horses after reading The Black Stallion and wild animals after discovering Wild Animals of North America. 

But as researchers, two books stood out as guides for real interdependent relationships with nonhuman nature:  Ellen Swallow Richards’ Sanitation in Daily

Life (1907) and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949).

In Sanitation in Daily Life, Richards demonstrates that humans are part of nature, generating the basis for the human ecology movement. For Richards, urban problems like air and water pollution were products of human activity imposed on the environment and, subsequently, best resolved by humans. The human ecology movement evolved into home economics, but its grounding in conservation had lasting effects, including the environmental justice movements, health ecology, and urban planning.

In Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold advocates for the good of all life as part of an ecosystem that includes humans, nonhuman animals, and plant life, not just those animals seen as sentient. For Leopold, “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,” and those parts include all elements of the natural environment, from soil and plants to Bambi. A graduate of the Yale forestry school, Leopold promoted game management, evolutionary biology, and ecology, rather than sentimental anthropomorphism.

These two books helped ground our readings of a perhaps pristine natural world exploited and decimated by humanity.