"The world was hers for the reading."

— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
​

This coming-of-age-tale of Francie Nolan was certainly bittersweet. Experiencing Francie growing up was both a raw and edifying journey. Nurtured by her steadfast mother and inhibited by her father's alcoholism, the young girl's everyday encounters felt like epic drama—with stakes high and lessons painful. 

Filled with a host of insightful, cruel, redemptive, and heartbreaking episodes, I found myself struck by the nuanced characterizations of the Nolan family as well as the rich tapestry of neighbors, strangers, friends, and enemies, living and working in the slums of Williamsburg. Many of the children's precociousness drawn by Smith rival some of my favorite moments from To Kill a Mockingbird, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And the simple, sophisticated theme uniting those observations and learnings from her journeys—struggle as nature's way of strengthening one's character—had me trusting Francie and the Nolans would be just fine, with roots strong and deep. [JG]

Betty Smith (1896-1972) was born as Elisabeth Wehner in the poor Williamsburg district of New York City to German immigrants. She married a fellow Brooklynite, George H. E. Smith, and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where they had two daughters. Although Betty had not finished high school, she re-committed to her education after her daughters entered grade school, studying journalism, literature, writing, and, winning a Yale scholarship award, Drama. 

Betty Smith remarried in 1943 to private in the U.S. Army. That same year, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published. It became an instant bestseller, and Smith went on to write three other novels--Tomorrow Will Be Better, Maggie-Now, and Joy in the Morning— as well as many one-act and full-length plays. 

Her life was fraught with unexpected setbacks, but in an article published in This Week magazine, called "Fall in Love with Life," Smith concluded with this: "To live, to struggle, to be in love with life—in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful—is fulfillment. The fulfillment of life is open to all of us." 
​

10. "In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He may not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise—but only to his father's state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here [in America] he belongs to the future. In this land, be may be what he wills, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at things." 

9. "To have a child, to plant a tree, to write a book." — Emile Zola

8. "Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?" "The secret lies in the reading and writing...I know this is the secret." 

7. "Everything struggled to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of the grating. It gets her sun and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because it's hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way."

6. "France stood there with the hot flamepoints of share burning her face." 

5. "A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route  has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way." 

4. "When the needle jabbed, Francie never felt it. The waves of hurt started by the doctor's words were racking her body and above all other feeling. While the nurse was expertly trying a strip of gauze around her arm and the doctor was putting his instrument in the sterilizer and taking out a fresh needle, Francie spoke up. "My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be surprised. And you don't have to tell him. you told me." ... She turned, stumbled a little and walked out of the room." 

3. "Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district around 1908 and '09. Child psychology had not been heard of in Williamsburg in those days. Teaching requirement were easy: graduation from high school and two years at Teacher's Training School. Few teachers had the true vocation for their work. They taught because it was one of the few jobs open to them; because it was better paying than factory work; because they had a long summer vacation; because they got a pension when they retired. The taught because no one wanted to marry them...These barren women spent their fury on other women's children in a twisted authoritative manner." 

2. "She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them." 

​1. "She has skin like a magnolia petal...and her eyes are deep and dark like forest pools." 

​
​YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
​

In 1972, Alston and Diana Chase ​left their tenured academic jobs, bought a remote cabin in Montana's Smith River county, and started a summer natural-history program for kids. It was from their log cabin they had made themselves, that Chase signed a book contract promising to explore the history of Yellowstone. Having trekked most of its trails for nearly thirty years, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Yellowstone Library and Museum Association, Chase had an intimate understanding of the park—or so he thought. 

The first sign of trouble came in 1982 when he interviewed Gary Brown, the bear specialist of the park, who said, "I feel very good about the grizzly," and estimated there to be 350 grizzlies in the park. However, when Chase then left the manager and spoke with Richard Knight, the lead scientist of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team a week later, he said, "I feel very pessimistic about the grizzly," guessing that there was less than 200 in the park. How could Yellowstone's manager feel good about the grizzly, yet the scientist be worried, and both disagree so drastically about the population estimates? 

"In asking this question," Chase writes, "I had set off on a search that turned out to be three years long to solve unexpected mysteries. Writing the book, rather than being an inspirational experience, turned out to be exciting, to be sure, but also disillusioning, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous." Chase's detective work was hampered at every turn by bureaucracy. "Occasionally, I found that critical records had disappeared. Freedom of Information Act requests took months to fulfill and often, when the material arrived, revealed inexplicable gaps. And though many in government and academe were eager to recount their feelings 'off the record,' most were reluctant to be quoted by name. The usual fate of whistle-blowers kept many officials silent, and the threat of losing their prerogative to study in Yellowstone frequently inhibited university scholars." (xi)

Instead of a thriving example of American ingenuity, idealism, and scientific policy, Yellowstone, Chase argues is dying. The culprit? Tragically, our own National Park Service, whose century of mismanagement has destroyed the flora and fauna. Their law of the land, steeped in the idea of natural regulation, is largely to blame, based on virtually no scientific research, and concocted in the '50s and '60s from an ironic, lethal dosage of hubris. 
​
In Playing God, Alston Chase:
​

• Documents the holocaust of wildlife perpetrated by Yellowstone's policies (grizzlies, black bears, wolves, elk, bison, beavers, and others)
• Explores the counter-intuitive value of controlled forest fires in order to grow forests
• Documents Yellowstone's institutionalized discrimination of scientists and enshrinement of a police/ranger force
• Observes the intellectual ingredients of the environmentalist stew of the '60s, cherry-picked from "Buddhism, Tao, Russian mystics, pre-Socratic, romantic poets, Indians...pessimistic German philosophers" and others

And, most importantly, Chase lays a trail of breadcrumbs leading toward a better environment, one found by asking simple, yet profound questions: 
​

• What is nature?
• Is man separate from nature or an integral part of it? 
• What is an ecosystem? 
• Can man affect an ecosystem for the better or is it always for the worse?
• Is there an inherent value in anything and everything?
• How would we know this?

It's this type of Socratic dialogue, that Chase injects into an all-too political, dogmatic landscape, and the effect is still so damn refreshing thirty years later. In a three-part talk he gave in the '90s. "Stewardship vs. Biocentrism," which explores many ideas of Playing God in Yellowstone, Chase begins by recounting a famous story of Socrates, the philosopher:

​One day, Socrates' friend, Chaerephon, went to the Oracle of Athens and asked, "Who is the wisest person in Athens?" The Oracle replied, "Socrates." Chaerephon told his friend, who was deeply disturbed, because he was convinced he knew nothing at all. After several sleepless nights, the man emerged from his home, believing he now understood what the Oracle had meant: that everyone else knew nothing either, but that they thought they knew a great deal. Socrates, conversely, knew that he knew nothing; he was the wisest because he was aware of his own ignorance. And so, the wisest man took to Athens' streets, asking strangers series of questions from morning to night: What is truth? What is virtue? What is beauty? And, by engaging in a dialogue brought a much-needed, humbling dosage of self-awareness to the people of Athens whose answers often easily unwound.

Socrates likened his role in society to that of a gadfly, a small insect that buzzes around horses and cows biting them, often swatted by the animals' tails. In dialogue, Socrates' patients often grew dizzy and frustrated too, lashing out at him instead of themselves. "Ultimately, they gave him the ultimate swat, by making him drink the Hemlock." If you look up gadfly in the college dictionary, it's defined as 'a constructive critic of established institutions.' "To that," Chase said, looking up proudly at the audience, "I plead guilty." [JG]
​

16. "When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power." — Alston Chase

15. "For the benefit and enjoyment of the people—Yellowstone National park, created by an act of Congress, March 1 1872."  — Inscription on the Roosevelt Arch in Yellowstone

14. "Religions are born and may die, but superstition is immortal." — Will and Ariel Durant

13. "Our national parks are outdoor museums, yet they are run by policemen, not by historians or scientists." — Senior Official to Alston Chase 

12. "Natural regulation, dressed in the trappings of biological theory, gave policy the patina of academic respectability while real science was carefully prohibited." 

11. "In the environmentalists' scheme of things, however, man can stand apart from nature, and when he does he often commits the worst sin of all, the sin the ancient Greeks called hubris—usurping the role of God. By playing God he stands apart and thereby does evil. Yet they also seem to suggest that human beings should stand apart from nature as well. For the ethic of protectionism was nothing more than protecting nature from man." [Emphasis mine.]

10. "All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of chance." — G. K. Chesterton

9. "This reserve is a natural breeding ground and nursery for those stately and beautiful haunters of the wilds which have now vanished from so many of the great forests, the vast lonely plains, and the high mountain rays, where they once abounded...Surely, our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs...our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred." — Theodore Roosevelt

8. "Yet, this prized land, reflecting our highest ideals of natural preservation, protected for a century, is not what is appears to be. Rather than a place where time stands still, it is caught in a river of change. Rather than preserved, it is being destroyed." 

7. "For more than a century the faith of environmental activists had been coalescing around a collection of ideas implying rejection: rejection of Judeo-Christianity, traditional science, technology, and civilization. In the void created by this iconoclasm they had assembled a jumble of ideas picked up from all over the world: from Buddhism, Tao, Russian mystics, pre-Socratic, romantic poets, Indians, and pessimistic German philosophers. And although each believer followed his own star, a family resemblance connected their ideas. Many quietly called themselves pantheists, espousing the view that all things were connected and sacred. They urged noninterference with spiritual nature. But they were still not sure now nature was to be known, and what was to be the place of human beings in the scheme of things." 

6. "Every age is fed on illusions." — Joseph Conrad

5. "The environmental awakening, however, made the public less tolerant of the policy of direct reductions, not more so. For Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and others taught that nature's problems were caused by humanity. The way we lived, grew food, drank water, dumped sewage, built houses, drove cars, was destroying the earth. And the silent victims of our greed and waste were than dumb and innocent animals of the world; the peregrine falcons and bald eagles poisoned by DDT, the whales and seals harpooned and clubbed for profit, the plankton and fishes of the sea smothered by oil from tanks, the jaguars, cheetahs, and ocelots skinned for high fashion, the countless species disappearing every day as the world's forests were stripped here by hungry souls chopping trees for farms and firewood." 

4. "As a consequence, the new definition of wilderness [by the Wilderness Act of 1964], ('an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man'), replaced science with romance. Ecosystems management—managing a park as a "vignette of primitive America," as stated in the Leopold Report—was an idea that came a hundred years too late. Yet the myth it presupposed—that man was not a part of nature—would be sustained." 

3. "You can not step twice into the same river." — Heraclitus

2. "The elk problem could not be defined out of existence. Difficulties, like the elk themselves, quietly multiplied." 

1. "Fire improves nature in many ways. It changes the chemical composition of the soil, promoting more varied vegetation and supporting more diverse wildlife. It releases soluble mineral salts in plant tissue, and increases the nitrogen, calcium, potassium, and phosphorous in the soil that act as fertilizers. It decreases soil acid rain, not only in the earth but in the streams and lakes as well. It blackens the ground, permitting more of the sun's heart to warm it and promoting faster growth of vegetation. Burning forests stimulates germination in some trees, such as lodgepole pine; it produces habitat for nesting birds, such as the mountain bluebird. But the most important result of burning is that is arrests or reverses the normally inexorable seral succession."

"There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand."

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
​