The End of Eden, by Thomas Rain Crowe

The End of Eden: Writings of an Environmental Activist by Thomas Rain Crowe, illustrations by Robert Johnson (Wind Publications trade paperback, Oct., 2008, 179 pages, $16).
http://windpub.com/booklist.htm

The essays of Thomas Rain Crowe
combine with the stirring illustrations
of Robert Johnson to produce a prophetic
vision of the world in which we live--a
vision of what we have and what we stand
to loose through our careless disregard
for the Earth and its finite resources.
A kind of activist’s handbook, this is one
man’s attempts at saving his homeland
from mindless hedonism, outside invasion,
and outright denial--writing as if there might
be enough universal truth to be of some
use to others experiencing similar incursions
in their own locales.




THOMAS RAIN CROWE Tuckaseegee, NC was born in 1949 and is a poet, translator, editor, publisher, recording artist and author of twelve books of original and translated works. During the 1970s he lived abroad in France, then returned to the U.S. to become editor of Beatitude magazine and press in San Francisco and one of the "Baby Beats" and where he was co-founder and Director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. In the 1980s, after returning to his boyhood home in North Carolina, he was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians and founded New Native Press. In 1994 he founded Fern Hill Records (a recording label devoted exclusively to the collaboration of poetry and music).. His memoir based on four years of self-sufficient living in a wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982 (Zoro’s Field) was published by the University of Georgia Press in the spring of 2005. He currently resides in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where he writes features and columns on culture, community and the environment for the Smoky Mountain News. Several books of his poetry have been published, most recently by Main Street Rag. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina.

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There are many Thomas Rain Crowes--Baby Beatnik, Sufi mystic, Celtic anthologist, bio-regionalist--that's what makes him so much fun. Crowe, the nature writer, achieved a great publishing success in 2005 with Zoro's Field, his Thoreau-like account of living simply off the land in Polk County. The End of Eden brings together essays that serve as a musing prologue to either Eden or environmental Armageddon; and then gains bite when Crowe discovers that his idyllic existence in Jackson County is threatened by development. "When I moved here in 1993, I truly felt that this place would sustain me in these kinds of ways for the rest of my life." Since the day he spotted a Florida company's surveyors working at the edge of his property, Crowe started talking with activists and experts, "trying to get a realistic picture of exactly what has been happening to Jackson County during my long idealistic sleep." Smart Growth, a pro-beauty media campaign, farmland preservation, conservation purchases, and the local food movement become Crowe's focuses for the remainder of his book.
-----Rob Neufeld, The Asheville Citizen-Times, The Read on WNC


From the Book ---

It's the end of October and I’ve still got tomatoes on the vine. Native, June-blooming rhododendrons are flowering again. Hummingbirds are still here and coming to the feeders. Walnuts hanging from the leafless walnut trees like Christmas tree ornaments, not able to drop. Yellow-jackets still coming and going actively to their underground nests. Raccoons still coming into the corn patch thinking that August must have come ‘round again and that there is corn. Following the wettest summer on record, we’re in the midst of a draught. Here in Tuckasegee, it’s only rained twice in the last two months. I’m having to hand-water the heather, just to keep them alive. With my woodpile ready for the winter, I’ve not even thought about starting a fire. Strange days. . . .
. . . . . . .