The New Earth Reader: The Best of Terra Nova

An offbeat literary journal with an environmental focus, Terra Nova attempts to push ecological writing in new directions by breaking down disciplinary boundaries by blending thought, literature, reportage, meditation and photography. One of the best pieces in this eclectic, stimulating collection is Rick Bass's report on his recent trip to Romania to find out how Romanians peacefully coexist with their superabundant grizzly bear population, in sharp contrast to trigger-happy Americans. In his beautiful personal essay, ""Me and Mom and the Bioregion,"" poet Jerry Martien unravels the tangled relations of lives and locale as he describes caring for his elderly widowed mother in an impoverished coastal village in northern California amid dunes, swamp, redwood forests and pulp mills. Feminist philosopher Val Plumwood's horrifying, near-fatal skirmish with a crocodile in Australia, which left her severely injured, compels her to rethink and affirm her vegetarianism and to analyze our rapacious culture's obsession with large predatory animals. Published under the auspices of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where Rothenberg, the journal's founder, is a philosophy professor, Terra Nova sometimes shades into political analysis, as in Charles Bowden's forays into a Mexican red-light district plagued by drugs, gangs, murder, rape and grinding poverty, or the report by Indian sociologists Bikram Nanda and Mohammad Talib on toxic industrial pollution in New Delhi. Other noteworthy selections include interviews by Rothenberg with virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier and with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Overall, the selections fulfill the journal's mission to seek unexpected ways to heal the split between nature and culture. 37 illus. (Dec.)