Daegan Miller's Reading List

"No one would read this book and think to themselves, ‘Oh, obviously, this is a great work of radical environmentalism.’ This book is a work of creative nonfiction. Maggie Nelson is a theorist, a poet, an essayist—an extraordinary writer and thinker. The book is a meditation on identity, on art , and, after Nelson—who identifies as queer and is married to the gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge—becomes pregnant and has a baby, on reproduction. It is, at heart, a long discussion of relationship: how we relate to others, how the boxes of identity influence those relationships, what we care for and leave behind. Isn’t there something inherently environmental about each of those questions? Henry David Thoreau —an obvious choice for any discussion of radical environmentalism—writes about looking at things with ‘the side of one’s eye’ to gain insight. If one reads The Argonauts with the side of one’s eye, then I think what Nelson is really talking about is listening: listening to the other. Listening, carefully, is an attitude of radical humility—and ‘humility’ like ‘human’ shares an etymological root with the word ‘humus,’ with generative, nutritive soil. At the very end of The Argonauts Nelson writes: “Is there really such a thing as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long? Ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.” It seems to me that this notion of living a life blazing with care, of choosing to care for one another, for everything else, is the seed of the radical environmentalism I write about. When we open up environmentalism to include things beyond trees or animals or the water, to people in general—and not just affluent white male hikers, but people of colour, women, LGBTQ+, poor folks—this is the real hard shining core of a radical environmentalism that gets us to interaction, to interrelationship, to what we leave in our wake. If I could have picked a sixth book, it would probably have been The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris. I have two kids, two boys, a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. I’ve read what seems like thousands of books to them at this point. Sure, I hope to teach them to love words, to increase their vocabulary, and we have fun together. But it occurred to me, somewhere in all that reading, that what I was really doing was sitting with two beings who are very different from me—that we were sharing the space together, that we were sharing a time together, and caring for each other. That, it seems to me, is the point of a radical reproduction—the reproduction of care. I think that this reproduction is so incredibly important, whether one decides to have kids or not. It’s not necessarily about what one passes on to one’s children, but what one passes on generally to all those that are ‘not-me.’ One of the reasons that capitalist reproduction is so antithetical to life is that it’s not about care. It’s about personal accumulation. I think Maggie Nelson gets us to this caring. This caring is part of what I’m trying to recover in my own book as well."

"I want to help open up the category of environment widely—to let in people who have traditionally been excluded from mainstream environmentalism, and in the US this exclusion has almost always targeted people of colour. Ralph Ellison’s novel is the story of an unnamed narrator, set, initially, in the rural South. He works his way up to a prestigious black college, journeys north, works in factories and, at the conclusion of the novel, ends up living underground in a space lit by 1,369 lightbulbs. Part of what makes this radically environmental, I think, is that the book traces his movement through spaces and landscapes of exploitation—whether it’s the Southern sharecropping landscape, or the Northern industrial factory one. The book charts the way that an individual person interacts with landscapes, economies, cultures—with different environments. What the novel pinpoints relentlessly, and I should say beautifully, is the environment of exploitation, whether southern and agrarian or northern and industrial. There’s no purity in any of these landscapes. The narrator is constantly trying to overcome exploitation, whether by the traditional route of pulling himself up by the bootstraps or, later in the novel when he joins a Marxist cell. But he can’t. He fails, or rather, every system fails him. This is a deeply pessimistic novel, with no resolution or clear path forward—and yet, it’s a novel with great resolve. There’s a great line near the end of the novel where the narrator says: “Life is to be lived, not controlled. And humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.” “Humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat” This, to me, really resonates with the scientist and environmentalist Rachel Carson, who entitled one of the chapters of Silent Spring , ‘The Obligation to Endure.’ Isn’t that what Ellison is writing about? What a bracing, defiant, radical environmental ethic: “Life is to be lived, not controlled. And humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”"

"The works of Recluse, a French anarchist writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are not particularly well known in English because not many of them have been translated. He was amazingly productive: his magnum opus, known in English as The Earth and its Inhabitants, is an enormous work running to six volumes, and he wrote scores of other pamphlets, articles, and essays. ‘Capital A’ anarchism has always been explicitly environmental. The thread begins with Pierre-Joseph Proudon, runs through Recluse and through Peter Kropotkin, who came up with an modification to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, arguing that cooperation—mutual aid—is a factor of evolution alongside competition. It continues though Emma Goldman, whose magazine was called Mother Earth, on into the second half of the 20th century in the work of the green anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin and the essays of Edward Abbey. Today, Derrick Jensen, among others, is continuing to cultivate the tradition of green anarchism. Recluse, to return to my point, is consistent in arguing that human freedom and justice are dependent on our environments. He is a wild read. He takes you through anti-capitalist politics, feminism, vegetarianism, free love, and a version of sustainable development."

"It is. Though Solnit had written an exhibition catalogue or two before Savage Dreams, this is her first standalone creative nonfiction book. Solnit before she was ‘the’ Rebecca Solnit. Savage Dreams is wonderful, amazing; it’s everything we all love about her writing. It has the deep research, the unbelievably sharp thinking, the beautiful, beautiful prose. Part of what makes Solnit Solnit—and radically ecological—is the way that she links disparate things together. Except that Solnit does this great cultural, political, and intellectual history and finds that the two sites resonate with each other deeply: the culture that would create nuclear test sites is the same culture that would create Yosemite National Park. They’re two sides of the same coin. Solnit does this all in incredible, electric glowing prose—a model for the way that I want to write. Hers is a literary form that is not linear but weblike, ecological. Savage Dreams is, unfortunately, underread in the Solnit canon. I highly recommend it."

"I have an affinity for Emily Dickinson. She saved my life. And so I try to work her into everything I do. She embraces desperation, but does not give in. A quiet refusal comes through in a lot of her poems, as well as an incredible humility and humanity. Could you imagine a conversation between she and Ellison? Here, let me read a poem of hers: it’s number 41. I robbed the Woods — The trusting Woods. The unsuspecting Trees Brought out their Burs and mosses, My fantasy to please. I scanned their trinkets curious — I grasped — I bore away — What will the solemn Hemlock — What will the Oak tree say? What I love about this poem is that it returns us to this attitude of listening, though there may be nothing to hear. She asks us to be quiet, to sit still, to listen to things we have wronged. Dickinson doesn’t offer an answer, but leaves us with a series of questions. She doesn’t tell us what we should do or what we shouldn’t do, other than that we should simply listen. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe, before we can figure out how to get out of this mess, we need to pause with Emily. Pause in the trees, listening. Maybe, that way, we’ll learn how to care."