Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (The World As Home) - Southern Memoir & Nature Writing - Perfect for Book Clubs and Environmental Studies

I came of age at a time and place when being ecologically aware meant you flattened your tin cans before tossing them in the trash. Fortunately, our planet is home to Janisse Ray and others who share her passion for nature and living sparingly. Ms. Ray, the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, combines hilarity with heartache, alternating between musings on the abundant natural resources that surrounded her childhood home in Appling County, Georgia, and memories of her impoverished upbringing.Ms. Ray writes about Christian fundamentalism very matter-of-factly; neither condemning or endorsing the religion that permeated every aspect of her growing up years. She talks about her family lineage and inter-generational poverty in a style that is reminiscent of Rick Bragg, a fellow southern author.Deprived children must be resourceful and creative. Ms. Ray and her siblings “took trips” in abandoned cars that populated her father’s junkyard. “Sometimes in warm weather and even in cold, to escape the house and the endless work, we would go sit in the junk cars with the windows rolled down, and we would pretend to travel to far-off places.”In time, Ms. Ray will leave home, journeying northward to college. She will meet an older student, a kindred spirit – “we loved the same things – poetry and the woods. Aloud across a campfire we read Walt Whitman, and when we described the lives we wanted, our desires were the same: to live simply, close to nature, to grow and collect our own food, to use plants as medicines, to be as self-sufficient as possible.”As I write this on a splendid early summer morning, a grey squirrel is clambering down a tall Douglas fir tree, heading for the side of the house in search of sunflower seeds and peanuts that may have rolled off the deck railing above. I have seen dozens of other squirrels make that same precarious journey down that same tree but today there is an extra measure of appreciation for our mutual existence.