Book Review: Wild Earth, Wild Soul
/A manual for leading workshops in ecological interconnection
The description I encountered for Wild Earth, Wild Soul by Bill Pfeiffer prior to reading it for review didn't sufficiently prepare me for the fact that this is primarily a manual for leading a particular type of retreat group. The Amazon description makes it sound like the book itself is meant to help the reader tap into ancestral memories, become part of a lasting culture and develop an ecstatic life. That's a bit misleading.
The book is instead a fairly well-organized manual for workshop and retreat leaders in a specific tradition that the reader is expected to already be somewhat familiar with. The book is well-written with accessible prose and interesting examples. However, its structure as a manual for a specific type of workshop will be less useful to readers who aren't involved in the specific Wild Earth Intensive movement. It also isn't the best introduction to such a movement, with the emphasis being on how to lead groups rather than on the underlying concepts and ideas.
That said the book does have one use for the general reader who is interested in community organizations and leadership. Many of the activities in the book could be adapted to other types of workshops and organizations. While some of the activities and ideas are things familiar to most people involved in environmental movements, some are quite unique and refreshing. There is enough detail that an experienced workshop leader could adapt them to a variety of situations.
The one thing I find truly lacking in the book both for the general reader and for the Wild Earth Intensive movement is a serious treatment of social exclusion in groups. The focus of the book is on developing not only an ecologically sustainable culture but on forming community that will be sustainable through deepening interconnection between human beings in a group and with the natural world. The concept is a good one and mostly it is well executed. However, it comes from the perspective of a person who has always been well-accepted socially and without a deep consciousness of social trauma. There is little or nothing to address the issues facing people with disabilities or other truly marginalized individuals in a group. And these issues will come up for a workshop coordinator in such a setting. They come up at every similar conference or workshop I have attended and I have seen leaders fail time and again to address them well and bring the group to accept excluded members of the group. There is some attempt in Wild Earth, Wild Soul to address the need to balance the more talkative and less talkative members of the group through specific methods, and these are good ones. However, there are also plenty of suggestions of dividing the group up into pairs without the recognition that there will always be one or two individuals who no one will voluntarily pair with because of uncomfortable differences. There can be no sustainable culture and no interconnection as long as these issues are not addressed in the very settings where people are most interested in overcoming social and ecological trauma. The book tackles these tough issues weakly and insufficiently, yet I know of no comparable book that deals with them any better at present.
