In his new book of essays, Scott Russell Sanders celebrates the power of imagination as an agent of positive change. “Imagination,” Sanders writes, “breaks the shell of the status quo, summoning up objects that do not yet exist, actions that no one has yet performed, and wiser ways of living that have yet to be realized.”
He sees imagination at work not just in art, science, and politics, but also in the oh-so-slow bending of the moral arc of the universe, writing “the ideal of human equality arose not from observing an existing order but imaging a better one.” Imagination, he believes, “can give rise to compassion, by providing insight into the feelings and thoughts of other people.”
“Justice to future generations requires us to pass along the beauty and bounty of Earth undiminished.”
The Way of Imagination is Sanders’s tenth collection of essays, to go along with about as many works of adult fiction and a handful of children’s books. It presents his writing from the last several years, including two pieces originally published in The Progressive. The most recent of these, from 2015, appeared in the magazine under the headline “From Plantation to Planet”; it appears in the book as “The Suffering of Strangers.”
The essay describes Sanders’s visits to former slave plantations, now tourist attractions, building into a critique of racial bias, militarization, and planetary destruction. It leads to his affirmation, consistent with the book’s larger theme, that “we are creatures capable of learning, capable of imagining and caring about others, capable of changing our minds and our ways.”
Such an essentially optimistic message is typical of Sanders, now seventy-four and a professor emeritus at Indiana University, where he taught for thirty-eight years. His own life is a testament to the human capacity for transformation.
The son of an alcoholic who helped build tools of destruction, Sanders embraced the cause of peace and learned to imbibe warily and “listen for the turning of a key in my brain.” He became an ardent environmentalist, humanitarian, and advocate for civil rights. His work rings with authenticity, caring, and a deep sense of hope.
“As with any human faculty,” he acknowledges at one point, “imagination can be corrupted by selfishness, fear, greed, or the craving for power. But when guided by generosity and compassion, imagination can lead us toward a life that’s worthy of our potential as reasoning, caring, and moral creatures. It can show us how to live together in peace, and in harmony with our marvelous planet.”
I first came upon Sanders’s work about a decade ago, when I picked up a copy of For the Health of the Land, a collection of lesser-known writing by the naturalist Aldo Leopold. The book, released in 1999, included a foreword by Sanders that left me awed.
Here’s a sample: “Like Leopold’s prose, and like the character of the man revealed in his books, the Midwest is plain and straightforward, yet shadowed with mystery; open and welcoming, yet reserved; full of promise and hope, yet acquainted with grief.”
It was writing on par with Leopold himself, and it got me started reading deep into Sanders’s oeuvre, which I have noticed holds up uncommonly well over time. Even his essays from decades ago still feel urgent.
Perhaps Sanders’s best overview collection is Earth Works, published in 2012, which includes essays from throughout his career up to that time. One stunning piece, “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs,” first published in 1982, describes his boyhood in Ohio, where his family moved in 1951 so his father could take a job at a military arsenal “to supervise the production lines where artillery shells and land mines and bombs were loaded with explosives.”
From age five into his teens, Sanders was among a small number of children who grew up within this vast fenced-in munitions facility, playing war (“How could we avoid it?”) and looking in vain for the atomic bombs rumored to be on the premises. Sanders, who sought conscientious objector status during the war in Vietnam (he ended up being declared unfit for other reasons), concludes the piece with a shattering take on how a childhood steeped in the preparation for destruction had colored his worldview.
“Everywhere now,” he writes, “there are bunkers beneath the humped green hills; electronic challenges and threats needle through the air we breathe; the last wild beasts fling themselves against our steel boundaries. The fences of the arsenal have stretched outward until they have circled the entire planet. I feel, now, I can never move outside.”
Sanders is part of a rich vein of American writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Leopold to Wendell Berry to Annie Dillard, who promote preservation of the land by expressing a love for it. The Way of Imagination includes Sanders’s insightful and gently critical essay on Thoreau’s Walden, one worthy of comparison to Edward Abbey’s gleeful dressing down, in his essay collection Down the River, of the writer he irreverently calls “Henry.”
Thoreau is, in Sanders’s eyes, an enigma that one could spend a lifetime pondering. He describes the patron saint of American environmentalism as a “brash narrator” with an excessively male perspective whose “radical individualism, however necessary in his day as a bulwark against demands for conformity from church and society, now appears too narrow, rejecting as it does all responsibility of the self toward others.”
A Conservationist Manifesto, published in 2009, brings together Sanders’s writings on the environment. The book’s title essay is brief but powerful, consisting of forty numbered points that collectively remind me of Leopold’s grand aphorism: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Sanders’s list includes such gems as: “Justice to future generations requires us to pass along the beauty and bounty of Earth undiminished”; “There is no such thing as ‘sustainable growth.’ There is only sustainable use”; and “Only by caring for particular places, in every watershed, can we take care of the planet. Every place needs people who will dig in, keep watch, explore the terrain, learn the animals and plants, and take responsibility for the welfare of their home ground.”
This last point is critical to another key tenet of Sanders’s thinking, expressed in his 1991 essay “Staying Put,” which led to his eponymous 1993 book. Staying Put celebrates the virtue of putting down roots, laying claim to a place and calling it one’s own, learning about its geology and history, and taking responsibility for its preservation.
“Loyalty to place,” he writes, “arises from our need to be at home on the Earth. We marry ourselves to the creation by knowing and cherishing a particular place . . . .”
For Sanders, the place he came to call home is not Memphis, Tennessee, where he was born, nor the Ohio munitions base where he grew up, nor any of the other places he’s lived. It’s southern Indiana, where he moved with his wife, Ruth, in 1971 to teach at Indiana University and raise two children. For more than forty years, the couple lived in the same house in Bloomington, until just recently, when the progression of Ruth’s Parkinson’s disease forced them to relocate to another residence in the same city.
In The Way of Imagination, Sanders envisions a world in which love for the Earth replaces the pursuits that conspired to make us unhealthy. He is especially astringent in his denunciations of the ethic of constant growth.
“Free-market capitalism, by rejecting all constraints on the pursuit of profit, elevates our inborn selfishness into an economic ideology,” he writes. “Global corporations, wielding resources that dwarf those of all but a few nations, pursue growth as feverishly as bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish. Nearly all politicians, regardless of party or nationality, call for perpetual economic expansion—a vote-winning refrain, for it promises us to deliver more and more of everything we crave, or have been coaxed and bamboozled into craving.”
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “With every upward tick of the GDP, the richness and resilience of the greater-than-human world declines.”
One essay in The Way of Imagination talks about the task of writing and whether, to speak bluntly, it is worth the effort—something all nonfamous writers and even some famous ones often find themselves asking. The answer he comes up with is a good one.
“In spite of the media cacophony, in spite of losing confidence in literature’s ability to reform the world, I keep writing on account of the pleasure I feel in doing skillful work, the inspiration I find in reading, the questions that haunt me, and the creative mystery I sense at the heart of nature. We apprehend the universe in fragments, but the universe itself is whole. The art I wish to experience and the art I aspire to make attempts to model that wholeness, to honor the order and beauty of the cosmos.”
It is a message worthy of its messenger.