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THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN
By Robert Bateman, with Rick Archbold Viking, 130pp., $20.00

For years, Robert Bateman has been active and renowned as an artist of the natural world. It comes as no surprise to learn that he is also an ardent environmentalist. In Thinking Like a Mountain he uses the turn of the millennium, along with his own 70th birthday, as an occasion for considering the state of "our human and natural inheritance," and the possibilities for the future.

Although much of this brief book comprises a catalogue of atrocities inflicted on the natural world, Bateman ultimately defines himself not as a fatalist but as a "possibilist": "I believe," he writes, "that the human spirit and human ingenuity are capable of creating a complex variety of possibilities from any given set of circumstances. I believe that as individuals we have choices."

This quotation gives a fair sense of Bateman’s tone throughout. He is always earnest — something readers will find refreshing or cloying depending on their own temperaments and politics — yet he wisely shuns the temptation to play the solemn seer of doom. In fact, he conscientiously offers alternatives to the current reality.

At the same time, he has a frustrating tendency to resort to platitudes and clichés. It’s all too easy to imagine prime ministerial candidates or their American counterparts declaiming, to robotic applause, "I believe that as individuals we have choices." This frequent reliance on breezy or depleted phrases tends to stultify his main points, which already suffer from being so familiar. We are polluting the planet without considering the plight of our grandchildren; "we are losing touch with the world of nature and with ourselves as humans"; an "unholy alliance" (another term gutted by overuse) has developed between business and government.

What Bateman does do well is relate illuminating anecdotes and findings from his active and varied life. He also has a good eye for quotations, bringing together a number of apt observations by others. Marshall McLuhan, he writes, "once said that when you hear someone using the word Progress, you know you are dealing with a nineteenth- century brain." Canadian economist Patricia Adams, citing UNICEF on the damage wrought by "debt restructuring" imposed by the International Monetary Fund when developing countries defaulted on their loans, writes, "it is hardly too brutal an oversimplification to say that the rich got the loans and the poor got the debts."

And Bateman gets off some good lines of his own, as when he argues that "an economy based on self-gratification may … eat away at the edges of democracy." But this insight crying out for further exploration is followed up by no more than a couple of sentences. Likewise, Bateman describes nicely how advertisers "have now persuaded eight-year-olds that they are already teenagers and twenty- five-year-olds that they are still adolescents." But shortly afterward he writes, "North American movie and cartoon heroes win through physical force. Advertisers push hot buttons: greed, lust and having fun with violence. Is it so surprising, then, that some young viewers turn violent, go on shooting sprees, abuse drugs and alcohol or commit suicide?"

But the issue is so much older and more complex than that.

Anecdotally, the reader learns that the famous wildlife artist’s first encounter with wilderness actually occurred in the city. Bateman as a boy lived in a house backing on to a North Toronto ravine, in his fine description, "One of many ancient river valleys that provide a tracery of wildness through Toronto’s urban landscape. That ravine," he adds, "held the first forest I got to know."

In his late twenties, he and a friend set out on a "round-the- world Land Rover trip," and in the Belgian Congo hunted with the Ba Mbuti, a pygmy tribe. On the way to the hunting grounds, the Ba Mbuti — the entire tribe, it seems — squeeze into the Land Rover where they sing in a unique and elaborate harmony, which "has been compared to chimes or a glockenspiel."

Bateman praises the Ba Mbuti’s ability to fit into the ecosystem without profoundly altering it — though he might have balanced this idyllic vision by discussing the frequent, and natural, complicity of such peoples in the changes that overcome them. Hunter-gatherer societies have always leapt at the opportunity to acquire new technologies, such as firearms, that give them greater control over their environments. Whole peoples have only ever lived in true harmony with nature when they have had no choice.

Bateman tells also of seeing a wild wolf in the desert wilderness of Israel, a nation whose government policy, he reveals, "is that every animal mentioned in the Bible — except the lion — should once again roam free in the wilderness areas of the country." Then there’s the story of Jane Goodall winning the attention of a group of distracted police chiefs at a convention by howling in the manner of female chimps trying to attract alpha males.

The only problem with these bits is that they end so soon. Just when Bateman has secured our attention, he will pull up short with a facile concluding line and move on. To be fair, his stated intention was not to write a comprehensive memoir, or an exhaustive treatise — yet either of these would have made his points in a far more concrete, compelling way.

Bateman’s strength is his unabashed reverence backed up by a lifetime of experience in nature. He is a deep feeler rather than a deep thinker, and that’s no minor virtue. He is right to believe that more people need to feel and especially to act as he does. But intellectually speaking, there is little here that has not been explored more rigorously and originally in the work of, say, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Neil Postman, Jane Jacobs and Michael Moore.