With Earth Day 2021 upon us, Nathaniel Popkin's new book is certain to stir reflection and discussion. As reviewer Charlie Quimby notes, it is not a jeremiad nor preachy—quite the opposite. It is [a] short read intended to make conscious the unconscious things we as human societies are doing in consuming the nature that sustains us, and, at this rate, it leads to only one possible outcome.

To Reach the Spring tackles the big question of how humans can possibly face together an existential threat in which we are both victims and perpetrators. It is less a book about ecology than a human critique of the systems that have given us unimaginable freedom to consume the planet that sustains life.
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The book’s 146 pages could easily be read in a day. I took much longer to finish, not because it was slow going but because each of its four chapters demanded reflection. I found myself underlining and starring the text on a substantial number of pages, then waited until I felt alert and committed enough to attend closely to the summing up.

What is life worth?
Popkin's cri de coeur. "To Reach the Spring" speaks to, follows up with, and updates Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" but speaks as well to Primo Levi, James Baldwin and to many more. It is a philosophical rumination on choice, obligation, and judgment. It asks: what is a life worth? It tells us we are all victim and victimizer. It uses the Holocaust as a touchpoint to reflect on the environmental apocalypse we are living through (perhaps dangerously -- the differences outweigh the similarities, but human behavior here is the key -- when we are of the group causing harm we believe we are in the right, OR don't see a path of resistance, OR don't care enough or are too consumed by other things both trivial and important). The essays also comprise something of a memoir, whereby Popkin reaches into his childhood and young adulthood -- the story of our planet's plight, after all, is the story of our lives, of how we have learned what to value and how to make change possible. Indeed, this short but crucial book is ultimately a book of hope, despite the grim take on our humanity. It is partially framed as a letter to hypothetical grandchildren (shades of Baldwin writing to his - real - nephew) which implies that there will indeed be grandchildren around to read it. While the book to his grandchildren yet to be is in part an apology, it also is a dream. That the spring IS within our reach. We just have to be brave. "To Reach the Spring" should be up there in the pantheon with "Silent Spring." Not because of its literary merit (which it has in spades, mind you) but for its challenge to make a better world through our individual and collective choices.
(Review by Kevin M. Feinberg)

Nathaniel Popkin, TO REACH THE SPRING
Nathaniel Popkin, EVERYTHING IS BORROWED
Mark Lyons, HOMING: A MEMOIR

[Q:] In the book, you highlight our complicity and potential for apathy, going on to write, “Not facing known and well-understood acts of destruction may be the moral failure of our time.” I turn one of your opening questions back to you. In face of the climate crisis, what is life worth?

[A:] Very clearly, we’ve allowed the market, the system of global capitalism, to establish the metrics for answering this question. But it doesn’t have to be that way, does it? And furthermore, what we take the question to mean—what is a human life worth?—can be challenged and changed. For all life and lives are connected. As biologists are increasingly coming to understand, beings spawn, grow, evolve, and adapt together in complicated webs of life and not—as we like to imagine—as discrete individuals. We are at stake to one another. Let us, then, reconfigure our approach to the question, “What is life worth?” For what do we mean by life?