Whatever Happened to Ecology?

By whatever incident one is awakened, or reawakened, the knowledge dawns that the Earth is an organism of organisms, an interrelated whole, thriving in balance, with no preference for one species over another; that the task of our species is to find our way back into the web. The home truth is that all life wants to live; that life wants to speciate, diversify, and intertwine is immanent in nature. The knowledge that my habitat and therefore, my existence as an organism are threatened is more than idea; it is at once visceral and transpersonal. -- from Whatever Happened to Ecology

In 1969, Mills, then a college valedictorian, leapt into the fledgling ecology movement by announcing that she would never bring a child into an already overpopulated world. In succeeding years she plunged into San Francisco's environmental activism, working with David Brower, Stewart Brand, Paul Ehrlich and Joan MacIntyre, among others. This winning memoir is both a retrospective of the movement and a personal account of Mills's own shift from environmentalism on an abstract and global scale to bioregionalism, which is practical and local in scope. -- Publishers Weekly