Book Review: 'The Story Handbook - Language and Storytelling for Land Conservationists'
Edited by Helen Whybrow - Review Courtesy of Andy Goodman at Free-range Thinking™
To protect fragile ecosystems and the wildlife they sustain, the Trust for Public Land (TPL) [an Earth Share of Washington member] pursues a straightforward strategy: buy the land before developers can. It's an effective strategy, but since TPL's success stories often reduce to raising money and completing complex financial transactions that result in the purchase of so many acres, it can be dull to describe. Recognizing this drawback, TPL has assembled a collection of essays that tell the real story behind their work -- namely, that human beings have a fundamental connection to the land that is deep and spiritual. Even if your work has nothing to do with conservation, the ability of TPL's storytellers to find a tale worth telling is admirable and worth studying.
One might even say that natural ecosystems and abstract geographical spaces become human places precisely through the accumulation of narratives that record and pass on to other people the living memory of what those places mean. Stories create places by teaching us why any given patch of earth matters to the people who care for it. -William Cronon