Ignorant of the realities of nature, we imagine a paradise where all is well but for the cruelties inflicted by man. It makes for simple choices and easy moralizing…. Stephen Budiansky

As I was proofing the September/October 2009 issue of Countryside, I came across a letter from a reader that filled me with a profound uneasiness. The reader, a transplant onto five semi-rural acres from a large urban area, was pondering whether or not she was living as “green” as she should. Obviously not, because she began to refer to large conventional farmers as “the browns” and those who lived on smaller acreage, but jetted off to Hawaii for elegant weddings, as “the greens.” Placing labels on others as a way to define ourselves constrains how we learn and grow. A fact pointed out by Stephen Budiansky in The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, from Yale University Press.

Budiansky’s theory encompasses both a scientific re-examination of history as well as a reverence for the force we know only as evolution. As he so aptly points out, we as humans over-exaggerate our own importance in society as well as nature. Budiansky explains in great and poignant detail how the forces of evolution have forced not random changes, but species specific choices. He points to the drawings of early Egyptians depicting the domestication of gazelle and cattle. Yet, thousands of years later only the cattle remain domesticated. Why? Because evolution compelled them to remain attached to mankind.

This is an interesting read, not too long, and will lift your spirit as it broadens your mind. This is the work of a real, hands-on farmer, and it shows. Every animal rights activist should read this book. And everyone who fancies themselves one of the “greens” would do well to ponder the words of a real farmer, one who deals with life and death, and who has earned a respect for the natural world. None of us is green or brown. We’re all a part of nature.