Unsolaced

Starred review from November 16, 2020
“I’ve moved too much—something like twenty-eight times since I came of age,” writes Ehrlich in this expansive recollection of her travels. She writes that this is a bookend to her 1986 classic The Solace of Open Spaces; here, she recounts the places she’s called home and confronts differences caused by climate change. Ehrlich describes her time on a cattle ranch on California’s Channel Islands in the late 1990s where “wind was our constant companion and its attendant, the fog,” and a game ranch in Zimbabwe, where she worked with a local ecologist to “stop the desertification of the planet.” She also muses on her time witnessing melting ice and the disappearance of traditional hunting practices in northern Greenland, writing: “Climate is culture. As soon as the ice in the Arctic began to disappear, so did the lifeways of Greenland.” Erlich ruminates on loss both personally (her husband’s brain cancer) and climatologically, and has a knack for capturing the lives of those she’s met on the road. These include “Mike” Hinckley, the woman who taught Erlich how to cowboy; Allan Savory, who works to fight overgrazing and land degradation in Zimbabwe; and Rifat Latifi, a surgeon from Kosovo working to bring health services to war-ravaged areas. Erlich’s memories, rendered in rich, lyrical language, make for a moving ode to a changing planet.