People "Ready to Listen" to Environmental Messages, Barbara Kingsolver '77 Tells USA Today

May 3, 2007

May 3, 2007, Greencastle, Ind. - Barbara Kingsolver -- author of the new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and 1977 graduate of DePauw University -- "remembers being impressed by Al Gore's 1992 book on the environment, Earth in the Balance," reports USA Today. "But at the time," she tells the newspaper, "it didn't seem like a lot of people were ready to listen. Now they are."

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer opines, "With her new recounting of a year spent eating food raised near her home in Virginia, popular novelist Barbara Kingsolver may add mass-market, Oprah-level appeal to recent books about the advantages of local foods."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was released Tuesday by HarperCollins. The author of books such as The Bean Trees, Small Wonder and The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver "sees a connection among three crises: childhood obesity, global warming and struggling family farms," writes USA Today's Bob Minzesheimer.

"There's a growing sense we can't leave it up to scientists and governments," says Kingsolver. "People are asking, 'What can I do? How do we live in the world more as citizens than as toddlers grabbing for everything we can get?'" According to Minzesheimer, "She suggests starting in your refrigerator, because each item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles, consuming a lot of fossil fuel."

Access the stories at USA Today and the Post-Intelligencer.

Barbara Kingsolver also contributes an essay, "Seeing Red: Eating Locally and Debunking the Red-Blue Divide," to the May edition of Mother Jones magazine, which can be accessed here. Learn more about the author, who majored in zoology at DePauw, in this previous article.

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