BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : Where the Wild Things Are

Henry David Thoreau clarified a truth, successfully observed before his time, recorded in his famous line: “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

That truth is being muddied. There’s a mudding crowd that assumes that the national and global economies require the unending growth of human members and the unmitigated consumption of the world’s resources--whatever this profligacy costs the Earth or does to the people not yet born or does to other less-demanding forms of life and geology.

Thoreau’s hopes, and the wilderness literature they have inspired, deserve an alternative to the coffee table. Books pile up on coffee tables too fast or are subject to sudden drenching by incompatible refreshments. Bookshelves themselves are woefully inadequate. They display only the spines of books--shelf after shelf of spines, none of them honoring the designs so carefully created on book covers.

How about taking an architect to lunch at the earliest opportunity, and get her or his suggestions for coping with the variety of such books as described here? Perhaps they can design shelves wide enough and deep enough to let us display books upright or accommodate facing pages of spectacular art and prose in counterpoint.

The ultimate goal could be to let your friends and visitors know, at long last, how discerning your taste is, and that you’ll never allow the amenities of furniture, windows, wall space or ceilings get in the way of the proper display of books. I should explain that I am biased, having published a lot of coffee-table books. Unfortunately I have not taken an architect to lunch yet. And our house is surfeited with amenities and barely navigable.

You can do better. Acquire all eight books mentioned here, persuade your bookseller to defer payment for a year or so or lease your books. Don’t forget the architect.

Why all eight? Well, you’ll need “Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape” to remind you of the importance of keeping some wilderness nearby. No one ever advocated it better, and this book is long overdue.

You need “Designing the Earth” to remind you of that kind of inventing that humanity has been capable of--and what happens when people try too hard to outdo nature and there aren’t enough Olmsteds around.

You need “Saving Wildlife: A Century of Conservation” to reveal how hard early Democrats and Republicans struggled to achieve all that conserving, which the inventors of the “contract on America” are trying skillfully to disinvent.

Peter Benchley’s “Ocean Planet” explains hazards to the ocean that are far more troublesome than what he wrote about in “Jaws.” Harvard professor E.0. Wilson has elsewhere explained how to learn to love monsters, including sharks, some of which are themselves endangered. “Ocean Planet” can cool our own monstrous proclivities.

In “Seeing the Light: Wilderness and Salvation, A Photographer’s Tale” Clyde Butcher is the photographer, and authors Tom Shroder and John Barry tell of a man who did not have to learn to love swamps, never suspecting one should do anything else. Like sharks, vernal pools, spotted owls, human beings, and several million undiscovered species, swamps are endangered by the one overconfident species.

Never having had mentionable trouble with women in the wilderness, I’ll mention two troubles with “Women in Wilderness: Writings and Photographs.” One, there are beautiful photographs by women, but no women were allowed in the photographs. Second, women are overrepresented in the text. Of the nine authors, only one, Mardy Murie, avoids the overuse of female nouns and pronouns. I am aware of this because my own writing, from 1934 to 1992, was stuck on male nouns and pronouns. I now know that wilderness needs more women out there to show the rest of us how to evaluate, interpret, preserve and restore.

Galen Rowell’s text and photographs encounter almost everything he could possibly explore on this little, beautiful, limited planet. In “Poles Apart: Parallel Visions of the Arctic and Antarctic,” he has a delightful time traveling from pole to pole with his camera, and delights us as well. Being well above average in the time I’ve spent being alive, I boldly allege that no one but Rowell has reached so many difficult places, assigned so magical a role to his camera, and put so much of it all so well into words.

Save a superlative for what must be said--and Mark Mardon’s text says it well--about one Stephen Lyman and his “Into the Wilderness: An Artist’s Journey.” His 23 drawings augment 102 splendid paintings that are interspersed with 119 photographs, all of them small, some humorous, many of them little jewels. Lyman is a master of brush and lens. What that lens discovers has you wondering why he bothers to carry carry pigment--until you see him liberate that pigment.

You need the book itself to enjoy, without my interference, what wonderful things happen when an artist can switch so easily from easel to tripod.

All in all, you can discover in these books how to sustain the wildness within all of us (without which we couldn’t exist) by sparing and celebrating the wilderness outside.

****

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED: Designing the American Landscape, By Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau (Rizzoli, $49.95; 276 pp.)

DESIGNING THE EARTH: The Human Impulse to Shape Nature, By David Bourdon (Abrams: $49.95; 240 pp.)

SAVING WILDLIFE: A Century of Conservation, The Wildlife Conservation Society (Abrams: $49.95; 286 pp.)

OCEAN PLANET: Writings and Images of the Sea, By Peter Benchley (Abrams: $39.95; 192 pp.)

SEEING THE LIGHT: Wilderness and Salvation, A Photographer’s Tale, By Tom Shroder and John Barry . Photographs by Clyde Butcher (Random House: $30; 160 pp.)

WOMEN IN WILDERNESS: Writings and Photographs. Selected and edited by Susan and Ann Zwinger (Harcourt Brace: $19.95; 98 pp.)

POLES APART: Parallel Visions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Text and photographs by Galen Rowell (University of California Press: $39.95; 184 pp.)

INTO THE WILDERNESS: An Artist’s Journey. Paintings and photographs by Stephen Lyman , text by Mark Mardon (The Greenwich Workshop: $35; 180 pp.)