ENVIRONMENT

NOTES FROM THE SHORE by Jennifer Ackerman. (Viking: $21.95; 190 pp.) Books on the environment this Earth Day season meander the length of the valley they’ve cut over the last two decades: From evocative nature writing to deep ecology, to case studies, to meditation on the economy and the environment, to agenda-building and policy analysis. Young Aldo Leopolds and Rachel Carsons poke up between the nature writing and the case studies. Young Edward Abbeys are harder to find. Books on how environmental values and economic goals are not mutually exclusive are no more readable than they were five years ago. Books that describe a return to the land carry the tone of their urban predators: scattered thinking, short attention span, poor health, need for community, more desperately on their sleeves than the same books written five years ago. Policy books bury their agendas in a flurry of information and conciliation. The places described by the naturalists seem long ago and far away, a wonderland, a luxury.

Except, that is, for this book, which so carefully and so broadly recreates its “small town by the sea.” Lewes is on the Delaware Bay, a town Ackerman moved to as an adult. “A native landscape enters a child’s mind through a meld of sensations,” she writes. You can’t hope for quick or easy fluency. You work from the outside in, by accumulating a vocabulary of observed details.” Ocellated lady crabs, pink feldspar, pitch pine and loblobby; these are the characters and the vocabulary of “Notes From the Shore.” “Fringing the dunes is straw-colored beach grass.” “On a winter afternoon near twilight, waves are coursing in from the northeast, rearing up and pouring down with a wild, pitching crash.” “Ragged flags flutter over battened-down boats and stoplights run their cycle in solitude.” There’s Conrad and Heraclitus and Melville and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ language of the sea. There’s mystery and conundrum. Puzzling over the details, one finds the facts on sea-level rise and climate change have entered through the brain’s back door. A feeling for the importance of the preservation of this place guards the front.