Magazines focusing on the natural world are plentiful these days, but the quarterly Terra Nova towers above its competition. It refuses to define its mission in terms of a politically correct slant on environmental activism, or on a rhapsodic, New Age romanticism. Editor David Rothenberg and his ever-stimulating roster of writers and photographers take the position that writing clearly about nature requires a tough-minded commitment to notions of complexity and contradiction.
Issues are loosely organized around themes like Borderline and Music from Nature. Liberated, for the most part, from political or spiritual agendas, Terra Nova's writers offer multiple perspectives on how nature's dark and light sides have been interpreted cross-culturally. Borderline looks unblinkingly at the false dualisms that often cloud ecological debates. Animal life is not treated as something purer than human, while pollution is viewed as a complicated swirl of linked pluses and minuses.
The music issue includes a CD, bringing to life essays about music's roots in natural soundscapes. Of particular note are excerpts from a book by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. His Zenlike appreciation of direct experience of music in nature, undiluted by academic theory, is summarized by the statement, "When sounds are possessed by ideas instead of having their own identity, music suffers." The mix of contributors puts most music magazines to shame. In what other publication can you find Beethoven and Hildegard of Bingen, Brian Eno and the BaBenzélé Pygmies?
Terra Nova delights in presenting artists who relish working in a time when virtuality and artificial life are developing, who see new technologies less as threats and more as opportunities for complex artistic engagements intertwining naturalness/artificiality. No image from the journal is more indicative of its vision than that of a piano dropped from a mountain by an avant-garde composer. Don't worry. This is purely fiction, excerpted from Thomas Wharton's novel Icefields. But Wharton offers an appropriately paradoxical, complex conclusion to this performance art: "Ivory keys are found later in the summer by hikers ... Often they are mistaken for the teeth of mammoths."
Terra Nova: US$34 yearly. MIT Press Journals: +1 (617) 253 2889, fax +1 (617) 577 1545, email journals-orders@mit.edu.
STREET CRED
Age of Interpretation Online Synergy
All Natural and Complex
