High Tide In Tucson

From hermit crabs to Hawaiian Islands, Barbara Kingsolver’s collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never is a read to remember. Though it is a collection of different essays spanning multiple different themes, an important one spans the entirety: Humans come from nature, and nature is chaotic in and of itself; people cannot expect life to be as calm and controlled as they would like. She uses many different examples throughout the book to help prove this point. Not only does she prove that point but she does it in a fun to read and easy to understand way. She is incredibly important to the book, as it contains her life experiences. The overarching theme is shown through the author, as well as the example of the workings …show more content…
She proves this through nature in a plethora of ways. For example in the opening essay which shares the title of the book, High Tide in Tucson, she discusses how humans are still prone to baser instincts of the animal kingdom just as our ancestors did. Kingsolver specifically says “I find that millions of years of evolution has prepared me for one thing only: to follow internal rhythms (p.8).” She also discusses how many of the things we do, such as protect loved ones and form social bonds, all come from those internal rhythms. In the essay Making Peace, she talks about issues she had with local animals destroying her garden. The most prominent animals were javelinas, which are small wooly pigs. These wooly pigs were constantly getting into her garden, bringing her to the brink of outrage. She tried everything she could to get them out of her garden but nothing worked. That was, until she had quite the epiphany. She realized that as she was thinking like a “person.” By this she means people who think they are above the animal kingdom. Once she realizes this she changes her strategy. Instead of driving the pigs out she plants less kinds of plants. She also made a small courtyard to keep her plants in that would keep the javelinas out. These are some of the many ways that she relates humans back into nature through means of animals and nature. In the essay, Semper …show more content…
Barbara Kingsolver does an amazing job of creating a collection of essays with very similar themes. She not only has all twenty five essays prove that humans are connected to nature in more ways than they could possibly think, but she does in a very fun and easy to understand way. All of these things are what makes High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never a great read for anyone interested in a fun yet very deep look at how people interact with nature and each