Review by John Austin
The extraordinary core of People of the Dune—a blistering, elaborate, and meticulous interrogation of the tension between modern property rights on the one hand and the obligations we owe to sacred places and the common good on the other—comes in the form of an unorthodox legal mechanism. Judge Odom Holmes, having decided in favor of a mining company in a suit to stop the destruction of a dune held sacred by the Odawa and Ojibwe and beloved by their earth-conscious neighbors, has a wrenching change of heart and authors a dissent to his own opinion. This dissent occupies sixty pages of this 170 page book, and is, to put it plainly, the reason to take this book seriously.
The narrative is uncomplicated. A mining company called Mython buys land containing a large dune which allegedly contains a sacred mound, intending to remove it and profit from the sand’s industrial usefulness. The surrounding community comes to the defense of the dune, at first in the form of messy protests and then in organized lawfare—the lawsuit which prompts Judge Holmes’ psychospiritual bunker-buster of a legal opinion. Holmes delivers the opinion just as the massive backhoes are taking their first chomp on the dune. The dune mysteriously explodes, and the happy ending coalesces quickly: bad guys go away, good guys flourish, and the scarred dune accrues even richer meanings than it had before.
This book wrestles with matters of paramount importance—how humans and the earth have developed a deeply dysfunctional relationship, and how the relations among humans themselves continue to threaten not just the species, but their island home altogether. Olson’s legal expertise and legal wisdom blaze brightly in Odom’s dissenting opinion. It is frankly impossible to convey the beauties of that section of the book with a few brief quotes, so what follows must serve as a sample:
Can or did the law ever condone an undisputed loss and demise of the earth’s commons: forests, mountain tops, lakes, rivers, marshes, or as in this case, a gap in the unbroken chain of twelve-thousand year-old dunes?. ..So, this common property, or commons in nature that preexists the appearance of humans and continues in all that for the purposes of this opinion, civilizations and eventually the law of private property. . . thrust onto nature like a branding iron burns ownership on the hide of a steer. . .But to be secure on one’s private land and to use its fruits for home, enjoyment, or endeavor is not to warrant the owner’s right to turn the land, water, or nature itself into a product with impunity, certainly not without regard for the damage to common interests of others or the people as a whole.
Olson-as-Odom cites a dozen legal precedents in such a logical way that the reader can feel entirely competent to assess the facts, the law, the applications of the law, and the reasoning which allows the eventual ruling. It is a truly remarkable passage, and this reader was greatly edified and genuinely inspired by it.
To get to that marvelous passage, unfortunately the reader must wander through a pedestrian scene-setting that offers no glimpse of the riches to come. The initial passages include sections rendered in ponderous and shallow mythopoetic diction, such as when Olson recaps the colonization of North America by Europeans. There are too many paragraphs that cost much and deliver little, such as the following:
The Invading People saw nature as doom hidden and lurking in the shadows. Some said it was their sacred duty to subdue the enemy. They knew nothing of the spirit, nothing of harmony. . .they were ignorant of the very force that sustained them, ignorant that they choked, strangled, cut, boiled, sucked, burned, boxed, and sold the very things on which their survival depended, the very things for which their encrusted hearts yearned.
That said, the reader who persists as far as Judge Holmes’ brilliant legal opinion in People of the Dune—which really is philosophy at its best, grounded in observed reality, the varying perceptions of observed reality, and an unflinching embrace of seen and unseen as the inextricably intertwined source of all that is true and eternal; of all life, really, if “life” has any actual meaning at all—will be rewarded with one of the most beautiful and useful bits of writing that I have read in a very long time.
