The late Stan Rowe was one of those rare individuals in activist circles: a true character with a gentle sense of humour and long-term worldview that tempered the threat of rhetorical overkill. A pacifist jailed during the Second World War, Rowe eventually became a geo-ecologist and a professor of plant ecology. His visionary research and writings proved influential in changing how many people viewed what in the 1950s was a new concept outside of First Nations circles: environmental protection.

Employing a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to his topic – preferring the term ecosphere to the environment – Rowe believed that the war in Europe simply shifted in focus to a battle against nature, with a barrage of chemicals in agriculture and forestry, tank-like machinery terrorizing the land, and a massive restructuring of our natural relations that led to epidemics of global starvation. The results, he says, are plain to see less than half a century later: holes in the ozone layer, acid rain, desertification, and unparalleled levels of poisons in the food supply, air, and water.

Earth Alive collects some of Rowe’s last writings, as he looks back on his own life and the key themes that drove his work. Rowe combines a folksy writing style with solid scientific information. His tales tend to ramble in the manner of back-porch conversations, thus leaning toward the repetitive, but taken in smaller doses, each essay in its own right provides a good read.

Whether tackling urban alienation from the earth or the ways in which religious orthodoxies or certain approaches to architecture affect our ecological footprint, Rowe stresses the importance of an integrative approach to the world. Ultimately, things will not change, he argues, unless humans stop viewing themselves as separate from the living ecosphere. Rowe’s arguments are constructed with a satisfying amalgam of religion, poetry, philosophy, history, art, and science as he explains the dangerous path down the road to ecocide.

These essays are in many respects love letters to a planet that is still, remarkably, hanging in there, despite what Rowe rightly terms the eco-terrorism that is done to her in the name of progress. Rowe refuses to the end to become cynical, and his plea to renew the sacred bond with the planet is a heartfelt legacy to future generations, who ignore it at their own peril.