Balance-of

What made some of the reading difficult was keeping up with all the names and events and the general time line. It got confusing at times.

But the actions of people that interacted with the author were clear enough to present an engaging story, and anyone that is interested in the world of prisons and criminals doing hard time during the period of the book will find this work interesting. Most of the hard core story telling happens from the mid sixties through the seventies and into the eighties. There is stuff going on in the nineties here but the story starts to lose some of its steam.

As for the politics of the story and the expose' of the corruption, if the author is to be believed, and I think he presented a very strong case (although alternative arguments are not really here) then the conclusion can be clearly drawn; there is and has been a lot of corruption in the Louisiana prison system. As for my personal feelings after my reading I think that I mostly chose to believe what the author has to say, the prison system is filled with corruption and the justice system is filled with unfairness.

That being said, although I agree that the author is a "changed man", I didn't change my opinion of the death penalty after reading his story. While I don't think he needs to be singled out for special punishment now, I think that the first unfairness was that he didn't receive the death penalty shortly after conviction. Using a gun while committing a felony should carry the death penalty. Life is precious and valuable and we show complete disrespect to the victims of violent crime when we as a people fail to administer fair and impartial justice.

The author complains that many murderers have been released while he was passed over for parole. And I agree that there is an injustice here, but it isn't to him, it is to the victims and the victims families of those predators being released. Life in prison should mean life and the death penalty should mean the death penalty.

All in all I recommend this book to anyone interested in a story about prison life and the struggle of one man that was sent to prison yet still found a way to bring something redeeming to this world. I was disappointed that even though he grew up, matured, came into a realization that he had devastated many lives by killing someone that was loved and found a way to stand up to prison injustices he doesn't mention any help from God or at least a "higher power". It seems that he healed and cured himself. If this is not true than the book left out some important details. I am not saying he should have made something up, of course, but if his redemption was "self willed" than reading about it has little value as the vast majority of us simply aren't that great.

In either case the book is an entertaining and compelling story and I wasn't disappointed in the time I spent reading it.

From the first page to the last, the reader is drawn into the life of Billy Wayne Sinclair. Sinclair relates how he was beaten and abused as a child, entered a life of crime as a teenager, and was convicted of murder, in 1965 at the age twenty. The writing is superb. Descriptions are graphic.
Sinclair was originally sentenced to death. His sentence was reduced to life in prison in 1972 after the U.S. Supreme Court voided then-existing death penalty laws. Gov. Buddy Roemer commuted his sentence to 90 years in 1992.
Events that span over thirty-five years are related in a narrative that details multi layers of political corruption in the Louisiana State Prison System. After years of operating on a code of loyalty established by prison inmates, the author took on a personal code of ethics. Sinclair, at great personal risk has been unwilling to compromise these new values and has exposed avarice, crime, and corruption within the parole and corrections community.

This is must reading for all elected officials in community, state, and national politics and anyone involved in prison administration, prison reform or prisoner's rights. I highly recommend this book.

I found the exercise programs to be particularly useful--he gives explicit guidelines for achieving cardiovascular health, and does not minimize the importance of balancing one's workouts. Whether you're just beginning to exercise or have been exercising for years, you will undoubtedly find useful information in this book.

This, then, is Suzuki's great accomplishment thus far--re-awakening the awe that most of us once felt as youngsters when we first chanced upon the hydrologic cycle, or the mysteries of our breathing, or the manner in which frogs procreate. That awe, that wonder, that may have been lost to repetition and commonality is returned to us.

Suzuki explains, for instance, the remarkableness of each individual water molecule. Ever the story teller, he traces the path one molecule might take as it is exhaled as vapour from someone's lungs, how it gets converted back into liquid form and seeps into the ground, making its way to a body of water underground and is eventually taken up by someone else on the other side of the planet. There is, however, no 'eventually', as Suzuki points out. This process is seemingly infinite. Everything in nature operates in cycles, Suzuki informs us.

There is, however, some trouble for our natural world. And as soon as trouble is mentioned, Suzuki delves into subject matter that is less than impressive. For instance, Suzuki is convinced that, even though we are part of nature, we are its worst enemy. Like I was told when I was twelve, human beings are only part of nature technically--sort of like parasites are part of the bowel system. We require nature, but we don't really treat it with respect. And as far as destruction goes, we are kings. Sole on the planet as the worst polluters and so on.

You'll forgive me if I have grown tired and weary of this environmental party line. The lack of optimism, and the extent to which negative attention is paid to human beings is astounding. Misanthropy as a party line should restrain itself to fourteen-year-old gothic children, not a respectable 'academic' movement advancing a particular policy approach.

Then again, taking a look at environmental trends and economics should be convincing enough in leading to thinking that things are getting better, not worse. A good dose of Julian Simon should be required reading for environmentalists, I think. Just as John Rawls and Will Kymlicka should be required reading for libertarians.

There seems also to be a slight contradiction, or inconsistency at the least, between two Suzukian, which is to say environmentalist, views. On the one hand, Suzuki tries to diminish our sense of importance. "Look, human, how dependant, paltry, and irrelevant you are to this great thing called nature," Suzuki seems to say. "Compared to the way nature operates--its complexity, its stunning comprehensiveness--us humans have little by way of accomplishment to speak of. In essence," the Suzuki line says, "we are impotent and powerless."

No one is disputing the remarkableness of nature here. But to go from that to our "paltry" accomplishments seems to go too far. One, for instance, is just the standard of judgment--nature. It's just the way it is. Remarkable or not, what have we to compare it to? Whereas our behaviour has this standard, plus past behaviour to go on. Thus our accomplishments have a standard, something to look to, look back on, making them truly accomplishments rather than just being, well, there and doing, well, its thing.

But ignoring this for a moment, at a different point in time, humans turn out not to be impotent at all. In fact, we start to approach god-like status when it comes to destroying nature. All of a sudden we go from impotent narcissists to omnipotent creatures of death and destruction. Something isn't quite right. Either we are too weak to do anything--including destroy the earth--or we are not.

Let us say that we are capable of destroying the earth for a moment, what solution does Suzuki draw? His response is to inculcate a religious affection for the world around us. Yes, you heard me correctly--the essence of The Sacred Balance is to view the ebb and flow of nature as something deserving our worship, or religious adoration. Hence the title of the book.

Suzuki, however, did not strike me as a religious fellow. If anything, he sounds a bit like a religious skeptic. And he goes to great lengths explaining that we ought to view nature as deserving of religious interest not because nature is sacred, per se, but that this kind of belief system would result in our respecting nature more. We would pollute less if we saw our pollution as desecrating the divine. The ends, in short, justify the means.

This, by the way, as the theme of the book explains the meticulous attention Suzuki places on minute, seemingly mundane, everyday natural processes. That drop of water's movement is considered miraculous. The dependence we have on nature is akin to the way we think we depend upon 'God' himself. And so on.

There is such beauty in Suzuki's descriptions of these events. There is so much richness to consider, so much to look at and be impressed by. There is such a joy in remembering why some people truly pursue philosophy, or continue to wonder, here. After all, when most of us have yawned away the changes from day and night, some folks continue to be struck by its regularity and consequences.

It is altogether too bad that Suzuki drops in a bit of religiousness into something that does not require it. In fact, it smacks of mendaciousness to try and convince us that nature is god in order to command our respect. We can speak plainly and still respect, adore, and take care of nature. We do not need the kind of hyperbole that would equate snails with great crawling-with-home gods.

We learn about the origin of the planet and the painstakingly slow but methodical evolution of all the life forms which inhabit it. The atmosphere, the seas, the soil, the plants, the animals and the interdependent web they form, is described in a logical manner such that you think it is so obvious. David Suzuki is clearly not just a brilliant scientist but a very good educator. His description of an ecosystem is "a complex of community of producers, consumers, decomposers and detritivores, which interact within boundaries imposed by their physical surroundings to cycle energy and material through the web of life."

It is surprising to read that the ozone layer is only as thick as a sheet of newspaper. A quick independent check confirmed that it is indeed only about 2-3 mm thick. The diameter of the sun at 1.4 million kilometres wasn't surprising enough for me to rush off and check, but it is pretty awesome. Each second the sun burns 637 million tonnes of hydrogen to create 632 million tonnes of helium while releasing some 386 billion billion megawatts. The sun has been aflame for 5 billion years and is about half way through its own life cycle.

"Sacred Balance" tells us that mankind's technological ability to exhaust the planet of its natural resources at an alarming rate and the associated increase in demand on food, water, trees, the land and the atmosphere threaten to modify the sacred balance to such an extent that our survival is under threat. A frightening picture is painted by conjuring up a time-lapse film taken from space over the last ten thousand years so that each millennium passes in one minute. For the first 7 minutes the movie looks like more like a still photo as nothing changes. Gradually, as time progresses, forests and greenery begin to disappear in parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. 12 seconds from the end, 2 centuries ago, the thinning spreads more intensely until with 6 seconds to go eastern north America is deforested. The action accelerates in the last 10 seconds, 5 seconds, 3 seconds and so on until in the final fractions of a second it looks as if a plague of locusts has descended on the planet. Seen this way the planet's forests are being irrevocably lost in a mere tick of the geological clock. Plotted on a chart this forest devastation leaps almost straight off the page in our own lifetime.

Finally a series of "good news" stories are told which serve to give us hope that even an individual with a will can make a difference. From mangrove planters in Kuwait and Vietnam to the "Clean up Australia Day" campaign which has grown to become "Clean up the World" good things are happening. However, a lot of momentum is going to have to shift if the cycle is to be reversed and the sacred balance of our fragile and wonderful planet preserved.

I hope that in the future she writes a book on yoga and that she writes another book where this one left off.