Book Clubs

Questions for discussion

  1. In what kind of environment are you most creative? Do you seek structure and calm to find your spark, or do you require chaos or unruliness to express yourself creatively?
  2. In what ways have you followed in the footsteps of your parents? In what ways have you blazed your own path? Could the same be said for your siblings?
  3. Think of a wilderness you know that has been razed and reconstructed for human use. Have you been there since? How did you feel (or how would you feel) being there after it’s been tamed? Has the change affected the culture of the surrounding area?
  4. In his introduction to The Tree, Barry Lopez asks, “Do we feel that unless we create evidence—photographs, journal entries, picked and pressed flowers, tape recordings, pocketed stones—we haven’t actually been intimate with nature?” Do we? Do you?
  5. Describe your most vivid memory of nature. Where were you? How old? Why does it stand out in your memory?
  6. John Fowles makes the case that our urge to tame the wild ultimately inhibits us creatively. Where can we find evidence of his theory within:
    • our education system
    • our increasingly sedentary lifestyles (computers, offices, cubicles, etc.)
  7. How does nature respond to our attempts to stifle it? What are the environmental repercussions?
  8. What state, country, or continent manages the best balance of civilization and the wild?
  9. “It will be much easier to keep wilderness areas than to create them,” the author and ecologist Aldo Leopold famously wrote. “The latter alternative,” he continued, “may be dismissed as impossible.” Do you agree? Can wilderness be recreated?
  10. What has civilization gained by taming so much wilderness? What have we lost?

Activities

  1. Read The Tree and John Fowles’s bestselling novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman together. How do the ideas about nature—about the wild—that Fowles expresses in The Tree reveal themselves through the characters of Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson?
  2. Choose an excerpt from those provided—or select your own—and take sides: let one group debate in favor of Fowles’s position and the other argue against.