I thought of that bit of wisdom many times as I read Water From Stone, Jeffrey Greene's account of David Bamberger's transformation of "the sorriest piece of land in Blanco County " into the nature preserve he calls Selah, a word from the Old Testament that indicates the need to pause and reflect.

Inspired by his mother's love of the natural world, his hardscrabble rural childhood during the Great Depression and the writing of Louis Bromfield, a visionary American advocate for land restoration, Bamberger transformed himself from door-to-door salesman to corporate CEO to locally and internationally recognized conservationist. Always a maverick, Bamberger seems to have used his considerable personal charisma to excellent effect every step of the way. There's a lesson in his success for any of us who wants to convince our neighbors and leaders that good stewardship of the land is not only important but within the reach of each of us.

Greene charts Bamberger's transformation, as well as the transformation of those 5,000 ruined acres in the Texas hill country, with poignancy and intelligence and, yes, charm. He's clearly been charmed by David Bamberger and Bamberger's accomplishments, and he weaves that charm into his account.

While making no secret of his personal relationship to Bamberger-- who's married to Greene's sister-in-law, whose pen and ink drawings illustrate his book -- nor of his admiration for the charismatic businessman and conservationist, Greene offers us a history of the Bamberger preserve that's lyrical but unsentimental.

An accomplished poet and memoirist, he weaves history, ecology, anecdote, statistical evidence and keen personal observation into a tapestry that's richly textured but never heavy, a book that's a pleasure to read and that might gently persuade or even inspire a reader with little prior commitment to environmental causes to live more consciously on the earth.

The charm in Greene's account of Bamberger's quest, and in Bamberger's approach to winning over fellow Texans on a subject ranchers can be prickly and defensive about, seems a step in the right direction. Bamberger' s speech, as quoted in the book, avoids stridency and sanctimoniousness and the corporate-speak of so much environmental politics in favor of a down-home plain-spokenness to which his neighbors can relate. "I don't speak genus and species," Bamberger says. Nor does he accuse his neighbors of willful malice.

Greene's account of Bamberger's success is also charming in the sense of giving delight because it is, for once, a story of success. It's also a story of survival. While Greene charts the restoration of Selah to a place where once-endangered species begin to thrive again and water returns to formerly dry creekbeds, he also charts his sister-in-law Margaret Bamberger's miraculous recovery from cancer. And he shows us, through David Bamberger's eyes, a future that might be a little brighter -- a future in which the last wild places aren't turned into theme parks for consumption by a privileged elite.

To that end, Margaret and David Bamberger invite a steady stream of international visitors and local schoolchildren to the ranch, and make education an integral part of their mission. Although Bamberger's success with Selah owes much to his business sense, he succeeds not because he sees it as a business, a source of economic profit, but because he sees the natural world as worth preserving for the sake of beauty and spirit and out of simple respect for creation -- in other words, that love of the natural world he learned from his mother.

Which brings me back to my own mother and what she taught me about teaching: that we learn more from being told what we're doing or could be doing right than we do from hearing what we're doing wrong. We thrive on being encouraged, in the sense of "given heart." And the story of Selah is encouraging. It even dares to offer hope for our damaged world. Preserving a world that we won't ourselves inhabit may be a whole "new exercise in the imagination," as Greene tells us near the end of Water from Stone. I think it may also be a whole new exercise in love.