With this remarkable book Eric Zencey changes the way we think about nature by changing how we think about history. “The ecological crisis is also a historical crisis,” he writes. “If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related.” Zencey’s way home takes us many places: to a starlit mountaintop, where a nineteenth-century sect awaits the second coming; to the northern woods during hunting season; to the salt marshes of a Delaware childhood; to the softball games and abandoned mill ponds of his adopted Vermont. Always we are shown a world outside our preconceptions. In the essay “In Search of Virgin Forest” we see that virgin forest is not the pure escape from civilization that romantics make of it. Like the second-growth forest around it, virgin forest too is a human construct, one whose “different disturbance history” is not natural but is equally the product of human perception and appropriation. A nationally acclaimed novelist, Zencey has brought together autobiography and philosophy to produce a work at once accessible and intellectually rigorous. Perceptive, urgent, and lyrical, these essays are alive with warmth and wit and the occasional glint of melancholy. Virgin Forest is a passionate call for ecological health. It amply demonstrates (as the final essay has it) “Why History Is Sublime”: if we suffer a postmodern lack of grounding, only a rooted-in-place ecological sensibility can supply our need, and historical understanding is its inescapable prerequisite.
Vermont is a famously verdant state, a place where nature and culture are in better balance than elsewhere. How did Vermont get that way? And more importantly, can the Vermont experience point the way toward achieving a sustainable society, one that doesn't destroy its own root in nature? In this history of the Vermont environmental movement, authors Elizabeth Courtney and Eric Zencey show how the arrival of the petroleum economy in the 1950s transformed the state--and how the response of the environmental movement laid the groundwork for the kind of society that we all must build for the future."--Back cover.
A bestselling literary sensation and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, this novel is now making its debut in paperback. The year is 1892. A woman vanishes. A corpse is found. Gunshots echo in the streets of Paris. Blood flows to the Panama Canal.
American historian Henry Adams, grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, is looking for Miriam Talbott, a young American student. Miriam is alive in ways Adams can scarcely remember being, but when he goes looking for her, she disappears. When another woman's body is fished out of the Seine and identified as hers, Adams becomes embroiled in the police's attempt to identify the body and in the Panama Canal scandal that threatens to engulf France.
With this remarkable book Eric Zencey changes the way we think about nature by changing how we think about history. “The ecological crisis is also a historical crisis,” he writes. “If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related.” Zencey’s way home takes us many places: to a starlit mountaintop, where a nineteenth-century sect awaits the second coming; to the northern woods during hunting season; to the salt marshes of a Delaware childhood; to the softball games and abandoned mill ponds of his adopted Vermont. Always we are shown a world outside our preconceptions. In the essay “In Search of Virgin Forest” we see that virgin forest is not the pure escape from civilization that romantics make of it. Like the second-growth forest around it, virgin forest too is a human construct, one whose “different disturbance history” is not natural but is equally the product of human perception and appropriation. A nationally acclaimed novelist, Zencey has brought together autobiography and philosophy to produce a work at once accessible and intellectually rigorous. Perceptive, urgent, and lyrical, these essays are alive with warmth and wit and the occasional glint of melancholy. Virgin Forest is a passionate call for ecological health. It amply demonstrates (as the final essay has it) “Why History Is Sublime”: if we suffer a postmodern lack of grounding, only a rooted-in-place ecological sensibility can supply our need, and historical understanding is its inescapable prerequisite.
American historian Henry Adams, grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, is looking for Miriam Talbott, a young American student. Miriam is alive in ways Adams can scarcely remember being, but when he goes looking for her, she disappears. When another woman's body is fished out of the Seine and identified as hers, Adams becomes embroiled in the police's attempt to identify the body and in the Panama Canal scandal that threatens to engulf France.
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