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Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast
Nearly 30 million acres of the Northern Forest stretch across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Within this broad area live roughly a million residents whose lives are intimately associated with the forest ecosystem and whose individual stories are closely linked to the region’s cultural and environmental history. The fourteen engaging essays in Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest effectively explore the relationships among place, work, and community in this complex landscape. Together they serve as a stimulating introduction to the interdisciplinary study of this unique region.
Each of the four sections views through a different lens the interconnections between place and people. The essayists in “Encounters” have their hiking boots on as they focus on personal encounters with flora and fauna of the region. The energizing accounts in “Teaching and Learning” question our assumptions about education and scholarship by proposing invigorating collaborations between teachers and students in ways determined by the land itself, not by the abstractions of pedagogy. With the freshness of Thoreau’s irreverence, the authors in “Rethinking Place” look at key figures in the forest’s literary and cultural development to help us think about the affiliations between place and citizenship. In “Nature as Commodity,” three essayists consider the ways that writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought about nature as a product and, thus, how their conclusions bear on the contemporary retailing of place.
The writers in Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest reveal the rich affinities between a specific place and the literature, thought, and other cultural expressions it has nurtured. Their insightful and stimulating connections exemplify adventurous bioregional thinking that encompasses both natural and cultural realities while staying rooted in the particular landscape of some of the Northeast’s wildest forests and oldest settlements.
Each of the four sections views through a different lens the interconnections between place and people. The essayists in “Encounters” have their hiking boots on as they focus on personal encounters with flora and fauna of the region. The energizing accounts in “Teaching and Learning” question our assumptions about education and scholarship by proposing invigorating collaborations between teachers and students in ways determined by the land itself, not by the abstractions of pedagogy. With the freshness of Thoreau’s irreverence, the authors in “Rethinking Place” look at key figures in the forest’s literary and cultural development to help us think about the affiliations between place and citizenship. In “Nature as Commodity,” three essayists consider the ways that writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought about nature as a product and, thus, how their conclusions bear on the contemporary retailing of place.
The writers in Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest reveal the rich affinities between a specific place and the literature, thought, and other cultural expressions it has nurtured. Their insightful and stimulating connections exemplify adventurous bioregional thinking that encompasses both natural and cultural realities while staying rooted in the particular landscape of some of the Northeast’s wildest forests and oldest settlements.
302 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2010
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January 6, 2012
In her essay for this anthology, Kathleen Osgood Dana writes,
Poetry wasn't my immediate concern in reading this collection (nor is it the only concern of the book as a whole), but this passage gets at what I enjoyed so much in the anthology: the essays engage the abstract and the specific, the global and the local, theory and practice, poetry and logging and shopping and politics and botany and... you get the idea. Not only does that make for fascinating, educational reading, but it's also a great demonstration of the potential for environmental history and ecocriticism and, frankly, interdisciplinarity at their best. It's specialized reading, perhaps, but very accessibly and enjoyably so.
As a teacher of poetry, I am often confounded by the difficulties faced by emerging readers as they sort out the literal and symbolic meanings of a poem. New readers of poetry seem ready to leap to symbolic interpretations but often just plain miss the real, tangible things that give those symbols their life—literally. The overwhelming emphasis on alienation in modern Western literature and on fragmentation in postmodern Western literature seems to have widened the divide between an object, its metonymic association, and the metaphor based on those constructions, a divide that is particularly manifest in poetry, the most humane of intellectual endeavors.
Poetry wasn't my immediate concern in reading this collection (nor is it the only concern of the book as a whole), but this passage gets at what I enjoyed so much in the anthology: the essays engage the abstract and the specific, the global and the local, theory and practice, poetry and logging and shopping and politics and botany and... you get the idea. Not only does that make for fascinating, educational reading, but it's also a great demonstration of the potential for environmental history and ecocriticism and, frankly, interdisciplinarity at their best. It's specialized reading, perhaps, but very accessibly and enjoyably so.
Displaying 1 of 1 review