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鈥檚 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 鈥淓ncounters鈥 have their hiking boots on as they focus on personal encounters with flora and fauna of the region. The energizing accounts in 鈥淭eaching and Learning鈥 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 罢丑辞谤别补耻鈥檚 irreverence, the authors in 鈥淩ethinking Place鈥 look at key figures in the forest鈥檚 literary and cultural development to help us think about the affiliations between place and citizenship. In 鈥淣ature as Commodity,鈥 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鈥檚 wildest forests and oldest settlements.
鈥淗ow good to see sharp thinkers engaging the mysteries and possibilities of one of the world鈥檚 most interesting and hopeful corners, the mountains and woods of the northeast. This book will start many gears turning in your head!鈥濃擝ill McKibben, author, Wandering Home
鈥Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest celebrates the beauty and dynamism of a long-settled area that also holds one of the major forests of the earth. It exemplifies a venturesome and inventive moment in the unfurling of environmental studies. And it articulates a more vividly integrated vision of education and conservation alike.鈥濃攆rom the foreword by John Elder
John Elder
Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
Pavel Cenkl
Reading Place in the Northern Forest 1
Encounters
Timothy Stetter
Meeting Twinflower (Linnaea borealis) 17
Terenc e D. Mosher
Music of the Northern Forest: Boreal Birdsong
in Literature and on the Trail 28
Natalie Coe
Life as Beech: Survival in the New England Forest 49
Teaching and Learning
Kathleen Osgood Dana
Robert Frost in the Fields and Nils-Aslak Valkeap盲盲
at the Treeline: Ecological Knowledge and Academic
Learning at the Northern Forest Edge 61
Ernest H. Williams, Patrick D. Reynolds,
and Onn o Oerlemans
Interdisciplinary Teaching about the Adirondacks 77
Jill Mudgett
Youth, Refinement, and Environmental Knowledge
in the Nineteenth-Century Rural North 98
Catherine Owen Koning, Robert G. Goodby,
and John r. Harris
Place as a Catalyst for Engaged Learning at
Franklin Pierce University 133
Rethinking Place
Larry Anderson
Benton MacKaye鈥檚 1904 White Mountains Hike: Exploring a
Landscape of Logging, 鈥淐amp Ethics,鈥 and Patriotism 153
Daniel S. Malachuk
William James at Chocorua: A Northern Forest Philosopher 171
Richard Paradis
A Traverse of the Presidential Range with the Scottish
Highlands on My Mind 187
Jim Warren
Living with the Woods: Disturbance Histories in
Thoreau and Burroughs 213
Nature as Commodity
Priscilla Paton
In Awe of the Body: Physical Contact, Indulgence Shopping,and Nature Writing 227
Loriann e DiSabato
Claiming Maine: Acquisition and Commodification in
罢丑辞谤别补耻鈥檚 The Maine Woods 246
Matthew Bolinder
So Much Beauty Locked Up in It: Of Ecocriticism and
Axe-Murder 261
Contributors 277
Index 281
