Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest
“How good to see sharp thinkers engaging the mysteries and possibilities of one of the world’s most interesting and hopeful corners, the mountains and woods of the northeast. This book will start many gears turning in your head!”—Bill McKibben, author, Wandering Home
“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.”—from the foreword by John Elder
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.
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 ValkeapaÅNaÅN
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 An derson
Benton MacKaye’s 1904 White Mountains Hike: Exploring a
Landscape of Logging, “Camp Ethics,” 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
Thoreau’s The Maine Woods 246
Matthew Bolinder
So Much Beauty Locked Up in It: Of Ecocriticism and
Axe-Murder 261
Contributors 277
Index 281