Customer Reviews

The Forester's Log: Musings from the Woods

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Mary Stuever has written a book for this time in our environmental evolution particularly appropriate for the Southwest, but not just limited to that region in its message. She does a great job of showing how the people, cultures, and mandates of our institutions combine to create the tensions as well as the progress we make in our land management systems. Although the book is drawn partly from her syndicated columns, it hangs together as a narrative that takes you from an understanding of historic management practices and fire in the forest to the place we find ourselves in today. I highly recommend this book.

Throughout her long and active career as a forester, Mary Stuever has worked as a firefighter and in forestry rehabilitation, forestry planning, and environmental education. Luckily for us, Stuever is a writer, as well as a participant in forest management, and over the past quarter-century, she has documented her work in the forests of the Southwest, writing about the challenges that foresters and forests face: woodlands in serious decline, the threat of massive wildfires, and invasions by insects and by creeping American suburbs. Her new book, The Forester's Log: Musings From the Woods, is a collection of nearly a hundred short essays written between 1985 and 2008 and published in rural newspapers, national magazines, anthologies and websites. It provides a valuable glimpse into the life of a working woman forester, the conditions of America's Southwestern forests (and beyond), and the efforts of federal and state officials to deal with the enormous challenge of managing the forest.

The essays are thematically arranged in five chapters: Fire, Forestry, Burn Area Recovery, Environmental Education, and Recreation. But although the chapter titles are slanted toward the professional, the stories Stuever tells run the gamut from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the ho-hum work-a-day world of planting trees ("Green Side Up, Okay?) to thrilling accounts of fighting fires ("Fire") and sad tales of bark beetles ("Dying Pinyons"). There are plenty of personal and deeply felt stories here, too: "Living in a Log Home" tells how Stuever acquired the logs to build a cabin on her property; "A Forester's Confession" describes her unsuccessful efforts to irrigate the trees she planted around her log house; and "Changing Woman" provides a narrative bridge from the Fort Apache Reservation where Stuever lived and worked to her new position as New Mexico's state timber officer. Most of the pieces are short, but one of the finest is the perceptive account of a climb Stuever led to Pico de Orizaba, Mexico's highest mountain. All of the pieces reveal a deep affection for the land and its creatures, many of whom are seriously threatened. In the last essay in the book, she writes:

I once stood out on a rock ledge on the South Rim [of the Grand Canyon] one fall day when a condor flew a few feet above my head. Its wingspan was immense. I thought of pterodactyls. I told my companion--a bird fan who spends months each year counting raptors flying over the rim--that when I died, I wanted to come back as a condor. He told me that would take really good karma. There just are not that many condors left.

If anybody can earn the karma to come back as a condor, it will be Mary Stuever. Hers is a knowledgeable, powerful, compelling voice. When she speaks for the forests, we must all listen.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

The writer expresses her passion for maintaining and preserving the very forests that help keep all of us alive with her astute writing skills. She captures so much of the day-to-day life of a forester that it becomes a vivid picture for the reader who wants to learn what happens in our western forests.

From the danger of firefighting to land stewardship, forest management, and environmental education in the real world, Stuever provides the reader thought-provoking observances that can be read in two or three page 'bytes' and mulled over for hours. An excellent book to distract you from the artificial environment of modern life.

This book is not only educational, it's poetic. It's easy to tell this woman is a forester because she loves the woods. What's nice is she's a good writer, too.

Terrific collection of short, non-fiction writings done by a woman who knows her stuff! Stories about fighting forest fires, cleaning up and reforesting after fires, ecologically sound practices about preserving and protecting our forests, and more. Also, touching stories about people, animals, and places she has known. Great short reads, with dozens of different entries. My high school is buying a set to use for teaching non-fiction and journalism!