Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture [Paperback]

Eric Zencey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the outset of this essay, Zencey (Panama) asks: "How do we make ourselves a place?politically, morally, practically" in a "post-Nature" world? Perhaps it is not surprising that a professor of history (at Goddard College, Vermont) should look to history for the answer. These 12 essays?11 of which were previously published, mostly in North American Review?are thematically connected to this premise, although to consider them "one extended essay," as Zencey conceived it, is a stretch. The author is at his best when he is concrete and practical: lambasting migratory academics, or exposing the mythos of the virgin forest, or learning patience?"shopper's gait, that languid pumping, a sort of meditation"?in a mall. There are moments of exuberant prose, when he steers readers from mundane observations to profound insight: "The richest life... is lived in an awareness of the maximum number of connections backwards and forwards in time, all of which are brought together in the individual's experience of the narrow moment of 'now.'" But too often the book's momentum bogs down, as when Zencey offers no fewer than 12 extensive reasons why the law of entropy seems (to him) to crop up as a metaphor in popular culture, or when he devotes an entire essay to the dubious task of discovering "The Contemporary Relevance of Henry Adams." But Zencey still offers many erudite and reflective lessons on nature and our place in it. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"If you were to pick one person who sees deepest into environmentalism, I think that person might be Eric Zencey. And if you were to list the four or five best writers in the field, I know for sure he'd be one of them."--Noel Perrin, author of First Person Rural

"[Zencey] is a fine essayist with a graceful, quiet voice and a talent for putting some of the more vexing environmental questions of our time into perspective."--Outside

"Infinitely wise and unflinching."--Bill McKibben

"Offers many erudite and reflective lessons on nature and our place in it."--Publishers Weekly

"In a time of rising ecological concern and interest Virgin Forest is a useful book to readers who are interested in the philosophical side of ecology, culture and history, and who want to understand the deeper forces behind moral ecology, before they study the more practical application of environmental history."--Environment and History

“These philosophical essays . . . should intrigue those who enjoy exploring unexpected connections and fresh insights."--Library Journal

"Puts Zencey in the high company of pro-nature intellectuals like Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson."--Advocate

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820322008
• ISBN-13: 978-0820322001
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,373,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good starting point, August 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture (Paperback)

Zencey's short glimpses at the struggles which many of us face as we try to fit what we know, naturally, to be right, with the struggles of modern existence come together to form a foundation for a deeper exploration into modern ecology and environmental protection and exploration. I recommend the book as a starting point, and introduction, for anyone who is interested in figuring out how humans can make it for another few thousand years. This book does not provide many answers, but it asks many of the right questions.