Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) by Ellen Stroud (Author), William Cronon (Foreword). The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the development of parks, the transformation of farming, the increase in tourism, and changes within the timber industry have together caused a return of northeastern forests. Though historians and historic actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they’re actually intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and tradition break down when the main target is on the historical past of northeastern woods. Cities, bushes, mills, rivers, homes, and farms are all part of a single, reworked, regional landscape.

On this examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes fostered a period of restoration for forests, with cities not merely customers of nature however creators as well. Interactions between metropolis and hinterland in the twentieth-century Northeast created a brand new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested panorama intricately entangled with the region’s cities and towns.

Ellen Stroud is an environmental historian at Bryn Mawr College, the place she is an affiliate professor within the Development and Structure of Cities Division, and holds the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris M.D. Chair in Environmental Studies.

“Stroud’s concept that forests were shaped by human alternative is a crucial complement to the usual story of forest succession in abandoned farmlands within the Northeast.” -Richard Judd, College of Maine. “”The ethical of Stroudʼs story has implications far past the American Northeast: the region has forests at the moment as a result of people made choices about them and then did the laborious sensible and political work of creating these selections real. Such things do not happen by accident. They occur because folks make them happen. That is as true in the present day because it was a hundred years ago.” -from the Foreword by William Cronon.

I felt a pleasant heat in reading Nature Subsequent Door. Stroud’s words painted delightful mental pictures of the magnificent forests that I have hiked, pushed by, and hopefully raised my children to love. Her anecdotes give human heat to this necessary treatise on the history and importance of forests. She has artfully intermingled these fascinating stories so that they personalize the deeply researched themes she proposes.

In consequence, the reader is dropped at understand how the welfare of the cities and the forests have been, over the previous century, understood and misunderstood, independent and interdependent. Most importantly, she brings the reader to grasp how essential careful, thoroughly informed public planning has been to the past and present. Moreover, it points the best way to an improved future for each the forest and the city.

Stroud has created an eminently readable history of the forests of Northeastern United States in a approach that emphatically illustrates their essential contribution to the growth of at present’s city areas, regionally, nationally, and globally. It’s a very worthwhile and enjoyable read.

It is a concise and considerate exploration of the connections between cities and their metropolitan regions. Stroud weaves collectively a variety of themes, locations and areas right into a coherent narrative of political, social and environmental history. The e book underscores the significance of of the Northeast and Mid Atlantic for understanding the Progressive-period conservation movement and provides a helpful conceptual framework for enthusiastic about the origins of postwar environmentalism.

Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Ellen Stroud (Author), William Cronon (Foreword)

232 pages

University of Washington Press (September 24, 2012)

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