Virgin forest

the long version

With this book Eric Zencey changes the way we think about nature by changing how we think about history. 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. 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.