Virgin Forest

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.