Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast

Foreword

B ecause the Northern Forest encompasses both northern New England and the Adirondacks of New York, it blurs our usual sense of political and regional boundaries. With its combination of the East’s wildest forests (in the Adirondacks and upper Maine) and some of the country’s oldest settlements and industrial sites (in southern New Hampshire and northwestern Massachusetts), this heavily wooded landscape also belies easy distinctions between nature and culture. In sum, the Northern Forest provokes bioregional thinking—an approach that is simultaneously comprehensive, adventurous, and place-based. Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest views the land, and the web of human and nonhuman life it supports, as an intricate, dynamic, yet unified circuit of energy. In its commitment to such an approach, this collection of essays manages to subvert the divisions both between academic disciplines and between states. Hence the many fresh insights and stimulating connections offered here. This book could be appropriately described, in a phrase Bill McKibben has applied to the Northern Forest as a whole, as “an explosion of green.” The farming, pasturing, and logging prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have faded away in many parts of the Northern Forest today. Second- or third-growth forests, both hardwood and softwood , have reclothed denuded slopes. More than 80 percent of this landscape has in fact been reforested over the past half-century or so, even in densely populated Massachusetts. Wildlife has rebounded, not only in the return of white-tailed deer, beaver, and porcupine but also with viable populations of black bears, bobcats, and fishers. Coyotes are becoming larger, grayer, and wolfier along the northern tier and—depending on whom you ask—catamounts are taking up residence again. But these recoveries don’t constitute a return to ecological business Foreword | johN elder viii • Foreword as usual for the forest of this zone. Not only is there extremely little old growth remaining, but the forest composition has often dramatically shifted after clear-cutting. Relics of human activity are also frequently in evidence. As Pavel Cenkl points out in his thought-provoking introduction , thousands of miles of stone walls still angle through these thickening woods. And a hiker in the depopulated heights stumbles upon snarled choker-cables, half-flattened sap buckets, and mouldering trucks nearly as often as upon those looming boulders so grandly named glacial erratics. Natural history and human history are inextricable here. The Northern Forest may not always be the best place to seek untrammeled or pristine landscapes. By the same token, though, it is hard to beat as a venue for dialogue about the rich affinities between a place and the literature, thought, and other cultural expressions it has nurtured. These flinty reaches thus also turn out to be particularly fertile places in which to rethink our assumptions about education and scholarship. Tom Wessels—the field ecologist whose concept of “disturbance histories ” frames Jim Warren’s provocative essay—has noted the ubiquity of spirals in his own writing about the Northern Forest. From the unfurling of ferns to the whorl of branches around a spruce’s trunk, Wessels observes the elegant ratios and sequences associated with the mathematical formula called the Golden Section. The remarkable inclusiveness of such a pattern speaks to the comprehensiveness of Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest, too. The field of environmental studies unfurls in seeking to encompass both natural and cultural realities. But this kind of expansiveness is likely to be most coherent if rooted in a particular landscape. Beginning with its investigation and celebration of birdsong, the section of “Encounters” seeks to register the affinities among natural history , aesthetics, and human emotions. Such an intention is conveyed in prose that seems to have its hiking boots on, field guides and binoculars in its rucksack. To put this another way, the essays in the first section of this book do not suffer from the truncations and self-censorship of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” They spiral outward, as the broader field of environmental history has done in the wake of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land and as the study of environmental literature has done since the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Foreword • ix Throughout this book’s diverse forays into the Northern Forest, an appetite for immediacy and particularity is apparent, a pleasure in the harmony between apparently disparate fields of study. As...