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The Harvard Black Rock Forest
“No other writer understood as clearly and deeply what the twentieth century meant to America. This essay stands side by side with Trow’s masterpiece, Within the Context of No Context, and if you read them both you’ll be able to make new sense of your life and times. And what a nice bonus that this book helped save the place it describes, allowing a flavor of hope.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
Originally published in the June 11, 1984, New Yorker, this lengthy essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of our national life. With the same iconoclastic spirit and multilayered prose that he interwove in his classic Within the Context of No Context, George Trow tells the story of upstate New York’s Black Rock Forest—a thirty-eight-hundred-acre site overlooking the Hudson River—through the lives of the men who were connected to it and through the larger histories of Harvard University, U.S. conservation policies, and physics and biology.
The men: banker James Stillman; his son, Ernest Stillman, a medical doctor who inherited the land that would become the Black Rock Forest in 1928 and who wanted to make it healthy and useful; the legendary Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief forester of the U.S. in 1898; and Richard Thornton Fisher, for many years the head of the Harvard Forest and the man who suggested to Ernest Stillman that he turn his inherited land into another demonstration forest. Harvard University: a more financially focused, less collegial environment than the one that had accepted the gift of the forest in 1949, now looking to shed responsibility for the forest without shedding the money its sale would bring. The challenge: How to manage, how to value, a wilderness area of great biological diversity.
In his brilliantly elastic fashion, Trow maneuvers images, symbols, ambiguities, ethics, journalistic wordplay, advertising tricks, and corporate doublespeak to create an intensely perceptive analysis of the cultural, political, and scientific communities. His richly developed story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale that bears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life.
Originally published in the June 11, 1984, New Yorker, this lengthy essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of our national life. With the same iconoclastic spirit and multilayered prose that he interwove in his classic Within the Context of No Context, George Trow tells the story of upstate New York’s Black Rock Forest—a thirty-eight-hundred-acre site overlooking the Hudson River—through the lives of the men who were connected to it and through the larger histories of Harvard University, U.S. conservation policies, and physics and biology.
The men: banker James Stillman; his son, Ernest Stillman, a medical doctor who inherited the land that would become the Black Rock Forest in 1928 and who wanted to make it healthy and useful; the legendary Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief forester of the U.S. in 1898; and Richard Thornton Fisher, for many years the head of the Harvard Forest and the man who suggested to Ernest Stillman that he turn his inherited land into another demonstration forest. Harvard University: a more financially focused, less collegial environment than the one that had accepted the gift of the forest in 1949, now looking to shed responsibility for the forest without shedding the money its sale would bring. The challenge: How to manage, how to value, a wilderness area of great biological diversity.
In his brilliantly elastic fashion, Trow maneuvers images, symbols, ambiguities, ethics, journalistic wordplay, advertising tricks, and corporate doublespeak to create an intensely perceptive analysis of the cultural, political, and scientific communities. His richly developed story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale that bears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life.
120 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2004
23 people want to read
About the author
George W.S. Trow
11 books16 followersGeorge W. S. Trow lives in Columbia Country, New York and Texas.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 4, 2023
A little long-winded on ideologies, and bombastic at times, but definitely informative on the historical perspectives of the different parties involved in BRF. Quick read.
June 17, 2013
A much weirder, more scattered, less intellectual, less coherent book than I'd hoped. It starts off well, mixing the history of managed forests with bigger ideas of what conservation once meant and could mean again, then devolves into chunks of filler by the end.
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May 17, 2008Was free in my conference bag and just started the thing, but wowee. Strong so far.
November 8, 2009
Engaging, electric writing. But falls short somehow.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews