Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture

by Eric Zencey

With this remarkable book Eric Zencey changes the way we think about nature by changing how we think about history. “The ecological crisis is also a historical crisis,” he writes. “If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related.”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. In the essay “In Search of Virgin Forest” we see that virgin forest is not the pure escape from civilization that romantics make of it. Like the second-growth forest around it, virgin forest too is a human construct, one whose “different disturbance history” is not natural but is equally the product of human perception and appropriation.

A nationally acclaimed novelist, Zencey has brought together autobiography and philosophy to produce a work at once accessible and intellectually rigorous. Perceptive, urgent, and lyrical, these essays are alive with warmth and wit and the occasional glint of melancholy. 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.

Genres: Nature

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intelligent reflections on various cultural preoccupations and strong undercurrents of thought both in American society at large and within environmentalism more specifically. A nice blend of personal, scholarly, and journalistic styles.

I particularly liked the essay "Rootless Professors," which drew some tentative conjectures about the consequences of having a very mobile academic class whose knowledge as well as personal experience is predominately abstract and cosmopolitan in nature, as opposed to local and concrete. The point has been made before (by folks like David Orr) that this 'rootlessness' is part of what prevents a development of ecological literacy: a sense of place and an understanding of how that place functions, and how its social and biological workings are intertwined. Zencey suggests that not only is this the case, but also that a professoriate that encourages an ideal of knowledge and of social relations that exists in the abstract might be a possible encouragement of nationalism; the nation-state substitutes for the more local communities which students are encouraged to leave for the sake of becoming cosmopolitans themselves, when they find themselves reaching for some sort of broader social body to belong to. The style of these essays means that no real empirical argument is presented in support of this suggestion, but I find it an interesting point nonetheless, and think the argument has some possible merit.