Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture

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 chi...