The ecology of the ever-changing Maine forest

" Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau's experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author's transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place "not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world." In Maine he comes in contact with "rocks, trees, wind and solid earth" as though he were witness to the creation itself. Of equal importance, The Maine Woods depicts Thoreau's contact with the American Indians and depicts his tribal education of learning the language, customs, and mores of the Penobscot people. Thoreau attempts to learn and speak the Abenaki language and becomes fascinated with its direct translation of natural phenomena as in the word sebamook--a river estuary that never loses is water despite having an outlet because it also has an inlet. The Maine Woods illustrates the author's deeper understanding of the complexities of the primal wilderness of uplifted rocky summits in Maine and provides the reader with the pungent aroma of balsam firs, black spruce, mosses, and ferns as only Thoreau could. This new, redesigned edition features an insightful foreword by Thoreau scholar Richard Francis Fleck. Redesigned edition featuring an insightful foreword by Thoreau scholar Richard Francis Fleck. Fleck is a well-respected authority on Thoreau and the author of many books including Henry Thoreau and John Muir Among the Indians. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. This book was first published in 1864 (composed partly of articles he had written earlier for periodicals) and still in print, is an insightful reporter's picture of a rugged wilderness the moment before being irrevocably altered by armies of loggers. Today the virgin forest seen by Thoreau is gone; trees have been cut, regrown, and harvested again. But modern travelers -- hikers, campers, hunters, fishers, canoeists or back road wanderers -- will still find, as Thoreau did, a land "more grim and wild than you had anticipated." It's also pin-drop tranquil, teeming with wildlife and, in places, challenging to reach. (NYTimes) Following Thoreau into the Maine Woods is hardly a new idea, but it is becoming easier. The Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail was inaugurated, delineating and celebrating Thoreau's passage on routes that Penobscot Indians had used for thousands of years. (NYTimes) Nature tourism is a $37 billion annual industry in the United States (Outdoor Industry Association). "--"Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau's experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author's transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place "not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world." In Maine he comes in contact with "rocks, trees, wind and solid earth" as though he were witness to the creation itself. Of equal importance, The Maine Woods depicts Thoreau's contact with the American Indians and depicts his tribal education of learning the language, customs, and mores of the Penobscot people. Thoreau attempts to learn and speak the Abenaki language and becomes fascinated with its direct translation of natural phenomena as in the word sebamook--a river estuary that never loses is water despite having an outlet because it also has an inlet. The Maine Woods illustrates the author's deeper understanding of the complexities of the primal wilderness of uplifted rocky summits in Maine and provides the reader with the pungent aroma of balsam firs, black spruce, mosses, and ferns as only Thoreau could. This new, redesigned edition features an insightful foreword by Thoreau scholar Richard Francis Fleck"--

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The Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's journeys across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, activists, members of the Penobscot Nation, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route. Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later. Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.

The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.

"The naturalist, says Emerson, must satisfy all the demands of the spirit. Dana Wilde does that by uniquely unifying acute perception with that transcendental metaphysic that Emerson unabashedly called Love. Wilde is the poet of facts, his science always in the service of reverence and his universal intimations of spirit never "the easy gold of fay or elf," as Robert Frost praised a practice of the natural supernatural. Wilde is not an excursionist, but a seer who observes the comprehensive, year round fluidity of nature surrounding him and the eternal cosmos above him from his backyard in Troy, Maine. He is the best of the real thing, letting the obdurate bleakness and the rampant beauty of Maine inform each other in wit that is invariably wise and intimate. Every essay in this book can teach us like parables of understanding and reason how to unite devotion and thought to be whole people in our waking lives." --William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus and The Right No From first signs or unseen sense of Fall's closing in, to the certain loosening thaws and drips prefacing ice out, from First Peoples' tellings and showings to the habits of next inhabitants here, now, and in whatever untamed future survives the changing climate, this book is a fire for the darks and lights of winter in Maine. And a source, as any fire is, of realization, solace, and meditation burning perfectly, steadfastly, through Winter's grief and any joy to be found. Season by season, discovery by revelation, no one in Maine works harder, truer, nor more beautifully and imaginatively than Dana Wilde. --Patricia Ranzoni, author of Settling and Bedding Vows