Wildness Within, Wildness Without
Bridget Besaw (Besaw Publishing // $ 29.95)
In the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau set out to explore Maine’s North Woods. But the poet-naturalist was not the first to travel the trails and tributaries of The Pine Tree State. The Wabanaki, meaning “people of the dawn,” used the area’s interconnected waterways for thousands of years before Thoreau gained the heights of Mount Katahdin or paddled the dark waters of the Penobscot. In Wildness Within, Wildness Without, photographer Bridget Besaw pairs images of Maine’s quiet beauty with thoughtful essays by writer-conservationists. The foreword by Bill McKibben makes it clear that Maine is at a conservation crossroads — clear-cutting and development are gaining momentum, and the state’s wet, green wilderness hangs in the balance. Perhaps Besaw’s images will not only preserve a moment in time when Maine is still somewhat wild but also encourage others to keep it that way.
—Jennifer Winger
Nature’s New Deal
Neil M. Maher (Oxford // $35.00)
Seventy-five years ago, Franklin Roosevelt was facing twin crises — one economic, the other environmental. The Great Depression had crippled the U.S. economy with a 25 percent unemployment rate, while the Dust Bowl and the devastating flooding along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers had sent communities across the nation into a tailspin. Part of Roosevelt’s solution to those emergencies was to create the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program approved by Congress as part of the New Deal. For nine years, more than 3 million men were put to work protecting the nation’s natural resources by planting more than 2 billion trees, easing erosion on millions of acres of farmland and developing hundreds of state parks. Today, programs similar to the Civilian Conservation Corps are operating in countries like China and Afghanistan but have not been reinstituted in the United States, despite the country’s cloudy economic climate and recent wave of natural disasters. In Nature’s New Deal, author Neil M. Maher suggests that learning from the Civilian Conservation Corps’ past could help secure the nation’s — and the planet’s — future.
—J. W.
Revolution on the Range
Courtney White (Island Press // $ 25.95)
In the early 1990s, the West was a battleground for ranchers and environmentalists. The former wanted to work the land, the latter wanted to protect it, and neither could see a compromise beyond the barbed-wire fences between them. In Revolution on the Range, Courtney White, co-founder of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to progressive ranch management, illustrates that the hostility between the two groups is rooted in history, not ecology. The diverse, healthy landscapes that environmentalists champion are the same landscapes that will support productive herds of cattle. In short, ranchers and environmentalists can find common ground—if they look to the land itself. White visits a handful of family-owned enterprises to prove that cows are not the problem—poor management is. On the “New Ranch,” conservation and cultivation go hand in hand.
—J. W.
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