From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh
The
pivotal figure in John Elder's latest book--itself a combination of
environmental history, travel writing, literary criticism, and
memoir--is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins
Marsh, generally regarded now as America's first environmentalist. Like
Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for
some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation
wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering
of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous
manifesto, Man and Nature. Marsh drew parallels between the
despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont,
warning that it was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar
magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was
a prescient voice for stewardship.
On a Fulbright year,
Elder chooses to follow in Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running
from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest
of Vallombrosa--which, as it happens, boasts a stand of sugar maples
planted by Marsh. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial
considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost,
Elder's narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced
locally, reports on family doings (including his wife's reconnecting
with Italian relatives), and returns finally--as did Marsh's--to
Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more
aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of
wilderness areas. Elder also extends the idea of sustainability from
maintaining a healthy human-environmental balance to maintaining a
strong web of social relationships within both the family and the
larger community.
John Elder , Professor of English at Middlebury College, is the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run. |
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