Northern Woodlands

Purchase this book:
IndieBound | Powell’s Books | Amazon

Good Fences: Pictorial History of New England’s Stone Walls

Like no other element of the New England landscape, stone walls relentlessly remind us of the challenging existence faced by those who settled this corner of the world. Stone walls chronicle the geology and history of settlement across the region, along with providing just a glimpse of the endless, back-breaking task of picking stones from the fields and making good use of them in walls of many sorts.

The recent flurry of books about the ubiquitous and intractable place of stone walls in New England’s landscape has been complemented by William Hubbell’s Good Fences. Hubbell, a gifted photographer and a stone wall buff, tips his hat to the stone wall by photographing it in nearly every type of use and condition, covering all variations of form in each of the six New England states.

Hubbell has organized the text historically, just like Robert Thorson’s Stone by Stone, the current definitive work on stone walls. But Stone by Stone, while thoroughly enjoyable, interesting, and comprehensive, contains no photographs. Good Fences is full of beautiful photographs, and though it is organized by era, it chronicles the many different types of stone walls found in every corner of New England: from single-stack farmer’s walls to lace walls; from walls built of round stones in New Hampshire to the square-sided schist and quartzite walls found in Westport, Massachusetts, and Little Compton, Rhode Island; and also disposal or rubble walls – double-stack walls filled with small stones in the middle. “Wet” walls and dry walls. Walls with capstones and walls made of thick slabs. Who ever knew there could be so many different types of walls? 

Hubbell also profiles the different uses of walls. Some were used to contain cattle or as sheep folds, some to delineate boundaries, others to show affluence. There are three photos of stiles: customized sections of a wall that allow the passage of humans or dogs, but not cows, along with a section on pounds, the places towns would keep roaming cattle and sheep until their owner claimed them. And Hubbell chronicles how walls deteriorate over time, by the action of frost, creep, erosion, displacement by tree roots, or even displacement of the illegal sort, otherwise known as theft. Hubbell makes it clear that while we think of stone walls as lasting forever, ever so slowly the forces that tirelessly work on them will win. Someday they will be gone.

A fascination with stone walls and the stories they tell is the foundation of Good Fences. The caption of nearly every photo is as thoughtful and interesting as the photographs are beautiful. And to pay homage to the wall builders of yore, Hubbell offers profiles of half a dozen modern day practitioners of the art of stone wall building. Interspersed throughout the book, the profiles often include an old wall somewhere that the mason has always admired. All clearly have a great love for their work. As Ted Peach, a stonemason from Marblehead, Massachusetts, says in his profile, “I like playing with granite.”

Which makes me think: what would the long-dead builders of the region’s stone walls and fences think of us having the time to read and look at books about stone walls? They’d probably just cast a bewildered look at us and shrug, and then get back to work.

Reviewed by Carl Demrow

© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

Purchase this book:
IndieBound | Powell’s Books | Amazon

The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future

Through his books and his work as an educator, Tom Wessels teaches people how to observe and interpret ecological landscapes. His latest book, The Myth of Progress, reflects something of a new direction from that of his previous books, Reading the Forested Landscape and The Granite Landscape. Its goal is to explain what he refers to as the three laws of sustainability: the law of limits to growth, the second law of thermodynamics, and the law of self-organization in complex systems. In essence, his thesis is that the global political economy is predicated on a series of false assumptions and gross misunderstandings of basic ecological principles.

He shows that these myths are legitimated through narratives, belief systems, and values that generate entire world views. Hence there are chapters devoted to the myth of control (complex versus linear systems), the myth of growth (limits and sustainability), the myth of energy (the second law of thermodynamics), the myth of the free market (the loss of diversity, democracy and the demise of self-organization), and, finally, the myth of progress (a need for cultural change).

Wessels readily admits that he is covering hefty intellectual ground, that he is relying on the literature of many of the pioneers in this field, and that he is presenting his work as a synthesist and an educator. His work is clearly directed toward a general audience, and he want them to understand exactly why many political and economic decisions are rooted in false assumptions, how they fly in the face of fundamental ecological and physical principles, and why they are not in the self interest of people, communities, and the planet.

Amazingly, Wessels covers all of this ground in a reasonably succinct way. This is a short, often pithy book, and you can easily read it in an evening. In this way, it serves multiple purposes. It is a fine refresher or overview for people who are either new to this material or who haven’t thought about it in a long time. It’s perfect for folks who lack a science background and wish to better understand the relationship between ecological and economic systems. It is a valuable teaching tool that covers these basic principles in a simple, no-nonsense way. Most importantly, it retains all of Wessels’s charm as a writer and educator. Indeed, the book’s most riveting passages are his anecdotes and examples.

Inevitably, there are some compromises. There is no way that Wessels can cover these “laws of sustainability” in great depth. But he’s well aware that there are other works that do so. Perhaps the biggest risk is the application of ecological principles to political and economic phenomena. The virtue of making these connections is that he reaches multiple audiences and demonstrates how the prevailing “laws of sustainability” must be honored; in the end, they will have their due. Sometimes the complexity of the social issues is simplified so that the laws of sustainability are made more clear, a simplification that will no doubt create controversy among social scientists.

Still, this is an impassioned, critical, and bold book. Wessels is guided by his overwhelming sense that the laws of sustainability demand respect, understanding, and interpretation, and unless we educate ourselves about their full complexity and truth, we will do irreparable damage to the landscapes we love.

Reviewed by Mitchell Thomashow

© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

Purchase this book:
IndieBound | Powell’s Books | Amazon

Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment

The author of this remarkable book states that his goal is “to present an accurate account of the seriousness of today’s global environmental challenges…and to offer a strategy for moving beyond today’s stalemate, one that is comprehensive and feasible.”

Gus Speth is one of very few people on the planet capable of achieving that bold objective, having the international experience and proven ability to understand the complex scientific and policy dimensions of the environmental crisis facing our world. He is dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, with past roles as founder and president of the World Resources Institute, co-founder of the Natural Resource Defense Council, chief executive officer of the U.N. Development Programme, and advisor to several U.S. Presidents.

The book is divided into four parts: a concise description of today’s global environmental challenges; a review of recent international responses to these challenges; an in-depth analysis of the underlying causes of environmental deterioration; and a strategy for attacking these root causes and making a transition to global sustainability.

Part One is a grim account of accelerating environmental degradation. The facts he presents are staggering, warning that “we have entered the end game in our traditional, historic relationship with the natural world…Whatever slack nature once cut us is gone.” But while the situation Speth describes seems almost hopeless, he cautions that “abandoning hope is precisely what we must not do.”

The several chapters of Part One are the most concise, yet comprehensive, reviews of the global environmental situation written to date. Speth concludes that the commitment to the environment of the 1970s has faded, perhaps as a result of having solved some of “the acute, obvious, and local pollution insults, thereby creating the illusion that the problem is solved. Yet we merely created a fool’s paradise for ourselves, for the more serious pollution problems are chronic, insidious, and global.”

Part Two chronicles a quarter-century of effort at “global environmental governance,” and the complex reasons for its failure. Here Speth looks at the “underlying drivers” of deterioration such as population, technology, consumption, market failures, and the neglect of “the social and political context” of environmental problems when crafting international agreements. He is especially critical of America’s persistent “negative role” in international efforts, be it health, human rights, weapons control, or climate change. While especially critical of the present Administration, he concludes that “the failure has been truly bipartisan.”

Part Three tackles the question: “What are the… drivers of large-scale environmental deterioration, and what is behind these drivers?” This is an in-depth look at the underlying root causes that must be understood to move beyond the failed attempts examined in Part Two, viewed in the context of present-day “globalization” and the goal of “sustainable development.”

In Part Four, Speth describes a series of interlinked transitions to sustainability that must be achieved to define a “qualitatively new epoch,” the most fundamental of which “is the transition in culture and consciousness.” This is, without doubt, the most hopeful and challenging of his transitions to achieve. Any attempt to paraphrase Speth here would be a mistake. This is a book that must be read on the author’s terms.

Few books on this immense topic come close to Speth’s achievement of building a sound case for international policy on a solid scientific foundation, concisely written in a lively, readable style.

Reviewed by Carl Reidel

© 2006 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.