WINTERGREEN: Rambles in a Ravaged Land

by Robert Pyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 1986

A naturalist ramble through the heavily lumbered land of the Willapa Hills of western Washington State. Pyle, whose writing up to now has been confined to nature guides (The Audubon Society Handbook for Butterfly Watchers), shows himself here to be a cunning essayist who is able to bring to life a region little known. The layout of the book is poetic in itself--set in four sections that symbolically represent summer, fall, winter, and spring, each section in turn contains four essays--revealing a cohesion of the author's spirit with the seasons. Pyle has two things in mind here. The first is to sing the praises of the region to which he emigrated for the peace, serenity, and views which it afforded. But Washington State means forestry, and Pyle depicts the ravages of the intensive lumbering upon the land and its life. Pyle is venomous towards companies such as Weyerhaeuser, who use the ""overmature"" theory to buttress their logging programs. This is an insistence that a forest must be logged as soon as it reaches ""maturity"" or else lose much of its utility and value. Pyle argues for the environmentalists--not a popular lot in the region; a common bumpersticker reads: ""Out of work? Eat an environmentalist!""--that there is no such thing as an overmature forest. ""Trees grow; trees die; logs rot; more trees grow. . .in essence the forest is a continually replacing, constantly refreshed entity."" After this winter of Pyle's discontent, though, he essays a spring demonstrating the ability of organisms (including ourselves) to survive the blight of massive resource extraction. A love song to an overlooked--and overworked--land.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 1986

ISBN: 1570613109

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribner's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION