A History News Network Best Book of 2012
The once-denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees--because of cities. Nature Next Door shows how Northeastern urbanization--along with the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry--fostered a period of recovery for forests and created a new wildness of metropolitan nature.
Ellen Stroud is an environmental historian at Bryn Mawr College.
"The book illuminates the web of connections between forests and the quality of human life, and documents some of the ways in which people have strengthened those ties." -Publishers Weekly
"The moral of Stroud's story has implications far beyond the American Northeast: the region has forests today because people made choices about them and then did the hard practical and political work of making those choices real. Such things do not happen by accident. They happen because people make them happen. That is as true today as it was a hundred years ago." --from the Foreword by William Cronon