Volume 52, Number 14 · September 22, 2005
Ah, Wilderness!
By William H. McNeill
Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks
by Bill McKibben
Crown, 157 pp., $16.00
Confluence: A River, the Environment, Politics, and the Fate of All Humanity
by Nathaniel Tripp, with a foreword by Howard Dean
Steerforth Press, 161 pp., $21.00
The subtitles of the books by Bill McKibben and Nathaniel Tripp proclaim their chief concerns: McKibben celebrates a landscape running from Vermont to upstate New York—he is hopeful about efforts being made to preserve it—while Tripp records his struggle to protect the upper Connecticut River valley from abuse by electric companies and property developers. Both writers came from cities and chose to live in the country and to write about their experience there. They both deplore what McKibben calls the irresponsible 'hyperindividualism of our time'; they are sympathetic to environmental causes but acutely aware of the dogmatic naiveté the converts to the environmentalism of the 1960s sometimes exhibited.
Review, 3541 words
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