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Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
Scribner
May 2012
On Sale: April 24, 2012
416 pages
ISBN: 1439193541
EAN: 9781439193549
Kindle: B005GG0MAG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the
remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and
their trees across the entire span of our nation’s
history. Like many of us, historians have long
been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of
trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of
the United States itself—from the majestic white pines of
New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use
as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of
California, which lured settlers west. In fact, without the
country’s vast forests and the hundreds of tree species they
contained, there would have been no ships, docks, railroads,
stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles,
or firewood. No shingled villages or whaling vessels in New
England. No New York City, Miami, or Chicago. No Johnny
Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, or Daniel Boone. No Allied planes in
World War I, and no suburban sprawl in the middle of the
twentieth century. America—if indeed it existed—would be a
very different place without its millions of acres of trees.
As Eric Rutkow’s brilliant, epic account shows, trees
were essential to the early years of the republic and
indivisible from the country’s rise as both an empire and a
civilization. Among American Canopy’s many
fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists
gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David
Thoreau’s famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New
York City’s Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed
a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin;
the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the
American elm from extinction; and the controversy over
spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited.
Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such
figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting
of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as
president. As symbols of liberty, community, and
civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures
in our country’s history. America started as a nation of
people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we
then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by
the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that
the globe’s climate is dependent on the preservation of
trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes
from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is
to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.
Never before has anyone treated our country’s trees
and forests as the subject of a broad historical study, and
the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly
entertaining read. Audacious in its four-hundred-year scope,
authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution,
American Canopy is perfect for history buffs and
nature lovers alike and announces Eric Rutkow as a major new
author of popular history.
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