Sounds Like Fun
Metaphor is given substantial opportunity to describe the various scenes of the natural world found in New England. One particular description of a specific type of wetland actually sounds like kind of a fun phenomenon, though clearly not to indigenous inhabitants:
“An entirely different wetland habitat occasionally occurred where a dense mat of sphagnum moss, leatherleaf, and various sedges grew out from the edges of a pond. Usually the mat was underlaid by water, so that people jumping up and down on it could feel the earth move beneath them like a giant waterbed. Indians referred to such areas as places `where the earth shakes and trembles’”
Thoreau
The official narrative of the book open on a portrait of Henry David Thoreau. No other writer is quite so inextricably connected to the ecology of New England, arguably, but the following extract from writing is said by the author of this book to have been profoundly influence by William Wood’s writing from a century earlier:
“When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here,— the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc.,— I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.”
America the Beautiful Commodity
Right from the beginning, it seems, settlers arrived in the New World, took a long glance around as it natural wonder and began to figure out a way to sell it off. America can effectively be said to have been constructed far less on religious impulses than good old-fashioned salesmanship and marketing:
“It was no accident that James Rosier referred to the coastal vegetation of Maine as the profits and fruits which are naturally on these Hands. His word profits may not have connoted the marginal gain from a mercantile transaction, but it did identify those natural products which were of potential use to a European way of life.”
European Disease Factory
Europe was a disease factory that doomed much of the indigenous population in the New World. Although one might suspect that a contributing factor to this pestilential process were the tightly packed ships which all but ensured a higher level of contagion among the settlers, just the opposite was true:
“The long sea voyage across the Atlantic acted as a disease filter in its own right, since epidemic diseases had usually run their course on board ship before sailors reached North America.”
Learning from Nature
One of the messages that the book offers is the advice to actually do what Apple Computers has simply made into an empty marketing slogan: think differently. To actually, genuinely, and profoundly consider looking at the world from more than just one’s own comfortable position:
“Once one has learned to think like a glacier, one can never gaze upon the modern Wisconsin landscape without also seeing the ghostly blue ice that transformed it so long ago.”
