The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South - Softcover

JOHN LANE is a professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College. His books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He also coedited, with Gerald Thurmond, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia). He has published several volumes of poetry, essays, and a novel, as well as a selection of his online columns, The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph. Anthropocene Blues: Poems is his most recent work.

Mingling environmental concerns, naturalist observation and appreciation of the South's distinctive landscape and culture, this adventurous anthology is full of indelible forays deep into nature, the American South and ecology. Exploring Mississippi's Black Creek Wilderness Area, which awaits federal approval as an officially protected zone, Rick Bass audaciously, perhaps quixotically, advances the idea of creating "buffered wilderness" regions that would remain as close as possible to what the country's first settlers encountered. Combing North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, Christopher Camuto assesses the cultural loss flowing from the near total destruction of the old-growth forest. Naturalist Susan Cerulean's agile report describes biologists' fieldwork radio-tagging and monitoring the endangered, migratory swallow-tailed kite, which nests in Florida and winters in South America. Nature gets confrontational in several of these essays. Archie Carr weighs the mixed blessings of coexisting with a 300-pound Florida alligator in his front-yard pond; Jan DeBlieu faces down Hurricane Gloria on Cape Hatteras. Counterpoised to first-person narratives of grand river trips wending through family and regional history, there is Mary Q. Steele's quietly exquisite celebration of her daily interaction with nature in a Tennessee suburb. Also included are E.O. Wilson's luminous recollection of a formative Alabama boyhood summer, Wendell Berry's far from idyllic account of homesteading on a tiny Kentucky farm, and Cherokee/Appalachian storyteller Marilou Awiakta's probe of Native Americans' harmonization with the web of life. These vibrant essays, many reprinted from books, a few original, scour nature, embodied in Southern vistas, for keys to Earth's renewal and untapped potential. Co-editor Lane is an essayist, poet and kayaker; Thurmond is a sociologist and birdwatcher.
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