3 Review(s)

The once denuded north-eastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of north-eastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of north-eastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single, transformed, regional landscape. In this examination of the cities and forests of the north-eastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well.Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth-century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns. Ellen Stroud is an environmental historian at Bryn Mawr College, where she is an associate professor in the Growth and Structure of Cities Department, and holds the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris M.D. Chair in Environmental Studies.