Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism) - Hardcover

John Elder

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813925762 ISBN 13: 9780813925769

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2006

Synopsis

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Review:

Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh's Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John Elder's poetic meditations on land and life demonstrate that only by searching beyond our familiar boundaries can we discover better ways of living back at home. - Marcus Hall, author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration ""This collaboration - between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive - is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I've ever read. It will be a classic."" - Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature ""Elder's impassioned pilgrimage shows us how to delight in messy wilderness, to secure a curative habitation of the world, and, with Marsh, to lend ecological nous to our gravest task: knowing ourselves and respecting one another. Let the maple seeds and olive stones of Elder's visionary harvest restore to us a reflective and redemptory future."" - from the foreword by David Lowenthal

Synopsis:

The pivotal figure in John Elder's latest book - itself a combination of environmental history, travel writing, literary criticism, and memoir - is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded now as Americais first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, Man and Nature. Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that it was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship. On a Fulbright year, Elder chooses to follow in Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa - which, as it happens, boasts a stand of sugar maples planted by Marsh.

Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elderis narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings (including his wife's reconnecting with Italian relatives), and returns finally - as did Marsh's - to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas. Elder also extends the idea of sustainability from maintaining a healthy human-environmental balance to maintaining a strong web of social relationships within both the family and the larger community. Here is an exceptional reading experience, the chance to follow two of the finest chroniclers of our place in nature - separated by years, but by surprisingly little else.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0813925762
• ISBN 13: 9780813925769
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288