American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
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.
Eric Rutkow’s “deeply fascinating” (The Boston Globe) work shows how 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 captivating 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 Franklin Roosevelt, who oversaw the planting of some three billion trees nationally in his time as president.
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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- American Canopy Trees Forests and the Making of a Nation
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A panoramic view of how trees have impacted our great nation. When you really stop and think about it, attempting to write a history of trees in a country as massive and geographically diverse as the United States is necessarily a gargantuan undertaking. Evidently, the idea of America’s trees and forests as the subject of a broad historical study had simply never been attempted before. But I am here to tell you that first-time author Eric Rutkow pulls it off with great aplomb in his compelling and comprehensive new book “American Canopy: Trees,…
Fun and fascinating read! Even if you don’t read a lot of history, American Canopy has something to offer for the casual, educated reader while still packing in a lot of detail and some potentially new arguments for the more well-versed. It moves through a series of stories on the impact of trees on the history and development of America. In fact, this reader comes away with impression that America as it exists could never have happened with our incredible trees. In sometimes hearbreaking fashion, the book shows how…