FALLEN FORESTS begins in the dirt.

Or, more accurately, it starts with my hands in the black earth of my grandfather’s garden. A carpenter by day but a horticulturalist by desire, he enlists me as his accomplice in planting:

Corn, beans, squash.

Potatoes.

Pumpkins, peppers.

Tomatoes.¹

When winter breaks, we harvest sap for maple syrup; in the spring, set strawberries and onions. Come fall, we fill his battered Chevy station wagon so full with squash and pumpkins that I have to lie spread-eagled across the tailgate as we creep across the street to where we’ll heap our treasure for sorting...

WITH ITS SPACIOUS MEADOWS and clear water, the New World was a place worth fighting over. Seeking peaceful interactions between Cherokees and Euramericans, the pointed and affecting letter by the unnamed “Katteuha,” or Beloved Woman, to Benjamin Franklin reveals the material and gendered ground on which interethnic resource conflicts were too often fought. Emerging from an ethical framework in which “woman is the mother of All,” Katteuha highlights positively valued, embodied resources for human survival while she attempts to restore interpersonal relations to a more appropriate standard of respectful attentiveness and complementarity. Peace and world security expert Michael T. Klare...

IN SCENES IN MY NATIVE LAND, Lydia Sigourney observes, “The wild elephant, when death approaches, moves slowly to seek the shadow of lofty trees, and there resigns his breath. Intelligent man, like the most sagacious of animals, might surely spare a few, as a shelter for his weary head, and a patrimony for an unborn race.”¹ Like many of her contemporaries, she witnessed with dismay the United States’ diminishing forest heritage. Unlike many, she comprehended the interconnection between zealous forestry practices and the potential for Native American genocide.²

This is a chapter about trees. But it also encompasses forests and...

DESCRIBING INCURSIONS that “low whites” made into blacks’ homes after Nat Turner’s insurrection, Harriet Jacobs recounts the physical tortures that the African American community endured. Her grandmother received a visit from one such “pack of hungry wolves,” who “snatched at every thing within their reach.” Mob members were particularly incensed by letters to Jacobs—evidence of her literacy—and by valuable household items, such as “some silver spoons which ornamented an old-fashioned buffet.” Jacobs’s rhetoric portrays the invaders as savages, animals contained only by “the better class of the community,” and she distinguishes between African Americans’ civilized environment and their...

MERCHANTS OF voluntary simplicity and simple living barrage us today, as books, magazines, and Internet sites promote a return to “earlier values.” My own history as the daughter of a Depression-era mother who, more than fifty years later, could relate (with dismay and shame, but also with pride) having to make her own clothes from others’ old garments, resonated with the charge to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” As my previous chapters illustrate, Jacobs, Berbineau, Wilson, and Larcom differentially suggest how what Gilman calls “social conditions” and “economic necessities” profoundly influence one’s perspective...

IN LATE 1888 AND EARLY 1889, the writer and artist Mary Hallock Foote published “Pictures of the Far West” in the elite eastern monthly Century Magazine, offering snapshots of the “new” country and illuminating its “wild” character. Quoted above, the first of three sketches, “Looking for Camp,” establishes nature’s self-sufficiency; the land provides bounty without apparent work or cost.¹ Foote’s essay underscores humans’ insignificance within the West’s huge scale and independent presence. “Looking for Camp” concludes at sunset: “At this hour the stillness is so intense that the faintest breeze can be heard, creeping along the hill slopes and stirring...

PUBLISHED IN THE May 1861 Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s erotic fantasy, which depicts a seamstress contemplating the pomegranate bloom on her windowsill, needs little interpretation. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, a few American women found ways to explore—and sometimes celebrate—their connection to nature. As we have seen repeatedly, nonelite women faced particular challenges surrounding their embodiment, but even elites like Emily Dickinson were frequently forced to convert themselves into “Nobody,” no-body. Unapologetically affirming her size and animation, Lucille Clifton’s contemporary poem illuminates some of the past century’s social transformations. Unlike earlier “small” women who, as Fanny Fern...