Agony of an American Wilderness - by Samuel A MacDonald (Paperback)

About the Book

What is a forest? What are forests for? Who should control them? These are familiar questions, but the Allegheny casts them in a new light. The national environmental movement has become less willing to compromise since its victories in the Pacific Northwest, and the Allegheny...

Book Synopsis

What is a forest? What are forests for? Who should control them? These are familiar questions, but the Allegheny casts them in a new light. The national environmental movement has become less willing to compromise since its victories in the Pacific Northwest, and the Allegheny is its newest proving ground. This book explains what activists are after, how the struggle differs from more familiar environmental battles and what it means for the future of the American landscape.

Review Quotes

The Agony of an American Wilderness is destined to be a classic case history study of the political/psychological/social/legal 'game that people play' relative to the national forest management. Until Congress sees fit to sever the Gordian Knot that increasingly binds federal forest managers, such political passion plays are the likely future for the management of federal lands.

The Agony of an American Wilderness shifts our attention from the traditional battlegrounds of the wilderness movement, the old growth forests of the West, to the Allegheny National Forest. Here, Sam MacDonald offers us a fascinating glimpse of a damaged land on the mend and the people living in it.

Interviews, a history of regional logging and environmentalism, and a look at locals versus tourists make this a must-read for those who believe heated environmental controversies only exist on the west coast.

He has done us all a service in laying out, in a down-to-earth style, the history and nature of the forest, and the pros and cons of the opposing camps' arguments.

Journalist MacDonald (who was born and raised in the region) examines the communities that are caught in the crossfire of this debate and argues that the "zero-cut" philosophy of forest resource management is too extreme.

About the Author

Samuel A. MacDonald is an award-winning journalist who has covered courts, crime, Washington politics, and war-torn Bosnia. He has served as the Washington editor of the libertarian monthly, Reason. His stories have earned several first-place finishes in the annual Maryland, Delaware and District of Columbia Press Association Awards. MacDonald was awarded a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship in May of 2002, and spent the next 18 months investigating the environmental battle unfolding on the Allegheny National Forest. He has written about the crisis for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and his findings and observations about the Allegheny timber wars have been sought by numerous media outlets.