Nature Next Door

This book is to be recommended to forestry professionals and practitioners, as well as providing a valuable reference to both educators and students in natural resource management and policy.

Ellen Stroud offers a compelling historical explanation for the return of America’s northeastern forests. Historians, land managers, and elected officials would do well to consider the historical and continuing relationship between forests, towns, and cities in America’s Northeast. Stroud’s excellent book offers an instructive path into the woods.

The extent of reforestation in the American Northeast is nothing short of remarkable, especially considering that it is the most urbanized region of the nation. Once 75 percent deforested, the region is now 75 percent forested. In this elegant volume, Ellen Stroud asks how that happened and finds unexpected answers.

Ellen Stroud…explores the Northeast’s interconnected urban and rural spaces and invites readers to reconsider old assumptions about their separateness. Nature Next Door is essential reading for scholars and citizens interested in the relationship between urban and rural history.

With this intriguing book, environmental historian Stroud has fundamentally rewritten the recent forest history of the northeastern US. . . . Valuable for anyone interested in forestry, urban forestry, and land use or conservation. Highly recommended.

Nature Next Door, while providing the ecological and cultural narrative that fills the gap between William Cronon's Changes in the Land and Tom Wessels's Reading the Forested Landscape, is as much about the future—the next hundred years—as it is about the past.

Stroud's story has global implications far beyond the Northeast.

Stroud helps us understand the process of change at many different scales.

Stroud writes with a clear and elegant voice. The stories of individuals that she weaves throughout her book, particularly those of numerous women, provide a warm human dimension to her landscape analysis.

The book almost reads as a historical travelogue through the Northeastern forested landscape with occasional pauses to explore the political ecology that shaped present day forests.

With this intriguing book, environmental historian Stroud has fundamentally rewritten the recent forest history of the northeastern U.S.

Stroud's idea that forests were shaped by human choice is an important complement to the standard story of forest succession in abandoned farmlands in the Northeast.

Nature Next Door shows how urbanization, farm abandonment, state policies, and conservation have left the American Northeast far more forested than it has been since the eighteenth century or before. It is among the most profound and surprising transformations in the history of the American landscape— and quite different from the usual stories of decline and degradation that are so familiar in environmental history. No one has written about this process with greater subtlety, intelligence, and literary grace than Ellen Stroud.

The book illuminates the web of connections between forests and the quality of human life, and documents some of the ways in which people have strengthened those ties.