WILD AT HEART:

In the tradition of Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a beautifully written and ultimately hopeful history of our relationship with the natural world.

Since setting foot on this continent over 400 years ago, we've had a complex relationship with nature. The Puritans saw nature as a frightening wilderness, full of "uncooked meat." During the Industrial Revolution, nature was despoiled and simultaneously celebrated as a source of the sublime. With little forethought and great greed, Americans killed the last passenger pigeon, wiped out old growth forests, and dumped so much oil in the rivers that they burst into flame.

Wild at Heart makes clear how far we have come in protecting the environment and how far we still have to go. In the span of a few decades, our relationship with nature has evolved to a more sophisticated sense of interdependence. Across the U.S., people are taking individual actions like planting native species, and are collectively fighting for projects like dam removal and wolf restoration. Cities are embracing nature, too, with initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint and promote community-supported agriculture. Our choices today will determine whether nature survives. This beautifully written book shows how our connection to nature came undone, and how we are knitting it back together.

Alice Outwater grew up on Lake Champlain, Vermont, and studied engineering at the University of Vermont and at MIT. She is the author of Water: A Natural History (Basic Books, 1996) and consults in water quality. She has lived on a farm since 1991 in Vermont, Hawaii, and finally Colorado.