--reviewed by Paul Salstrom

Naturalists come to be naturalists in wildly different ways--and that has always been true--but foresters used to all be cut from the same cloth. They all used to graduate from forestry schools and go right to work for industry, or the government, or a forestry school.

Not any more.

And almost all foresters used to specialize in economic forestry -- the enhancement of board feet that made forests more profitable to milk (or to decimate -- that was decided by the forester’s boss).

But not any more. Now a new generation of self-taught foresters work largely as volunteers and owe more to John Muir than they owe to Gifford Pinchot. Among their growing number is Chris Bolgiano, previously the author of Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of Pumas and People (1995).

This lively new book interweaves her own life story with what she has learned about Appalachia’s forests, including their past history and their future prospects. Chris displays a journalistic knack for framing the somber past in upbeat stories of present-day hiking and activism. Her journalistic skills don’t undermine her history, however, which is solid. Nor does she simply rehearse the 1900-era clear-cuts, followed by the runaway wildfires and then the epochal floods. That history is well told in Chapter Three, but first Chris reveals the local origins of Appalachia’s commercial logging in the mid-to-late1800s. And even before that she devotes an entire chapter to the Eastern Band of Cherokees and their relations with southerly mountain forests. Chapter Four then traces the evolution of forestry policy in the East, giving due emphasis to the career of Gifford Pinchot and the 1911 Weeks Act (which allowed land purchases for eastern national forests) but not neglecting the quite-different preservationist movement that culminated when the High Smokies (in 1930) and part of the Blue Ridge (in 1935) became national parks.

Quite a few local people remain still upset about how those parks became government property, but Chris (who lives on 100 wooded acres that border George Washington National Forest) seems to believe that the parks have forestalled a worse fate. Indeed, her long central chapter "Profiles in Controversy" marches through Appalachia’s national forests and parks one by one, highlighting the threat of increased timbering and showing just how short-sighted current cutting policy tends to be.

Among the profusion of 37 photos scattered through this book are plenty providing hints that the national forests and parks have saved millions of acres from a worse fate -- especially the photos on pages 63 and 75 which originally appeared in the 1902 "Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in Relation to the Forests, Rivers, and Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Region."

I personally part company with Chris, however, when she decides that some sort of spiritual emptiness (of all things) contributed to such mistreatment of nature. Quote (from page 61):

I wouldn’t quote this passage if religion hadn’t turned up in two or three of the 1998 issues of the Voice -- besides religion being my own favorite topic. Although Chris has lived in Appalachia almost thirty years, perhaps she hasn’t visited many of its rural churches.

In 1971, Chris and her husband Ralph bought some old farmland near Elkins and lived there awhile. But then they found those 100 wooded acres in Virginia, bordering George Washington National Forest, and found jobs nearby, built their own house, and have lived there ever since.

Rounding out The Appalachian Forest are several fascinating chapters -- one on the prospects for fostering what Chris calls "new old growth"-- another on OHVs and wilderness designations -- another on forest-preservation activists -- another on the prospects for a new breed of American chestnut trees -- another on black bears -- and finally one on acid rain.

Withal, this book is both solid and timely, a credit to its author.

(Paul Salstrom is the author of Appalachia’s Path to Dependency 1994)