Wintergreen: Listening to the Land's Heart

Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Softcover. Good. 5x0x8. Wintergreen is a tale of survival. In the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington, both the human community and the forest community are threatened with extinction. Virtually every acre of the hills has been logged, often repeatedly, in the past hundred years, endangering both the land and the people, leaving dying towns as well as a devastated ecosystem. Weaving vivid portraits of the place and its inhabitants - animal, plant, and human - with the story of his own love affair with the hills, Robert Michael Pyle has written a book so even-handed in its passion that it has been celebrated by those who make their living with a chain saw as well as by environmentalists. As he writes, My sympathies lie with the people and the woods, but not with the companies that have used them both with equal disregard. Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist and a professional writer who has published twelve books and hundreds of papers, essays, stories and poems. He has a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in 1974. His acclaimed 1987 book Wintergreen describing the devastation caused by unrestrained logging in Washington's Willapa Hills near his adopted home was the winner of the 1987 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. His 1995 book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide was the subject of a Guggenheim Fellowship.