|
|
|
Book Review
| Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place. By John Warfield Simpson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. 291 pp. Maps, bibliography. Cloth $24.00.
|
| This is more than a personal story about returning to the sites of the youth of John Muir on both sides of the Atlantic to record the changes to be found in those landscapes since Muir's time. Certainly the author does spend time researching Muir's experiences in Dunbar and Wisconsin and records his own impressions of those landscapes now. Certainly, too, there is a personal dimension to these journeys since Simpson is disturbed by a sense that he does not feel embedded in his home landscape of suburban Ohio. The difference is that John Warfield Simpson is professor of landscape architecture and natural resources at Ohio State University. His quest is to find how people can feel connected to land on which they live. He asks the current inhabitants of Muir's contrasting early landscapes whether they feel rooted and what contributes to that feeling. Then he observes the way those feelings get translated into positions on the current issues concerning those very different places. He asks not only, "What did I see?" but also "What did I not see?" He compares current land-use debates in both landscapes in his quest to find what local people find important about their place now, what historic values contribute to their sense of place and how this influences the nature of the current uses and development of land today around John Muir's first two home environments. The result is an immensely readable personal, questioning, informative book that ought to provoke some further questions for both sides of the comparison that the author is developing. |
1
|
|
Simpson spent nine months in 2001 living eight miles from Dunbar, which Muir left at the age of eleven in 1849. In Scotland Simpson found that "the inability of common people to purchase land" that "helped to drive Daniel Muir from Dunbar" remains unchanged. But the sprawl of large-lot houses that has made rural Wisconsin now seem almost suburban has been avoided in Scotland by the Council preventing housing developments on the large country estates. In Scotland, Simpson talks to lairds and local members of the John Muir Trust with the same listening naivety that he talks in Wisconsin to the current inhabitants of the Muir farm and the displaced Ho-Chunk people. He conveys no sense of social tensions embedded in the history of these two landscapes and makes no contrast between the different sense of a place in a laird or a Ho-Chunk Indian. He records these conversations about what is valued in the personal connection to land with gentle comments that sidestep the deeper issues of conflict. He's the perfect polite guest and the book is a delightful narrative of Simpson's personal engagements with land and people. But by avoiding the hard questions and the rigorous case-studies this book might have explored, it is, ironically, not as helpful to these landscapes as it might have been. |
2
|
|
Terry Gifford, is a reader in literature and environment, University of Leeds, U.K. He is the editor of John Muir: The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books (The Mountaineers, 1992) and John Muir: The Life and Letters and Other Writings (The Mountaineers, 1996); and author of Pastoral (Routledge, 1999) and The Joy of Climbing (Whittles Publishing, 2003). |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|