Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land - Softcover

Janisse Ray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931498741 ISBN 13: 9781931498746

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005

Synopsis

Janisse Ray, award-winning author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, writes an evocative paean to wildness and wilderness restoration with an extraordinary journey into southern Georgia's Pinhook Swamp.

Pinhook Swamp acts as a vital watershed and wildlife corridor, a link between the great southern wildernesses of Okefenokee Swamp and Osceola National Forest. Together Okefenokee, Osceola, and Pinhook form one of the largest expanse of protected wild land east of the Mississippi River. This is one of America's last truly wild places, and Pinhook takes us into its heart.

Ray comes to know Pinhook intimately as she joins the fight to protect it, spending the night in the swamp, tasting honey made from its flowers, tracking wildlife, and talking to others about their relationship with the swamp. Ray sees Pinhook through the eyes of the people who live there--naturalists, beekeepers, homesteaders, hunters, and locals at the country store. In lyrical, down-home prose, she draws together the swamp's need for restoration and the human desire for wholeness and wildness in our own lives and landscapes.

About this title

About the Author:

Writer, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray is a seed-saver, seed-exchanger, and seed-banker, and has gardened for twenty-five years. She is the author of several books, including The Seed Underground, Pinhook and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a New York Times Notable Book. Ray is on the faculty of Chatham University's low-residency MFA program, and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She has won a Southern Booksellers Award for Poetry, a Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction, an American Book Award, the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She attempts to live a simple, sustainable life on a farm in southern Georgia with her husband, Raven Waters.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author of the American Book Award–winning Ecology of a Cracker Childhood celebrates South Georgia's humble Pinhook Swamp in an impassioned and poetic account of the area's environmental fragmentation and its subsequent restoration. The swamp, "170,000 acres of dreary dismal... too deep for a human to wade in, too shallow for a boat to draw," and populated by flies and mosquitoes, is the corridor connecting the Okefenokee Swamp with Osceola National Park. Most of its acres have now been purchased and protected, but environmentalists' work, Ray warns, is not finished yet. In impressionistic, lyrical chapters, Ray meditates on the meaning of silence ("Silence is the ghost of the panther" that used to populate Pinhook), the animals of the area (black bears, bees, frogs) and the people dedicated to saving it. She also includes poems, a Native American blessing and italicized reflections on the land's fragmentation ("the separation of habitat in a landscape... chopping a wild place into pieces") by roads, logging, mining and developments. Her moving book is a tribute to a small but crucial wild place and a call for readers to help preserve it and others like it. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1931498741
• ISBN 13: 9781931498746
• Binding: Perfect Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168