Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast (Middlebury Bicentennial Series in Environmental Studies)

The first book to look at wilderness in the northeastern US, Wilderness Comes Home features a new approach based on ecological reserve design to protect biological diversity, rewilding and restoring lands to wilderness, and embedding wilderness in a landscape of sustainably managed farmland and forestland. It addresses major theoretical and practical aspects of this important issue -- whether, why, and how to reestablish wilderness areas in the Northeast. Although Western wilderness models already exist for undeveloped areas, Eastern models are still evolving. Protection and social management are being urged not for the forest primeval but for recovering areas, in which returning species such as moose and peregrine falcons roam over new growth softwoods and hardwoods, interspersed with the stone walls that once marked field boundaries.