Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands

| 2002

Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands

Published: 2002

Half a century ago, a professor in Wisconsin named Aldo Leopold noticed a little country graveyard, unusual only for its triangular shape. Looking more closely, he realized that an especially tight corner of the fenced cemetery contained a patch of grass that had never been mown, protected by the odd angle of the enclosure. That happenstance had meant survival for a small, living stand of the native prairie. When the cemetery had been laid out a century before, the surrounding grasslands must have seemed infinite and unconquerable. But in only a hundred years, their endless expanses had been conquered.

This book is an eloquent appreciation of America’s virgin lands, remnants of the once vast wilderness that have somehow survived. Widely acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver and award-winning photographer Annie Griffiths Belt celebrate in both words and images those last stands of wild, untamed America.

Kingsolver extols and explains America’s natural domains—its wetlands, woodlands, coasts, grasslands, and drylands—and the pioneering environmentalists who worked to save them. These visionaries—William Bartram, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey—raised courageous voices in the wilderness long before conservation became a groundswell. Now Kingsolver joins their passionate chorus.

Belt’s remarkable hand-tinted infrared images and color photographs graphically illustrate Kingsolver’s descriptions of swaying, upside-down marsh-forests; of the filtered sunlight and flowering spring ephemerals of the woodlands; of the varied tapestries of coast habitats; of undulating plains of grass and the western canyons where the land’s mineral bones are bared.

“These are history’s small acts of grace, left to us as refuges of wilderness where once plentiful creatures survive in quiet scarcity,” Kingsolver writes. “Here, in these lost corners, are the reserves of species abundance and strength for a continent that once roared with wild grandeur; they are its swan song. This book is about them.”

Praise For Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands

“With literary and photographic nods to the giants of conservation—Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey and others—the book offers quiet evidence that there is still something better than a world where ‘children's adventures and glimpses of fox dwell only in books.’ ”

— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

READ EXCERPT

How is the American childhood to be measured? So many different kinds of landmarks may have punctuated those years: The baseball games attended with distracted but loving dads; the marble doorways of great museums entered; the sandlots or spelling bees faced and conquered. For some, school report cards marked the high or low waterlines of hope; for others it was the friendships gained and lost on playgrounds.

But there is another category of child, bred in the back fields and uncultivated edges of America, whose years were measured in genuine, living seasons: The first clear day of winter’s end when the maple sap runs; the moment of summer when earth and air have conspired to raise the temperature of a pond so it might embrace the joyous goose bumps of a naked child’s skin; the last leaves piled high and leaped upon in autumn; then snowfall, hushed and final as the white endpaper of a favorite book.

I am one of those lucky ones, whose best memories all contain birdsong and trees. In the long light of summer, on every consecrated Saturday of spring and fall, and whenever we were blessed with the gift of a “snow day” in winter, my compatriots and I carried out our greatest accomplishments in the company of hickory and maple. Relieved of the instructive intrusion of adult company, we explored and reexplored the rambling patchwork of woodlands that formed irregular connective tissue between alfalfa fields and cow pastures that stretched in all directions from our homes.

The fields were fair enough. They harbored the occasional find—a nest of baby rabbits tucked into the thatch, or a sneezy bouquet of butterfly weed running renegade through the alfalfa—but these fields that constituted the farmers’ only wealth in our neighborhood were viewed by us kids as the empty spaces between precious wild woodlands. From the farmers’ point of view, the woods themselves were wasted land, usually left standing as woodlots because they were too steep or creek-riddled to plow efficiently. But we saw the world otherwise. We waded through alfalfa and skirted around bored cattle to get to the real places: damp groves smelling of humus and earthworm industry, rich in the pecky music of birds seeking forage.

In this cool shade I found my first jack-in-the-pulpit preaching his springtime gospel of life everlasting to a wide-eyed congregation of creek frogs. In these woods I found and consumed my first—and hundredth—wild pawpaw, a fruit that few people have tasted because it can’t be transported, only pulled from the branch and licked from the fingers like a handful of rich, banana-scented custard. We found half-buried in the banks of these gullies the bones of dead animals we imagined to be buffalo, or mastodons, thought I’m sure now they were only the weathered remains of cattle that had strayed from neighboring pastures years before, to expire from some lackluster cow ailment. But that possibility did not cross our minds at the time. We were too rich in love for life to suffer thoughts of the mundane.

Excerpted from Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, with photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt. Text copyright © 2002 by Barbara Kingsolver. Published by the National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.