America’s Forests Are ‘Present and Vanishing at the Same Time’

By Kiley Bense

The 19th century may seem distant to us today, but in a new book by Alexander Nemerov, “The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s,” readers have a chance to walk through the woods of the early 1800s—and discover that the often contradictory ways we relate to nature now have been with us at least since then.