Diana Muir

Reflections in Bullough's Pond is an entertaining and well-researched environmental history. Muir has two twined stories: the change in New England's landscape from the introduction of agriculture to English settlement to industrialization to suburbanization, and the question of why New England supported a thriving economy when its natural resources were not profitably abundant.

Muir's voice is clear throughout the book, whether she is talking about the flood patterns of her neighborhood or applying common sense where historical documentation is lacking ("...succulent as the [swordfish] steaks are, would anyone topple a three-hundred-foot tree and scrape the insides out of its five-foot-wide trunk with a clamshell... if he could spear a moose?" [p.7]). Her research ranges through historical sources, archeology, and scientific publications, and the book includes an astonishing amount of charts, graphs and maps.

These are the kinds of stories I grew up hearing - about the submarine plants in CT closing in the later part of the cold war and leaving behind destitution - about the second-growth forest that has barely had a chance to spring back after agriculture and logging denuded the White Mountains. The dramatic changes that New England has seen is fascinating stuff, especially for an area associated in most people's minds only to colonial/revolutionary-era history.… (meer)