The Embattled Wilderness

No place, no building or garden or park or farm or natural wonder, is any longer safe from destruction. This is because, by the determination of industry, the connivance of our institutions, and with the tacit consent evidently of most people, every place or thing has become merely a property exactly equaled by its market price. The inestimable service of this book, then, is to restore to a renowned and much-loved place its membership, both natural and human, and its history.

The Embattled Wilderness is a vitally important book—not because Robinson Forest is the Grand Canyon or some other wilderness wonder but precisely because it is not. Less spectacular and less protected, the forest in many ways embodies the story of every embattled piece of land in this country. This is the sort of book we should all be writing to protect the places we love. I think it’s an important book, a timely book, an at once passionate and objective book, and a model for other books that start with local fights and spread outward.

* author of Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder *

Focused on a fourteen-thousand-acre forest in eastern Kentucky, The Embattled Wilderness addresses current issues in Appalachian studies but also speaks to larger global issues of environmental quality, institutional decision making, interdisciplinary knowledge, pedagogy, and cultural values. It's a beautifully written narrative of the history and ecology of an island of natural diversity surrounded by a desolate landscape left over after mountaintop removal coal mining. Reece and Krupa combine the perspectives of both the sciences and the humanities to break unusual ground in environmental studies by helping the reader understand the vital connections between the natural and cultural contexts of a place.

* Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kentucky *

Reece and Krupa are both fine writers. In this small, engaging book, they alternate chapters, explaining the natural and human history of this unique corner of Breathitt, Perry, and Knott counties, and makeing a case to preserve it.

* Lexington Herald Leader *

Written by two people with deep knowledge of Robinson Forest, The Embattled Wilderness engagingly portrays this singular place as it persuasively appeals for its protection. . . . It is a readable yet rigorous, passionate yet reasoned summation of what can be found, or lost, in Robinson Forest and other irreplaceable places.