Friday, April 8, 2011

An Analysis of John McPhee's The Pine Barrens (Part 3 of 4)

[Note: I recently took an environmental literature class. As part of the coursework, I had to read two books that have influenced the American environmental movement and prepare a report on each. One of the books that I chose was John McPhee's The Pine Barrens.]

Who is John McPhee? A Hard-Working Journalist and Teacher

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1931. Following his education at Princeton and Cambridge Universities, he started to write magazine articles, first with Time magazine and later with The New Yorker. He’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965. McPhee has also worked extensively as a nonfiction writing instructor. As recently as 2009, McPhee was still teaching at Princeton University.

The Pine Barrens, published in 1968, was one of McPhee’s earlier books. Personally, I thought he rambled in places and could have used more editing. While my husband assures me that this is simply McPhee’s style, I am interested in reading McPhee’s later works to see if he tightened up his writing over the years.

Part of Itinerant Cryptographer's John McPhee collection


To date, John McPhee has published 30 books on wide-ranging topics that tend to examine the intersection of humans, history, and ecology. John McPhee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for his essays on geology which he threaded into a book called Annals of the Former World.

McPhee’s tremendous output of work coupled with an ability to take complex ideas and break them down into enjoyable prose are surely his greatest gifts as a writer. He has been called the most gifted non-fiction writer working today and he is certainly one of the hardest working. At the age of 80, he doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

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If you like this post, be sure to read:

Part 1: Background: What are the Pine Barrens?
Part 2: What Makes the Pine Barrens So Special?
Part 4: What Type of Writer is McPhee? Why Was His Book Effective?

Monday, April 4, 2011

An Analysis of John McPhee's The Pine Barrens (Part 2 of 4)

[Note: I recently took an environmental literature class. As part of the coursework, I had to read two books that have influenced the American environmental movement and prepare a report on each. One of the books that I chose was John McPhee's The Pine Barrens.]

An area of New Jersey's Pinelands that was recently
affected by a forest fire.
Photo credit: Matt Swern, via flickr // CC BY 2.0


What Makes the Pine Barrens So Special?

The sheer size of unbroken forest in the Pinelands is unparalleled along the eastern seaboard. The region is underlain by a massive aquifer. John McPhee wrote of the groundwater:
“The water of the Pine Barrens is soft and pure, and there is so much of it that, like the forest above it, it is an incongruity in time and place.”

The sandy soils of the Pinelands, while great for purifying groundwater, make for lousy farmland. Early U.S. pioneers generally avoided the Pinelands unless they were hiding from someone or something. Their ancestors living in the region have retained that reticent, self-reliant nature. Despite some past development for iron smelting and charcoal production, the Pinelands are markedly absent of industry. Folks that lived there when McPhee was writing his book, in the late 1960’s, tended to be self-reliant. Most were not wealthy in material possessions but enjoyed their solitude, making a living by collecting and selling moss and pinecones or tending blueberry bushes and cranberry bogs.

The ecology of the pine barrens relies upon fire. Some of the pine species in the barrens won’t reproduce without fire – they need the heat to open their pine cones and release the seeds. McPhee describes this process in Chapter 7:

“It is because of fire that pines are predominant in the Pine Barrens. There is thought to be a progression in development of any forest from pioneer species to climax trees. Most ecologists agree that if fire were kept out of the Pine Barrens altogether, the woods would be eventually dominated by a climax of black oaks, white oaks, chestnut oaks, scarlet oaks, and a lesser proportion of hickories and red maples. In some areas, oaks dominate now. Fire, however, has generally stopped the march of natural progression, and the resulting situation is one that might be called biological inertia – apparently endless cycles of fire and sprouting.”
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If you like this post, be sure to read:

Part 1: Background: What are the Pine Barrens?
Part 3: Who is John McPhee? A Hard-Working Journalist and Teacher
Part 4: What Type of Writer is McPhee? Why Was His Book Effective?

Saturday, April 2, 2011

An Analysis of John McPhee's The Pine Barrens (Part 1 of 4)

[Note: I recently took an environmental literature class. As part of the coursework, I had to read two books that have influenced the American environmental movement and prepare a report on each. One of the books that I chose was John McPhee's The Pine Barrens.]

Abandoned train tracks running through
the pine barrens of New Jersey.
Photo credit: Matt Swern, via flickr // CC BY 2.0

Background: What are the Pine Barrens?

The pine barrens, or Pinelands, of New Jersey are an ecologically unique area in the center of the state dominated by various species of pine growing in nutrient-poor soils. Despite New Jersey’s reputation as a cheek-by-jowl urban area, over one million acres of land – nearly one-quarter of the state – is Pinelands. According to the New Jersey Pinelands Commission, "It is the largest body of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond and Boston and is underlain by aquifers containing 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest water in the land.”

At the time John McPhee published The Pine Barrens in 1968, people were considering building a large interstate through this natural area, complete with a supersonic jetport and a city of 250,000 people. The jetport alone would have been massive in scale. McPhee described the proposed airport as “the largest airport on earth – four times as large as Newark Airport, LaGuardia, and Kennedy put together.”

McPhee devoted the last chapter of his book about the Pinelands to describing the proposed development. In these affecting passages, he juxtaposed the developer’s dreams against the current condition of the undeveloped natural area, driving home the urgent need to protect the pinelands:

"We moved on to see the site of the jetport, which would cover thirty-two thousand five hundred acres and would eliminate virtually all of the Upper and Lower Plains, several ponds, a lake, an entire state forest, and Bear Swamp Hill … We were standing on the observation platform of the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill. The ranger, in the cabin above us, was listening to rock ‘n’ roll. Looking out over the immense forest, Smith [the developer] went on to say, ‘One of our great problems is that you can’t get people to believe that this area is as big as this. They can’t believe that you could come down here and build a fifty-one-square mile airport and not have a structure problem – not even one building visible from here to the horizon. Bear Swamp Hill is in the terminal-service area, where the planes would come in and unload. I can just see those supersonic transports coming in here now. Gorgeous!’..."

The New Jersey Pinelands Commission states on their website that publication of McPhee’s book “spur[red] tremendous public outcry to protect the Pinelands natural and cultural resources.” In 1978, the Pinelands National Reserve – the first national reserve of its kind – was established in the United States. In 1983, the Pinelands were designated as a U.S. Biosphere Reserve; by 1988, this land was also considered an International Biosphere Reserve.

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If you like this post, be sure to read:

Part 2: What Makes the Pine Barrens So Special?
Part 3: Who is John McPhee? A Hard-Working Journalist and Teacher
Part 4: What Type of Writer is McPhee? Why Was His Book Effective?