Imagining the forest

Long before forests were thought of as resources to be managed, they carried weight in the American imagination. This book traces how Michigan's woodlands, along with similar forests in Wisconsin and Minnesota, took on cultural and moral significance from the early 1800s, when European settlers arrived, down to the present day. Each era's outlook shaped how people related to these forests, and they came to attach moral and spiritual value to them.

John Knott builds his argument on the scholarship of Simon Schama and Robert Pogue Harrison, using Michigan's settlement history, its popular writing, and its disputes over forest management as a test case. He examines writers and public figures including William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt. He also considers Ojibwa understandings of the forest and the natural world, how Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turned those understandings into myth, and the accounts left by early explorers. The book closes with recent fiction set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, including works by Jim Harrison and Philip Caputo.

Knott shows that two opposing images of the forest developed over time. In one, it is a howling wilderness that blocks civilization and must be conquered. In the other, it is a temple or cathedral that deserves reverence and protection. The book follows where each image came from and how it grew.