The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City

by John Tallmadge

Book Overview

What wilderness lover, asks John Tallmadge, "would ever dream of settling deep in the Rust Belt astride polluted rivers?" The Cincinnati Arch holds the provocative answer to Tallmadge's question,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820326909
• ISBN13: 9780820326900
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A contemporary nature classic

Nature educators have a way of getting young people to look more intently at the natural world. They place a circle of string -- or even a hula hoop -- on the ground, and ask students to inventory just that enclosed part of the yard. The lesson is that even such a small patch will reveal more life than one might expect, and that what one finds there is a symbolic microcosm of Earth's entire environment. In "The Cincinnati Arch," John Tallmadge has thrown an invisible hula hoop around a city that he never expected to call home and one where he never expected to find Nature or the wild. He takes to heart Thoreau's admonition that "In Wildness is the preservation of the world," and he's surprised to find wildness in this new urban setting. It's not the wild of Minnesota's Boundary Waters or John Muir's Yosemite, of course, but it is Nature unleashed, albeit in small parcels. What he discovers can be translated to any other urban or suburban environment. After a brief treatise on civilization's focus on time, money, and work, Tallmadge gets down to the dichotomies of nature study: indoor life and outdoor life; wildness and wilderness "out there" and "right here;" stewardship / husbandry and dominion; wildness and landscape restoration; old growth and succession; night and day; water and pollution; war and peace; and our relationship with nature and with other human beings. His observations include such succinct statements as "My backyard is still wilder than most of Europe," (p. 62), and "[W]e are the preeminent alien species." (p. 109) In typical Thoreauvian fashion, Tallmadge sometimes dissects words in order to study their original meanings, before we attached diluted definitions to them. In some discussions, he deftly includes both biblical legends and scientific explanations (like evolution), thus seamlessly covering both camps without favoring or insulting either one. He even approaches the idea of an afterlife, concluding that "One day we may wake up to discover that we have been living in heaven all along." (p. 215) In Cincinnati? Who knew? In the middle of the book, Tallmadge interrupts his city study to take a side trip with a class of adult students to the Escalante region of Utah. The western canyonland is about as far as you can get from the concrete streets of Cincinnati, and the diversion offers a respite for the readers as well. We and the travelers have time to think about the concepts of beauty, our connectedness to the earth, and what it takes to really KNOW a place. Good lessons, all. Another side trip is in the offing when Tallmadge visits his family-owned 40-acre woodlot in New Hampshire, intending to make the big decision: to keep it and preserve it, or to sell its resources to a logging company. His commitment to a place of his ancestral roots is admirable, as is his verdict: "[W]hat we do with the land always matters, even if we merely let it alone. We cannot escape playing a part in the story. All we

One of Our Finest Writers Synthesizes Wilderness & City

John Tallmadge is one of the country's finest writers, widely acclaimed for his work on the wilderness. This new book creates a long-overdue synthesis between the natural world and what we ordinarily view as the artificial world of the city. Read it and understand your environment (and your humanity)in a startlingly new light.