Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders by Richard Manning. (Just released December 2000)
About the Author:
Richard Manning is an
award-winning journalist and
writer based in Lolo, Montana.
Among his books are Food's
Frontier (North Point, 2000),
Grassland (Viking, 1995), A
Good House (Grove, 1993) and
Last Stand (Gibbs Smith, 1991)
Editorial Reviews
Island Press:
Protecting land in parks, safe from human
encroachment, has been a primary
strategy of conservationists for the past
century and a half. Yet drawing lines
around an area and calling it wilderness
does little to solve larger environmental
problems. As author Richard Manning
puts it in a knowingly provocative way:
"Wilderness designation is not a victory,
but acknowledgement of defeat."
In Inside Passage, Manning takes us on
a thought-provoking tour of the lands
along the Pacific Northwest's Inside
Passage-from southeast Alaska down
through Puget Sound, and then on to the
northern Oregon coast and the Columbia
River system-as he explores the
dichotomy between "wilderness" and
"civilization" and the often disastrous
effects of industrialization.
Through vivid description and
conversations with people in the region,
Manning brings new insights to the area's
most pressing environmental concerns-the
salmon crisis, deforestation, hydroelectric
dams, urban sprawl-and examines
various innovative ways they are being
addressed. He details efforts to restore
degraded ecosystems and to integrate
economic development with
environmental protection, and looks at
powerful new tools such as Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) that are
increasingly being used to further
conservation efforts.
Throughout, Manning focuses on the
hopeful possibility that we can redesign
the human enterprise to a scale more
appropriate to the nature that holds it,
that rather than drawing borders around
nature, we might instead start placing
borders on human behavior. Perhaps, he
suggests, we can begin to behave in all
places as if all places matter to us as
much as wilderness, and, in the process,
claim all of nature as our own.
Inside Passage is a wide-ranging and
thoughtful exploration by a gifted writer,
and an important work for anyone
interested in the Pacific Northwest, or
concerned about the future of our
relationship to the natural world.
