Why read Arcadian America?

Book cover of Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition

Book description

How a forgotten environmental tradition of the pre-Civil War era may prove powerfully useful to us now

Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Arcadian America as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Catherine McNeur

Author

While some of us like to imagine humans as separate from nature, one moment where that boundary dissolves is with death. Inescapably, we will all eventually decompose and become a part of our environment. In Aaron Sach’s book, nineteenth-century Americans reckon with death through the creation of carefully landscaped cemeteries. What I particularly love about Arcadian America is how Sachs weaves his own memoir about his encounters with mortality in with the history he’s telling, making it a gripping page-turner.

From Catherine's list on The best histories of nature in unexpected places.