Book Review by Reidun D. Nuquist
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin Books, New York, 2012). 433 pp., $18.00 paperback.
This elegantly written book by Robert Macfarlane is about “how people understand themselves using landscape.” Or put another way, how “we are shaped by the landscape through which we move.”
Benton MacKaye’s 1900 Hike Inspires Appalachian Trailby Larry Anderson
The Long Trail “is a project that will be logically extended,” forester and conservationist Benton MacKaye prophesied in his pathbreaking October 1921 article, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. “What the Green Mountains are to Vermont the Appalachians are to the eastern United States. What is suggested, therefore, is a ‘long trail’ over the full length of the Appalachian skyline.” When MacKaye first publicly broached his idea for the Appalachian Trail, he thus offered the then-uncompleted Long Trail as a model for his vision of “a series of recreational communities throughout the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England to Georgia, these to be connected by a walking trail.”