Ann Vileisis has studied at several Ivy League schools and received an environmental history degree from Yale University. She enjoys traveling to and exploring many of the remaining wetlands in the U.S. as an educational guide for Outward Bound USA. Her book won the “George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History” in 1999 from the American Society for Environmental H

Today, the U.S. Government has established, in a series of laws and regulations dating back to the late nineteenth century, numerous agencies to monitor, administer, and regulate these now protected lands. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was to establish flooding policies and commission levee projects, the National Parks Service to keep an eye on our national parks and wildlife refuges, the Soil Conservation Service to inform farmers as to better methods to soil preservation. Each of these agencies was inadvertently responsible for contributing to the problems and misinformation that exist today because of unintended consequences due to lack of forethought, greedy characters, and self-serving politicians.

Vileisis takes the reader through the chronology of our country as it emerges into the world’s lone “Superpower” and how this growth has been at the expense and ignorance of our nation’s wetlands. She challenges the reader to let go of his Puritan prejudices concerning swamps, marshes, bogs, and bottomlands, and adopt more enlightened attitudes and stances on preservation and restoration. Discovering the Unknown Landscape describes some of the experiences of early French, English, and Spanish explorers as they moved in canoes across the region, listing in their journals what indigenous trees, birds, fish, wildlife, grasses, flora, and even native Indians they encountered. These explorers and fur traders made it possible for farmers, homeowners, and merchants to move westward from the coastal settlements. Crossing across the continent, through the Midwest and Great Plains to the gold-r

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