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Discovering the Unknown Landscape

 

            One of the most dramatic and revealing reviews of the history of the United States" wetlands, and its transition from a place to fear to a place of sanctuary, is Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands published in 1997 by Ann Vileisis. Vileisis is a prominent advocate and lecturer in the field of environmental awareness, preservation, and restoration. In this, her one and only book, she attempts to enlighten her readers in the same way she realized the importance of wetlands herself. She emphasizes the threatening actions that have occurred throughout the progress of our country and are still occurring today, and how her opinions and prejudices have changed from when she was a young child. The publishers, Island Press, market her book under the guise of "The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repairs." .
             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 History.
             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.


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