The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

mon murre still entangled in shards of the
gillnet from which it has managed to escape,
of the splash of a diving murre at the precise
moment its head hits the water. Tim
Fitzharris's photographs in Forests: A Journey
into North America's Vanishing Wilderness
(Stoddart, $39.95) also allows us to appreciate
four frosted willow leaves and a grouse
feather as nature's abstract art. Fitzharris's
own short essays, introducing the Pacific
Forest, the Eastern Forest, etc., while hardly
conveying Stafford's magic, attentively follow
the traceries of complex ecological
interdependencies. Fitzharris is also the
photographer of Coastal Wildlife of British
Columbia (Whitecap Books, $39.95) whose
extensive text, by Bruce Obee, attempts a
good deal more than captions and filler—
he has obviously taken some time for
research, and has used it (he is particularly
his alert to Native lore and legend) to write
something of a journal of Pacific Coast culture.
On the culture of the farther north,
we have Stephen J. Krasemann's Diary of an
Arctic Year (Whitecap Books, $39.95) whose
close-ups of purple lupine and a whitewinged
crossbill digging seeds from a spruce
cone, is enhanced, as the title indicates, by
excerpts from the photographer's own diary.
This sensible solution to the problem of
picture-book text permits Krasemann to
provide personal contexts without excursions
into the pseudo-profound or self-righteous.
The dream of the Arctic is alternately documented
in Northwest Passage: The Quest for
an Arctic Route to the East (Key Porter/Canadian
Geographic $35.00), a history of the
search for the Northwest passage (and for
Canadian sovereignty) with serviceable text
by Edward Struzik, and some unexpected
photos—for example, of Inuit children riding
a yellow dune buggy—by Mike Beedell.
Finally, three books slightly at odds with
the tenuous "theme" of this gathering: first
is Canadian photographer Courtney
Milne's Sacred Places (Western Producer
Prairie Books, $60.00), a photo album
interpreting the mountains, rivers, and
buildings, that have been holy to many
peoples. The results of this global record of
mythologically resonant places is not landscape
photos, or postcard overviews;
Milne's work is more abstract, as his camera
looks for a detail, an angle, a hue of
light that will reveal the mystical potential
of Avebury or Delphi or Chile's Valley of
the Moon (but the text is mere declamatory
ecstasy). Second is Joseph Leo Koerner's
Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of
Landscape (Yale UP, n.p.). This study of
Germany's best-known Romantic landscape
painter I enjoyed greatly because
Koerner's detail can educate a non-specialist
into subtle details of composition, and
of painterly technique without being either
condescending or tedious. Koerner's
account of the definitive cliché of the solitary
sublime, "Wanderer above the Sea of
fog," makes that painting completely fresh
again. Third, this survey of environmental
writing should mention Statistical Record of
the Environment, compiled by Arsen
Darnay (Gale Research, n.p.), whose 850
pages, including detailed index, will tell
you, mainly for the United States, the number
of pounds of hazardous waste generated
by an average home each year (15), the
number of personal checks that can be produced
from one cord of wood (460,000),
and the percentage of its wastepaper which
a country recycles (Canada: 20%, compared
to Sweden: 40%).
No writer is more often cited when
nature writing, environment, and landscape
are discussed than Henry David Thoreau.
And I have already, in these notes, quoted
from Thoreau's Journals: 1848-1858
(Princeton UP, $39.50), the tenth volume of
Thoreau to appear under the auspices of
the Center for Editions of American
Authors. (The manuscript journal for 1850
incidentally has 42 leaves missing, the gap
where Canada should be, apparently
removed so that Thoreau could prepare his