on oranges, is cited. Among nonacademic writers on matters natural, how-
ever, I have been the keenest student of Michael Pollan. Beginning with his
book,Second Nature, Pollan wrote perhaps the most unusual garden-
ing book ever, because he arose from perennial borders to re-delineate the
great divide between First Nature—that is, wilderness—and his title sub-
ject, which includesallarranged and managed landscapes. The language
of ‘‘first’’ and ‘‘second’’ natures was originally Marx’s and Engels’s, and it is
good that Michael Pollan and the historian William Cronon have revived it.^4
Lately Pollan has turned to industrialized agriculture and food processing,
which I think is one of the most important subjects an ecological scholar
might address today.
tThere have been institutional as well as personal and private benefac-
tors. I began this book while still W. E. Smith Professor at Miami University
in Ohio. The professorship funded travel, research materials, and subscrip-
tions, but my Miami colleagues Osaak Olumwullah, Bradley Schrager, and
Peggy Shaffer knew their landscapes of (respectively) East Africa, Native
America, and modern America. They talked great talk and often sent me
packing to the library. Another former Miami colleague, Edwin Yamau-
chi, learned historian and philologist of ancient West Asia and Northeast
Africa, kindly provided me a bundle of source materials when I inquired
about brick manufacture during Old Testament times. A former Miami
landscape ecologist, Gary Barrett—now of the University of Georgia—sent
a huge packet of his and colleagues’ offprint research reports on urban
sewer sludge, its use on crop fields, and heavy metal uptake. Barrett, a co-
founder of Miami’s Ecology Research Center, was once a graduate student
of Eugene Odum at the University of Georgia’s world-famous Institute of
Ecology. I readily express still-widening admiration for the late Gene Odum,
too—I was slightly acquainted with him during his later years—since he
and his brother, H. T. Odum, while internationally traveled and honored,
represented a reformist and self-consciously southern mission to place sci-
ence in service to their beloved native region. Even if their ecosystem para-
digm for ecology is flawed (certainly now out of fashion), the determina-
tion of both Odums not only to reveal systemic harmony in nature but to
createequilibrium where it was disrupted seems brave, good-hearted, and
poignant to me.
Chuck Grench, assistant director and senior editor at the University of
North Carolina Press, planted seed, or at least some latent fertilizer, for
this project in my head during the course of an excellent dinner in Louis-
xix