The Pine Barrens by journalist John McPhee is a book lost in time, and more beautiful because of it. The long-winded paragraphs match well with the long-winded nature of one of his favorite subjects, Fred Brown, a man as friendly as he is loquacious. While I do not normally prefer the style, it did the Pine Barrens justice in its narration, focused on how people lived and how communities began, evolved, and often died. I say that the book is lost in time because it evokes a sense of timelessness of the barrens that has since disappeared. The endless sand, pine, and oaks have often been replaced by pavement and housing developments. The stories of the strong, but elderly Fred Brown are no longer common.

The Pine Barrens is known as the barrens for a reason, it is a poor land, flat and sandy, but as the author notes, it is surprisingly rich in natural resources. The communities that grew often lived on the native materials such as the easily-accessible bog iron, the sand for glass-making, the blueberries, cranberries, huckleberries, the pine and holly for Christmas, the sphagnum, and the abundant wood. The Pine Barrens is perhaps, at first glance, uglier than other regions, but once a person gets to know it and gets to understand the rich interactions between the fire ecology, the sandy soils, and the plants, which include many types of orchids and native flowers, there is much to see and appreciate. Though the book focuses mostly on the humans of the barrens, it never strays far from the ecosystem that they depended upon.

One criticism of the book is that McPhee lauds the men and women who live in the barrens and demeans outsiders, especially city-dwellers. The people of the pines are upstanding, knowledgeable of the natural world, and forgiven of their ills, but those from New York or Philadelphia–or even just outside of the pines in New Jersey–are ignorant and greedy. As everyone knows, all groups contain good and bad types.

Near the end of the book, there is a quote that deserved more attention. Written in 1967, McPhee quotes one of his interviewees as saying ‘I will predict that if nothing at all is done in terms of planned development here, within twenty years the area will be so spotted with exploitative development that it will be impossible to assemble the land into something that is sensibly planned. The state has about five years in which to act.” While the man was promoting the development of a planned city that would concentrate people and protect the environment out side of the area, he was correct. Today there remain some very large protected tracts of land, but it is still far, far more developed than it was when the book was written. Highways lined with houses crisscross the pines, breaking up the habitats into fragments, favoring vacationers, commuters, and those who simply wanted to live somewhere more affordable, over the wildlife that had so dominated.

It is a good read, and I recommend it, but it’s not ecologically focused, so one should take that into consideration if wanting specifically to understand the unique ecology in depth.