With this remarkable book Eric Zencey changes the way we think about nature by changing how we think about history. The ecological crisis is also a historical crisis, he writes. If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related.

Zencey s way home takes us many places: to a starlit mountaintop, where a nineteenth-century sect awaits the second coming; to the northern woods during hunting season; to the salt marshes of a Delaware childhood; to the softball games and abandoned mill ponds of his adopted Vermont. Always we are shown a...