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Chip Ward somehow manages to combine being Assistant Director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System with life as an ecological writer and activist; he's fought some pretty toxically grim developments in his own state without ever, it seems, losing heart or hope. So consider the piece that follows as his gift of hope to you, an antidote to whatever despair you may be feeling at the moment.
Having spent a little time in Vermont whose hills were denuded of most of their trees by farmers a couple of centuries back but have managed, like parts of the rest of the Northeast, to reforest themselves, I have my own private vision of a "rewilded" continent. It's mile after mile of that beautiful, soft sea of green, which, given time and farmers who mostly decided to head westward long ago, has regenerated along with a world of unexpected wildlife. Okay, it's not exactly what was once there in species terms, but it's still pretty stirring.
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