“Fleming reenvisions how natural history is to be practiced in a rural Ohio landscape that is both wild and settled, both green fields and brown, both indigenous and colonized, both diminished and resilient. Rather than pining for wilderness that has been long lost, the author attends to the regenerative capacities of the land here and now. This book’s chief virtue is its detailed fluency in the local coupled with a personal feel for the topics raised. The cyclical time of the landscape—expressed in its seasons and ecological processes—is brought into conjunction with the flow of the historical as framed by the author’s personal interactions with the land.”
—James Hatley, coeditor of Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought
“Deborah Fleming’s warm and wryly humorous persona pervades ‘Waiting for the Foal’ and other marvelous personal essays about her life in rural southeastern Ohio. Further, broader pieces address the area’s history, the Amish community and other unusual people, as well as material threats to the hill country’s ecology. Resurrection of the Wild will sit on my bookshelf right next to David Kline’s classic Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal, for repeated reading.”
—Carolyn V. Platt, author of Ohio Hill Country: A Rewoven Landscape and Cuyahoga Valley National Park Handbook
“Whether writing about her garden, or raising horses, or the impact of coal mining, Deborah Fleming offers an intimate natural history of her farm and her state. By book’s end, Ohio is no longer dull, barren flyover land, but one beautiful, fragile web of ecological relationships to which Fleming belongs and is committed.”
—Tom Montgomery Fate, author of Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild
“Every place on Earth needs a writer as attentive as Deborah Fleming, to study it with a loving and clear-eyed gaze. In these essays, she explores the natural and human history of her home ground, the hill country of eastern Ohio, a landscape battered by strip mining, careless farming, and deforestation. Yet wildness persists, there as everywhere, an irrepressible creative force. With a wealth of examples, Fleming demonstrates how nature’s resilience, aided by human care, can restore the land to health. May her book inspire readers to join such healing efforts in their own home places.”
—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected Essays
“Just as Aldo Leopold chronicles and celebrates the landscape around his ‘shack’ in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in Resurrection of the Wild Deborah Fleming conveys the history and character of her home on eastern Ohio’s Allegheny Plateau. This region, like the cutover terrain Leopold calls ‘Sand County,’ is one in which a broad collapse of agriculture and depopulation of settlements have ushered in a resurgence of forests and wildlife. An elegiac story from one perspective thus becomes a tale of rewilding from another, as well as a field of new opportunities for independent-minded and scientifically oriented settlers. I loved the precise and energetic way Fleming interweaves descriptions of her home landscape’s geology, such notable figures from its past as Johnny Appleseed and Louis Bromfield of Malabar Farm, and her own special fascination with horses.”
—John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home