John Lane
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After reading J. A. Baker's fifty-year-old British nature classic The Peregrine, John Lane found himself an ocean away, stalking resident red-shouldered hawks in his neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What he observed was very different from what Baker deduced from a decade of chronicling the lives of those brooding migratory raptors. Baker imagined a species on the brink of extinction because of the use of agricultural chemicals on European...
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One night, poet and environmental writer John Lane tuned in to a sound from behind his house that he had never heard before: the nearby eerie and captivating howls of coyotes. Since this was Spartanburg, South Carolina, and not Missoula, Montana, Lane set out to discover all he could about his new and unexpected neighbors.
Coyote Settles the South is the story of his journey through the Southeast, as he visits coyote territories: swamps, nature...
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"In an age that values faster and faster travel, Lane's river memoir affirms the great value of floating and observing."-Booklist
Three months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventazón, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea.
Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change,...
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While scouting sites for geology field trips, poet and naturalist John Lane encountered deep gullies created between the Civil War and the 1930s contributed to by his mother's tenant farming family and their rural neighbors in Piedmont South Carolina. This brush with the poor farming practices of the past leads Lane into an exploration of his own family's complicated history and of the larger environmental forces that have shaped the region where...
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Before the novel and the film Deliverance appeared in the early 1970s, any outsiders one met along the Chattooga River were likely serious canoeists or anglers. In later years, untold numbers and kinds of people have felt the draw of the river's torrents, which pour down the Appalachians along the Georgia-South Carolina border. Because of Deliverance the Chattooga looms enigmatically in our shared imagination, as iconic as Twain's Mississippi-or maybe...
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Romance, adventure, adversity and success - such is the panoramic sweep of this compelling story that starts and finishes in the little-known heart of the Amazon rain forest. A story that reaches out from the New World to the Old and back again to the jungle city of Iquitos and the headwaters of the mighty Amazon, king of rivers - this is a triumphal and joyous celebration of love and creation that sings in the heart like a great symphony.
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After many years of limited commitments to people or places, writer and naturalist John Lane married in his late forties and settled down in his hometown of Spartanburg, in the South Carolina piedmont. He, his wife, and two stepsons built a sustainable home in the woods near Lawson's Fork Creek. Soon after settling in, Lane pinpointed his location on a topographical map. Centering an old, chipped saucer over his home, he traced a circle one mile in...
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Lane drew a circle on a map that represented a one-mile radius from his home and explored every facet of the place including the topography, history, ancient and current citizenry, and industry. This exploration sharpened his sense of place and serves as a model for how we might look at our own homes, terrain, and communities.