Eric Zencey

Eric Zencey (born 1953) is an American author of two books.

"Panama" [ [http://www.iblist.com/book12053.htm] ibook article on "Panama"] is an historical novel [ [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1367/is_199510/ai_n6385873] Review of "Panama" in [The Nation] ] set in Paris in 1893, in which the American historian Henry Adams becomes entangled in the Panama scandals, the scandals and political crisis that befell France as a consequence of the bankruptcy of the French Panama Canal Company a decade earlier. Briefly a best seller, "Panama" was widely and favorably reviewed as a literary thriller.

"Virgin Forest" [ [http://www.amazon.de/dp/0820319899] Amazon on "Virgin Forest"] is a collection of twelve related essays about how we think about and treat nature. The collection was published by the University of Georgia Press, and is loosely tied together by a theme: the importance of history to an ecological understanding. "If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related." [ preface to "Virgin Forest"] . It includes an essay, "The Rootless Professors," first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1985, which argues that one root of modern culture's ecological problem is the fact that post-secondary education is, without exception, performed by a transient class of intellectuals who owe no allegiance to place. That this is no longer true is in part due to the influence of his work; his call for a new class of educators, one "equally at home in the cosmopolitan world of ideas and the very particular world of watersheds and growing seasons" helped inspire the current movement for "place based education" [ Ball, Eric L. and Lai, Alice,"Place-Based Pedagogy for the Arts and Humanities,"Pedagogy - Volume 6, Issue 2, Spring 2006, pp. 261-287 ] and education for ecological literacy. [ [http://bulletin.kenyon.edu/x2529.xml] article about program at Kenyon College that cites Zencey ]

Zencey is contributing editor for the North American Review [ [http://www.ugapress.uga.edu/0820322008.html] The University Press of Georgia] , and has been a fellow of the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Bogliasco Foundations.

Zencey currently teaches for Empire State College in Prague and New York State.

Bibliography

Novels

* "Panama" ISBN 978-0425156025 (1995)

Essays

* "Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture" ISBN 978-0820322001 (1998)

References