Hungry Hollow: The Story of a Natural Place Book

Starting with an elegant description of a small piece of land called Hungry Hollow, A.K. Dewdney introduces us to its denizens. The reader goes on a guided tour through the many dimensions of our natural habitat, back into prehistoric time and inward to a teeming microscopic world full of strange creatures performing bizarre feats. Hungry Hollow will be found frequently throughout the eastern deciduous forest zone of North America, but stands in a wider sense for all natural places, which, despite their remnant beauty and diversity, find themselves under increasing threat from humanity. It is a place that is nowhere yet everywhere, a microcosm of the earth in which we experience the processes of procreation and survival that unite all species. Dewdney takes us on a guided journey through Hungry Hollow's many dimensions of time and spacea multifaceted prism through which its present and prehistory, and its worlds large and small, are all refracted. We meet many plants, animals, fungi, and other life forms, guided sometimes by the raccoon called Lotor, sometimes by the biologist Dianne, who is just coming to terms with the real world of biological diversity. We encounter a Hackberry tree whose branches reproduce the taxonomic tree of life; learn how it would look and feel to shrink by stanges to the size of an amoeba; watch a toad win the survival lottery; and see the world of Hungry Hollow from the viewpoint of plants, earthworms, rotifers, and even stones. For the first time, one book lays out all the major features of a living, breathing environmental system, its life and death, its weather and geological processes, the history that made it what it is and its future, which never looked bleaker. Destined to become the new bible of the environmental movement, Hungry Hollow dramatizes the very real life and death struggle between humans and other species in our world. Never was it so important for us to understand the world of nature that Dewdney describes.Read More