Inside Passage is a wonderfully subversive travelogue. The setting is the Pacific Northwest, from southeast Alaska down through Puget Sound, and then on to the northern Oregon coast and the Columbia River system. With the gifted writer Richard Manning as our guide, the journey isn't a conventional one of tourist attractions, though. The author takes us instead on an insightful exploration of our economic landscape's design, its origins and its effect on people and nature today, both in the region and beyond.

Through vivid description and engaging conversations with the region's people, Manning brings new insights to the area's most pressing environmental issues and concerns -- suburban sprawl, the salmon crisis, deforestation, hydroelectric dams -- and shows us various innovative ways they are being addressed. We see not only the destructive effects of low-and high-tech industry, mass tourism, and hyper-consumption, but also efforts to restore degraded ecosystems, to use tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the service of local conservation, and to integrate economic development with protection of natural systems.

For the past century and a half, a prime conservation strategy has been to protect nature through the creation of parks and preserves. Yet drawing lines around an area and calling it wilderness is not by itself adequate to solve larger environmental problems, Manning points out. As he puts it in a knowingly provocative way: "Wilderness designation is not a victory, but acknowledgment of defeat".

In Inside Passage, Manning focuses on the hopeful possibility that we can redesign the human enterprise in the Northwest and else-where to a scale moreappropriate to the nature that holds it, that rather than drawing borders around nature, we might instead start placing limits on human behavior. Perhaps, he suggests, we can begin to act in all places as if all places matter to us as much as wilderness, and, in the process, claim all of nature as our own.

"This book is about an idea that rests at the junction of what we call wilderness and civilization. Simply, it is a call for rethinking, and more importantly, reconstructing, our relationship with nature." --from "Inside Passage"Protecting land in parks, safe from human encroachment, has been a primary strategy of conservationists for the past century and a half. Yet drawing lines around an area and calling it wilderness does little to solve larger environmental problems. As author Richard Manning puts it in a knowingly provocative way: "Wilderness designation is not a victory, but acknowledgement of defeat."In "Inside Passage," Manning takes us on a thought-provoking tour of the lands along the Pacific Northwest's Inside Passage -- from southeast Alaska down through Puget Sound, and then on to the northern Oregon coast and the Columbia River system -- as he explores the dichotomy between "wilderness" and "civilization" and the often disastrous effects of industrialization.Through vivid description and conversations with people in the region, Manning brings new insights to the area's most pressing environmental concerns -- the salmon crisis, deforestation, hydroelectric dams, urban sprawl -- and examines various innovative ways they are being addressed. He details efforts to restore degraded ecosystems and to integrate economic development with environmental protection, and looks at powerful new tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that are increasingly being used to further conservation efforts.Throughout, Manning focuses on the hopeful possibility that we can redesign the human enterprise to a scale more appropriate to the nature that holds it, that rather than drawingborders around nature, we might instead start placing borders on human behavior. Perhaps, he suggests, we can begin to behave in all places as if all places matter to us as much as wilderness, and, in the process, claim all of nature as our own."Inside Passage" is a wide-ranging and thoughtful exploration by a gifted writer, and an important work for anyone interested in the Pacific Northwest, or concerned about the future of our relationship to the natural world.