Sippewissett

"Tim Traver's Sippewissett is a brilliant accomplishment replete with insight, wisdom, understanding, and passion. The author marvelously combines natural history, science, culture, conservation, and enduring qualities of the human spirit. The reader is continually moved by Traver's eloquent blending of personal narrative and rational reflection; we find ourselves traveling with the author through his coming of age cum personal and professional odyssey. This is a book that is likely to endure, enrich, and inform for many years to come."

—Stephen Kellert, Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

A biography of the famous New England salt marsh, interweaving science, history, and memoir.

Tim Traver’s Sippewissett is heir to a rich history of nature writing. Akin to classics like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the book forms an eloquent bridge between ecology and memory, science and art.

There is poetry in his retelling of the past, a childhood of mud and tides and water; there is great love in the peace and satisfaction he finds later in life fishing and clamming and watching his own children discover the secrets of the marsh. In Sippewissett, readers will discover one of science’s most studied places, visited by some of America’s greatest biologists—from Louis Agassiz to Rachel Carson—through the eyes of someone determined to rethink the roles of science, love of place, and morality in the vital work of Earth stewardship.

Illustrations by Bobbi Angell

When did the land actually stop being sacred to us? Did anyone record the moment or rather was it a dimming of awareness across years? Did we become modern producer-consumers by misattention, caught by time and opportunity while our meanings changed? Is that how we lost our way, moving nowhere but toward progress? Or is the land still sacred to us, and we just have to turn over more stones to know it?
—Sippewissett

About the Author

Tim Traver

Tim Traver holds a master's degree in environmental science from Yale University. He is a freelance travel and science writer and has had a column in the Providence Journal and Falmouth Enterprise. He works on issues of land use, wildlife management, open space protection, and environmental education and is past executive director of the Vermont Institute of Natural Science and the Upper Valley Land Trust and past director of the Norman Bird Sanctuary. Traver lives in Taftsville, Vermont, with his wife and three children.

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