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Sydney Wissmann

Dr. Twomey and Dr. Lawson

Environmental Futures

26 April 2021

Dorie: Woman of the Mountains Book Review

Books have played a huge role in fueling my passion for landscape conservation and

restoration (the novels in this class included). Because they have been so instrumental in my

understanding of the environment, I have chosen to complete the book review prompt for the

final project. After reviewing my list of books, I have decided on a bit of an unorthodox choice,

although I would be remiss if I didn’t include the honorable mentions: Garden Revolution by

Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman by Miriam Horn, and

Heiða: A Shepherd at the Edge of the World by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir and Heiða Ásgeirsdóttir.

The book I have chosen to review is Dorie: Woman of the Mountains by Florence Cope

Bush. It is a memoir of Dorie Woodruff Cope’s life in the Smoky Mountains during the early

1900s, written by her daughter. In this class, we discussed three novels set in the present or

future (Oryx and Crake, Zone One, and New York 2140), and one book about the past (Pale

Rider). Dorie would provide a non-fiction account about the historical interaction of man and the

environment, adding balance to the class between past and future, and fiction and nonfiction.

Although climate change and other issues may seem like recent events, Dorie’s life proves that

these problems have gone on for centuries, and her life is an invaluable example of how quickly

everything can change without proper care for the land.

Dorie was born deep in the wilderness of the Smoky Mountains at the end of the

nineteenth century. Her family struggled to live off their small, steep field, living in such
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isolation that the appearance of Halley’s comet is rumored to be the end of the world in her small

community of mountaineers. As Dorie ages, loggers move into the area and take over the hills

she once called home, leading her to eventually marry and follow the logging enterprises to earn

money despite how they ravage the land. Interspersed throughout are descriptions of plants and

equipment vital to her survival. The average reader may find these constant descriptions to bog

down the story, but on the contrary they show Dorie’s love for the land and the deep

interweaving of the environment and people. The book is an honest account of how difficult life

was in the mountains, yet it leaves the reader longing for the times where someone could live so

tied to nature, the times before the Smokies and so many other places were scarred by callous

destruction of the land.

The novel explores social aspects of environmentalism as well, something we covered in

almost every reading and video in class. Dorie remembers time spent with Cherokee women as a

child, equally wary and fascinated by their way of life. However, any mention of the culture

beyond the first pages is non-existent, leaving one to wonder what fate the Cherokee people

faced as logging brought destruction to their homeland after they had already faced so much

violence for centuries. As for Dorie and her family, they were undeniably poor; for example, as a

child she visits a family with an organ and she is desperate to hear just a single note from the

lavish instrument, knowing her family would never own anything so expensive. She and fellow

Smokies residents had little say in working for the pernicious logging companies, which offered

salaries and stability no mountain family could have dreamed of before. Dorie shows the

complexities marginalized and impoverished groups face in light of environmental change, and it

would be a unique addition to the class’s reading list by providing a non-fiction, firsthand

account of the intertwining of society and the environment.

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It is a simple, beautiful book—not the next best seller by any means, but beautiful all the

same. It would take merely a few days to read, but in those few days the mountains transform

from land taken care of by its inhabitants to areas of destruction, then back into care and

protection under national park designation. The novel ends with the family moving to

Knoxville’s suburbs: “[The logging companies] had opened a door—a door we were forced to

use as an exit from our ancestral homes. Then, after the exit, the door was closed to us. We were

given visitors’ rights to the land—to come and look, but not to stay” (221). To me, it is a blend

of the triumphant ending of New York 2140 and the bleaker endings of Zone One and Oryx and

Crake. Dorie has found happiness and prosperity in the suburbs, but it has come at the cost of her

beloved mountains, and even national park status upsets the old way of life, though it saves the

Smokies, too. The other novels we read represent extreme dystopias; Dorie does not. It

represents an average person balancing a love for the environment and the need to survive in a

human-dominated world, which is a struggle that marries the ideas of sustainability, meaningful

action, and wealth disparities that were so relevant to this class.