Philip Shabecoff

Places: Habitats of a Human Lifetime Philip Shabecoff

This is a memoir, but its principal subject is not my life. It is instead a memoir about places-places where I lived, or worked or visited, some just briefly. It is written with the hindsight of all I have learned about the environment, a field I have followed closely for nearly half a century in the latter part of a long career as a reporter, publisher and author. This is not a travel book. It is a book about how a life is affected by the places we in inhabit and how we, in turn, affect those places. It describes the places in which I have lived-the Bronx, Manhattan, Westchester County, Washington, D. C., the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, a small village and small city in Germany, Tokyo-and some of the places I have visited for work or pleasure-the Catskill mountains, the American West, Vietnam, Bali, East Africa, France and England. It describes those places as natural and social ecologies. And finally, the book is about the harm we humans are wreaking on the places we inhabit, including the planet which is our only home.