Panama Panama is an historical novel set in
Paris, France in 1893, in which the American historian
Henry Adams becomes entangled in the
Panama scandals, the scandals and political crisis that befell France as a consequence of the bankruptcy of the French Panama Canal Company a decade earlier. Briefly a best seller,
Panama was widely and favorably reviewed as a literary thriller. The hardback edition was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A mass market edition followed, published by Berkeley, who also brought out a trade edition a few years later. The novel was published in a dozen foreign editions, including versions in German, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and Danish. (1995)
Virgin Forest Virgin Forest is a collection of twelve related essays about how we think about and treat nature. The collection was published by the
University of Georgia Press, and is loosely tied together by a theme: the importance of history to an ecological understanding. "If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related." It includes an essay, "The Rootless Professors," first published in
The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1985, which argues that one root of modern culture's ecological problem is the fact that post-secondary education is, without exception, performed by a transient class of intellectuals who owe no allegiance to place. That this is no longer true is in part due to the influence of his work; his call for a new class of educators, one "equally at home in the cosmopolitan world of ideas and the very particular world of watersheds and growing seasons" helped inspire the current movement for "place based education" and education for ecological literacy. In two other essays in that collection ("Some Brief Speculations on the Popularity of Entropy as Metaphor" and "Zeno's Mall"), Zencey discusses the application of thermodynamic ideas to economics – an application that has since been extended by the nascent field of
Ecological Economics. (By ignoring the thermodynamic foundation of economic activity, mainstream economics maintains what Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen called its "no deposit, no return" attitude toward the environment; the laws of thermodynamics describe why and how an economy is rooted in natural systems. For mainstream economics, environmental values are a subset of economic values; for the emergent, thermodynamically enlightened discipline of ecological economics, economic activity is a subset of social activity, which in turn is a subset of activity in nature.) The thematic connection is found in the fact that, according to Zencey, mainstream economics offers "an ahistorical science of dynamics," while the Law of Entropy is "time's arrow" – the only physical law of universal content that is time-invariant, and hence descriptive of the process that gives us our sense of time. Zencey's effort to use the form of the personal essay to deal with substantial intellectual content drew praise from
Bill McKibben ("infinitely wise and unflinching"), and places the book within the tradition of environmental wisdom literature – works like
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. In recent work, Zencey has abandoned the personal essay in favor of a more didactic approach to similar material; see "Is Industrial Civilization a Pyramid Scheme?" and "Mr. Soddy's Ecological Economy." (1998) == Selected publications ==