Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, concealed from Florida-bound vacationers with the hedge at the advantage of the street and by hulks of outdated vehicles and stacks of blown-out wheels. Ecology of a Cracker Youth tells how a youth spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the nearly vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. In vocabulary simultaneously colloquial, elegiac, and interesting, Ray redeems two Souths. “Suffused with the same history-haunted feeling of loss that imprints so a lot of the South and its own literature.”