Henry David Thoreau had horrible handwriting. For years scholars couldn't decipher the pages of his last work, but 130 years later Wild Fruits is finally in print, and we'll hear readings from it in this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge. Also a visit to Aldo Leopold's Sand County Shack, a plan to pave a road for grizzly bears and mountain lions, and Carl Hiassen on Florida's greedy developers.

Bradley Dean directs the Media Center at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He's edited the manuscript pages left by Henry David Thoreau and published Wild Fruits. Dean tells Jim Fleming what Thoreau was up to in the book, and how he deciphered the manuscript. Also, TTBOOK producer/reporter Debbie Bilder takes us to visit The Shack - Aldo Leopold's country place. We hear from Leopold's daughter, environmental scholar William Cronon, and activist Terry Tempest Williams on Leopold's land management practices and his importance to the conservation movement. And we hear a reading from Leopold's great work, Sand County Almanac.

Shepard Krech teaches anthropology at Brown University, and is the author of The Ecological Indian. He tells Judith Strasser that the image of Native Americans as environmentally sensitive conservationists is a myth created by Europeans and later adopted by Natives. He explains that Native people's traditional religious beliefs required that they respect animals and the environment, but imposed no rules about conserving resources. Modern Native Americans, he says, are held to an unrealistically high double standard in environmental matters

Conservation biologist Michael Soule tells Steve Paulson about the Wilderness Project, which hopes to construct wildlife corridors linking national parks. He explains why grizzly bears need their own roads and the crisis in habitat loss and fragmentation. Also, comic writer Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald and author of several hilarious novels - Striptease, Stormy Weather, and the new one, Sick Puppy. He describes the plot of the new book to Jim Fleming and rants and raves about the ecological depredation in Florida caused by sleaze and greed.

Distribution dates:

• week of 03/05/2000 - hour 2