A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Yet, this promise took ten turbulent years to be fulfilled. In Genetic Witness, Jay D. Aronson uncovers the dramatic early history of DNA profiling that has been obscured by the technique’s recent success. He demonstrates that robust quality control and quality assurance measures were initially nonexistent, interpretation of test results was based more on assumption than empirical evidence, and the technique was susceptible to error at every stage. Most of these issues came to light only through defense challenges to what prosecutors claimed to be an infallible technology. Although this process was fraught with controversy, inefficiency, and personal antagonism, the quality of DNA evidence improved dramatically as a result. Aronson argues, however, that the dream of a perfect identification technology remains unrealized.
AIDS. Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.
Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race.
Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.
"The algorithms in this book have been developed by Drs. Warren and Mahmoud, as the result of a systematic effort to produce such guides. The book is presented as another in the series "Studies in Infectious Disease Research" and is a most welcome addition, certain to supply a major and hitherto inadequately fulfilled need."—from the Foreword, by Edward H. Kass, M. D., Ph.D
In The Greatest Killer, Donald R. Hopkins provides a fascinating account of smallpox and its role in human history. Starting with its origins 10,000 years ago in Africa or Asia, Hopkins follows the disease through the ancient and modern worlds, showing how smallpox removed or temporarily incapacitated heads of state, halted or exacerbated wars, and devastated populations that had never been exposed to the disease. In Hopkins's history, smallpox was one of the most dangerous-and influential-factors that shaped the course of world events.
Do women express their feelings more than men? Popular stereotypes say they do, but in this provocative book, Leslie Brody breaks with conventional wisdom. Integrating a wealth of perspectives and research--biological, sociocultural, developmental--her work explores the nature and extent of gender differences in emotional expression, as well as the endlessly complex question of how such differences come about.
Nurture, far more than nature, emerges here as the stronger force in fashioning gender differences in emotional expression. Brody shows that whether and how men and women express their feelings varies widely from situation to situation and from culture to culture, and depends on a number of particular characteristics including age, ethnicity, cultural background, power, and status.
Especially pertinent is the organization of the family, in which boys and girls elicit and absorb different emotional strategies. Brody also examines the importance of gender roles, whether in the family, the peer group, or the culture at large, as men and women use various patterns of emotional expression to adapt to power and status imbalances.
Lucid and level-headed, Gender, Emotion, and the Family offers an unusually rich and nuanced picture of the great range of male and female emotional styles, and the variety of the human character.
A comprehensive and compassionate guide to navigating loss.
When social worker Lisa Keefauver became a widow in 2011, she was alarmed to discover that even though 100 percent of us experience loss, we’re living in a grief illiterate world. In her work as a therapist, and in her search for help in the wake of her own loss, Keefauver began to see how the misguided stories we consume about grief lead to unnecessary suffering. Responding to the problematic narratives that grief is something to move on from after completing the five stages like some sort of to-do list, Keefauver became a grief activist. Through this book and her hit podcast of the same title, she creates a safe place to be inside the messiness of it all, to discover the full spectrum of grief, and to find the tools that help grievers move forward, not on. Grief is a Sneaky Bitch is a comprehensive guide—both a manual full of insights and skills and, even more importantly, a thoughtful companion that helps readers feel seen and held.
Keefauver shares her personal and professional wisdom alongside the lessons she’s learned from clinicians, authors, poets, and friends. In place of rigid instructions and must-do checklists, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch invites reflection, encourages self-compassion, and explores the therapeutic power of humor with, yes, a bit of profanity.
David Nathan was stunned when he first saw Dayem Saif at Children's Hospital in Boston in September 1968. Dayem was then a six-year-old with the stature of an average-sized boy of two. He wore baby shoes on his tiny feet and was unable to walk without holding his mother's hand. His color was dark yet pasty and his face horribly misshapen. The child was being ravaged by thalassemia, a life-threatening inherited disease of the blood, and one of the leading causes of disfigurement, disability, and death in children worldwide. Without effective treatment, Dayem would almost certainly die before his twentieth birthday.
Genes, Blood, and Courage is David Nathan's absorbing story of the thirty-year struggle to keep Dayem alive. "Immortal Sword" is the English translation of Dayem's Arabic name, and under Nathan's care Dayem, indeed, seems immortal. Despite his continual reluctance to follow his doctor's orders and the repeated hospitalizations that result, Dayem--the misshapen, stunted boy--survives to become a handsome, successful businessman.
In Genes, Blood, and Courage Nathan goes beyond his struggles with this seemingly immortal patient to describe in detail the emergence, over the past twenty-five years, of an entirely new force in medical care called molecular medicine. As Dayem's case illustrates, this new area of human genetic research--in which Nathan is a leading clinical investigator--promises tremendous advances in the rational diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of inherited disorders, such as thalassemia and sickle cell anemia, and even of acquired illnesses such as cancer and infectious disease.
Genes, Blood, and Courage is a celebration not just of Dayem's triumphs but also of the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the American biomedical research enterprise in the late twentieth century.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand begins this wide-ranging volume with an essay that extols diversity and warns of the dangers of modifying the human genome. Nora Groce reviews the ways that societies have defined disability and creates an interpretive framework for discussing the relationship between culture and disability.
In essays devoted to historical perspective, Brian H. Greenwald comments upon the real “toll” taken by A. G. Bell’s insistence upon oralism, while Joseph J. Murray weighs the nineteenth-century debate over whether deaf-deaf marriages should be encouraged. John S. Schuchman’s chilling account of deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era adds wrenching reinforcement to the impetus to include disabled people in genetics debates.
Mark Willis offers an intensely personal reflection on the complexities of genetic alteration, addressing both his heart condition and his blindness in surprisingly different ways. Anna Middleton extends Willis’s concepts in her discussion of couples currently considering the use of genetic knowledge and technology to select for or against a gene that causes deafness.
In the part on the science of genetics, Orit Dagan, Karen B. Avraham, Kathleen S. Arnos, and Arti Pandya clarify the choices presented by genetic engineering, and geneticist Walter E. Nance emphasizes the importance of science in offering individuals knowledge from which they can fashion their own decisions. In the concluding section, Christopher Krentz raises moral questions about the ever-continuing search for human perfection, and Michael Bérubé argues that disability should be considered democratically to ensure full participation of disabled people in all decisions that might affect them.
In Genius Belabored: Childbed Fever and the Tragic Life of Ignaz Semmelweis, Theodore G. Obenchain traces the life story of a nineteenth-century Hungarian obstetrician who was shunned and marginalized by the medical establishment for advancing a far-sighted but unorthodox solution to the appalling mortality rates that plagued new mothers of the day.
In engrossing detail, Obenchain recreates for readers the sights, smells, and activities within a hospital of that day. In an era before the acceptance of modern germ science, physicians saw little need for cleanliness or hygiene. As a consequence, antiseptic measures were lax and rudimentary. Especially vulnerable to contamination were new mothers, who frequently contracted and died from childbed fever (puerperal fever). Genius Belabored follows Semmelweis’s awakening to the insight that many of these deaths could be avoided with basic antiseptic measures like hand washing.
The medical establishment, intellectually unprepared for Semmelweis’s prescient hypothesis, rejected it for a number of reasons. It was unorthodox and went against the lingering Christian tradition that the dangers of childbirth were inherent to the lives of women. Complicating matters, colleagues did not consider Semmelweis an easy physician to work with. His peers described him as strange and eccentric. Obenchain offers an empathetic and insightful argument that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder and illuminates how his colleagues, however dedicated to empirical science they might have been, misjudged Semmelweis’s methods based upon ignorance and their emotional discomfort with him.
In Genius Belabored, Obenchain identifies Semmelweis’s rightful place in the pantheon of scientists and physicians whose discoveries have saved the lives of millions. Obenchain’s biography of Semmelweis offers unique insights into the practice of medicine and the mindsets of physicians working in the premodern era. This fascinating study offers much of interest to general readers as well as those interested in germ theory, the history of medicine and obstetrics, or anyone wishing to better understand the trajectory of modern medicine.
A Greenhouse for the Mind continues the story of the school, focusing on how its teachers and counselors create an educational environment in which children will want and be able to learn. Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders worked closely with Bettelheim for thirteen years as a counselor and assistant principal and since 1973 has been director of the Orthogenic School. She offers her interpretation of Bettelheim's vision of a healing world for children, as well as her own ideas and new perspectives from the last decade.
In a warm and anecdotal style, Sanders relates the experiences and overarching theoretical principles that have shaped the school and its curriculum. She describes how the staff, schedules, and physical appearance of the school have been developed to create a stable and safe place to learn; how teachers confront their own emotional vulnerability; how the staff accepts the children themselves while disciplining unacceptable behavior; and how the attention of the inattentive can be gained. She chronicles the successes and setbacks of the staff in developing a curriculum that includes reading, science, and physical education, and she exemplifies the school's principles and practices through a story of an imaginary student's educational development.
In addition to her experience at the Orthogenic School, Sanders has worked with teachers at all levels from nursery schools to universities, and in A Greenhouse for the Mind she passes on what she has learned about educating difficult children—principles that have been helpful to both disturbed children in a unique setting and more typical children in ordinary settings. Her attention to the role of emotions in the learning process adds an often neglected dimension to traditional cognitive and instructional approaches.
Winner, 2022 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE Awards
Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.
George Washington Carver (1864-1943), best known for his work as a scientist and a botanist, was an anomaly in his own time—a black man praised by white America.
This selection of his letters and other writings reveals both the human side of Carver and the forces that shaped his creative genius. They show us a Carver who was both manipulated and manipulative who had inner tensions and anxieties. But perhaps more than anything else, these letters allow us to see Carver's deep love for his fellow man, whether manifested in his efforts to treat polio victims in the 1930s or in his incredibly intense and emotionally charged friendships that lasted a lifetime.
The editor has furnished commentary between letters to set them in context.
With a new chapter on the oral history interviews Dr. Kremer conducted (several years after publication of the first edition) with people who knew Carver personally, and the addition of newly uncovered documents and a bank of impressive photographs of Carver and some of his friends, this second edition of our classic title commemorates the 75th anniversary of Carver’s death on January 5, 2018.
The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled.
In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives.
Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.
When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family’s farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn’t health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics.
But as demand for organics grew, so too did Bob’s experiments. He discovered that through time-tested practices like cover cropping and crop rotation, he could produce successful yields—without pesticides. Regenerative organic farming allowed him to grow fruits and vegetables in cold, dry Montana, providing a source of local produce to families in his hometown. He even started producing his own renewable energy. And he learned that the grain he first tasted at the fair was actually a type of ancient wheat, one that was proven to lower inflammation rather than worsening it, as modern wheat does.
Ultimately, Bob’s forays with organics turned into a multimillion dollar heirloom grain company, Kamut International. In Grain by Grain, Quinn and cowriter Liz Carlisle, author of Lentil Underground, show how his story can become the story of American agriculture. We don’t have to accept stagnating rural communities, degraded soil, or poor health. By following Bob’s example, we can grow a healthy future, grain by grain.
In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.
Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.
A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, the first new biography in more than three decades, offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of the famed conservationist and Progressive politician. In addition to considering Gifford Pinchot's role in the environmental movement, historian Char Miller sets forth an engaging description and analysis of the man -- his character, passions, and personality -- and the larger world through which he moved.
Char Miller begins by describing Pinchot's early years and the often overlooked influence of his family and their aspirations for him. He examines Gifford Pinchot's post-graduate education in France and his ensuing efforts in promoting the profession of forestry in the United States and in establishing and running the Forest Service. While Pinchot's twelve years as chief forester (1898-1910) are the ones most historians and biographers focus on, Char Miller also offers an extensive examination of Pinchot's post-federal career as head of The National Conservation Association and as two-term governor of Pennsylvania. In addition, he looks at Pinchot's marriage to feminist Cornelia Bryce and discusses her role in Pinchot's political radicalization throughout the 1920s and 1930s. An epilogue explores Gifford Pinchot's final years and writings.
Char Miller offers a provocative reconsideration of key events in Pinchot's life, including his relationship with friend and mentor John Muir and their famous disagreement over damming Hetch Hetchy Valley. The author brings together insights from cultural and social history and recently discovered primary sources to support a new interpretation of Pinchot -- whose activism not only helped define environmental politics in early twentieth century America but remains strikingly relevant today.
Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation makes four important arguments about the recent coupling of conservation and globalization that is reshaping the place of nature in human-environmental change. First, it has led to an unprecedented number of spatial arrangements whose environmental management goals and prescribed activities vary along a spectrum from strict biodiversity protection to sustainable utilization involving agriculture, food production, and extractive activities. Conservation and globalization are also leading, by necessity, to new scales of management in these activities that rely on environmental science, thus shifting the spatial patterning of humans and the environment. This interaction results, as well, in the unprecedented importance of boundaries and borders; transnational border issues pose both opportunities and threats to global conservation proposed by organizations and institutions that are themselves international. Lastly, Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation argues that the local level has been integral to globalization, while the regional level is often eclipsed at the peril of the successful implementation of conservation and management programs.
Bridging the gap between geography and life science, Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation will appeal to a broad range of students of the environment, conservation planning; biodiversity management, and development and globalization studies.
Nominee, 2023 Wallace Award, Agricultural History Society
In The Globalization of Wheat, Marci R. Baranski explores Norman Borlaug’s complicated legacy as godfather of the Green Revolution. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting global hunger, Borlaug, an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, left a legacy that divides opinions even today. His high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties, known as miracle seeds, effectively doubled and tripled crop yields across the globe, from Kenya to India and Argentina to Mexico due to their wide adaptation. But these modern seeds also required expensive chemical fertilizers and irrigation, both of which were only available to wealthier farmers. Baranski argues that Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers. As large-scale monocultures replaced traditional farming practices, these changes were codified into the Indian wheat research system, thus limiting attention to traditional practices and marginal environments. In the shadow of this legacy, and in the face of accelerating climate change, Baranski brings new light to Borlaug’s role in a controversial concept in agricultural science.
Grass Productivity is a prodigiously documented textbook of scientific information concerning every aspect of management "where the cow and grass meet." Andre Voisin's "rational grazing" method maximizes productivity in both grass and cattle operations.
Step into the garden with writer and rural historian Jerry Apps. In this treasure trove of tips, recollections, and recipes, Jerry combines his hard-earned advice for garden success with a discussion of how tending a garden leads to a deeper understanding of nature and the land. From planning and planting to fending off critters and weeds, he walks us through the gardening year, imbuing his story with humor and passion and once again reminding us that working even a small piece of land provides many rewards.
Good Apples is for anyone who wants to go beyond the kitchen and backyard into the orchards, packing sheds, and cold storage rooms; into the laboratories and experiment stations; and into the warehouses, stockrooms, and marketing meetings, to better understand how we as citizens and eaters can sustain the farms that provide food for our communities. Susan Futrell has spent years working in sustainable food distribution, including more than a decade with apple growers. She shows us why sustaining family orchards, like family farms, may be essential to the soul of our nation.
It was Eudora Welty who awakened Elizabeth Lawrence's interest in this fascinating topic by putting her name on the mailing list of The Mississippi Market Bulletin, a twice-monthly collection of classified advertisements founded in 1928 and still published today. Lawrence soon discovered market bulletins from the Carolinas and other Southern states, as well as similar bulletins published privately in the North. She began ordering plants from the bulletins, and there ensued a lively exchange of letters wit the women who sold them.
Gardening for Love is Lawrence's exploration of this little-known side of American horticulture and her affectionate tribute to country people who shared her passion for plants. Drawing on the letters she received, sometimes a great many of them from the same persons over many years, she delves into traditional plant lore, herbal remedies, odd and often highly poetic vernacular plant names peculiar to particular regions of the South, and the herb collectors of the mountains of the Carolinas and Georgia. She focuses primarily on the Southeast and the Deep South, but her wide knowledge of both literature and botany gives Gardening for Love a dimension that transcends the category of regional writing.
Newcomers to the Southwest usually find that their favorite landscape plants aren't suited to the hot, dry climate. Many authors offer advice on adapting plants to the desert; now Mary Irish tells how gardeners can better adapt themselves to the challenge.
Drawing on her experience with public horticulture in the Phoenix metropolitan area, Irish explores the vexations and delights of desert gardening. She offers practical advice on plants and gardening practices for anyone who lives in the Southwest, from El Paso to Palm Springs, Tucson to Las Vegas.
Irish encourages readers who may be new to the desert—or desert dwellers who may be new to gardening—to stop struggling against heat, aridity, and poor soils and instead learn to use and appreciate the wonderful and well-adapted plants native to the desert. She shares information and anecdotes about trees, shrubs, perennials, agaves, cacti, and other plants that make gardening in the Southwest a unique experience, and provides further information about plants from other desert regions that will easily adapt to the Southwest. In addition to descriptions of plants, Irish also offers tips on planting, watering, pruning, and propagation.
For anyone who has struggled to maintain a patch of green or blanched at their water bill after unproductive irrigation, the answer to an attractive landscape may be as close as the desert around you. And for anyone who has bought a catalog guide to desert plants and not known which to choose, this book can set you on the right path. Mary Irish shows how to take heart in available plants of adaptable beauty in a book to enjoy while waiting for the next planting cycle.
With Gardening with Perennials horticulturalist and garden writer Noel Kingsbury brings a global perspective to the Lurie oasis through a wonderful introduction to the world of perennial gardening. He shows how perennials have much to offer home gardeners, from sustainability—perennials require less water than their annual counterparts—to continuity, as perennials’ longevity makes them a dependable staple.
Kingsbury also explains why Lurie is a perfect case study for gardeners of all locales. The plants represented in this urban oasis were chosen specifically for reliability and longevity. The majority will thrive on a wide range of soils and across a wide climatic range. These plants also can thrive with minimal irrigation, and without fertilizers or chemical control of pests and diseases. Including a special emphasis on plants that flourish in sun, and featuring many species native to the Midwest region, Gardening with Perennials will inspire gardeners around the world to try Chicago-style sustainable gardening.
The Gardener’s Guide to Prairie Plants is the one-stop compendium for all gardeners aspiring to use native prairie plants in their gardens. Neil Diboll and Hilary Cox—two renowned prairie gardeners—compile more than four decades’ worth of research to offer a wide-ranging and definitive reference for starting and maintaining prairie and meadow gardens and restorations. Alongside detailed synopses of plant life cycles, meticulous range maps, and sweeping overviews of natural history, Diboll and Cox also include photographs of 148 prairie plants in every stage of development, from seedling to seedhead. North America’s grasslands once stretched from the Blue Ridge to the Rocky Mountains, and from Texas to Manitoba, blanketing the mid-continent with ecologically important, garden-worthy, native species. This book provides all the inspiration and information necessary for eager native planters from across the country to welcome these plants back to their landscapes. The Gardener’s Guide to Prairie Plants is a must-have reference for gardeners, restorationists, and every flora fan with a passion for native plants, prairies and meadows.
Nauseef emphasizes the need for careful planning and design to create comfortable, low-maintenance spaces that bring homeowners outside. Her designs solve problems such as a lack of privacy, shade, or sun; plan for water use; replace troublesome nonnative plants with native plants that attract pollinators; and enable homeowners to enjoy living sustainably on their land. Colorful photographs of projects around the Midwest show the wide range of possibilities, from newly created gardens using only native plants to traditional gardens that mix nonnative with native species. Whether you have a city yard, a suburban lot, or a rural acreage, there are ideas here for you, along with examples of well-designed landscapes in which native plants enhance paths, patios, pergolas, and steps.
Providing information on planting and maintaining native plants and prairies as well as seed and plant sources, organizations, and public arboretum and prairie sites, this book enables every gardener to master a new palette of plants and landforms. However small our personal landscapes, together they can slow the loss of many species of plants and wildlife and bring native flowers and grasses back where they belong. Ecologists, landscape architects and designers, master gardeners, landscape contractors, teachers, and home gardeners—everyone dedicated to conserving and improving our environment—will benefit from Nauseef’s approach.
One of the most serious threats to indigenous plants is the introduction of invasive non-native species by landscapers after new developments are built. In this unique guide, ecologist Margaret B. Gargiullo presents a detailed look at the full scope of flora that is native to this region and available for propagation. Geared specifically for landscape architects, designers, land managers, and restorationists, this book offers practical advice on how to increase the amount of indigenous flora growing in the mepolitan area, and in some cases, to reintroduce plants that have completely disappeared.
More than one hundred line drawings of plants and their specific habitats, ranging from forests to beaches, help readers visualize the full potential for landscaping in the area. A separate entry for each plant also provides detailed information on size, flower color, blooming time, and its possible uses in wetland mitigation, erosion control, and natural area restoration. Some plants are also highlighted for their ability to thrive in areas that are typically considered inhospitable to greenery.
Easily searchable by plant type or habitat, this guide is an essential reference for everyone concerned with the region's natural plant life. Since most of the plants can also be grown well beyond the New York City metropolitan area, this book will also be useful for project managers doing restoration work in most of southern New England and the mid-Atlantic region, including Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
Purple three-awn.
Tree of heaven.
Alamo vine.
Narrowleaf cattail.
These exotic and fanciful names conjure up visions of lush foliage, colorful grasses, and dense plant life. They are, in fact, names of native and naturalized Texas plants—grasses, pods, vines, and weeds. Lovely and all-too-often overlooked in nature, they become ornamental delights when used imaginatively and decoratively.
Grasses, Pods, Vines, Weeds introduces 44 of Texas' most common and important naturals. Quentin Steitz shows how to recognize them and discover their aesthetic wealth. By taking the reader through all of the steps involved in utilizing naturals—from harvest to design—her book becomes an important tool for floral and landscape designers, decorators, horticulturalists, home gardeners, botanists: all those people who enjoy hands-on experience with Texas' vast array of native and naturalized plants.
The book presents clear and concise descriptions of many Texas naturals, accompanied by approximately 150 full-color photographs showing each in one or more stages of growth and also in a design. The reader can see the plant as it looks not only in the wild but also in an arrangement. The author offers techniques on how the species can be prepared for display, discussing drying and arranging. And a chapter on cultivation and conservation suggests to outdoor enthusiasts species they can grow for decorative natural materials as well as conserve and appreciate in the wild.
Grasses, Pods, Vines,Weeds is enhanced by flora selected, collected, prepared, and dried by the author. These hand-culled materials have been used in designs contributed by some nineteen notable floral designers as well as the author. The text and designs combine to reveal the fresh, creative applications of Texas' decorative naturals and to increase our pleasure in the wonders of natural Texas.
The study of garden history has grown rapidly over the last twenty years. This collection of essays explores the issues, methods, and approaches that students in landscape architecture have developed during that period to cope with the expanding subject of gardens and their history. The volume will serve as a bench mark in the field, with its range of approaches and wealth of illustrative material.
Each contributor focuses upon a specific piece of his or her research, and uses this as a basis to discuss the wider implications of the study of gardens within such contexts as botanical, horticultural, agrarian, literary, technological, social, culture, political, and art history. The historical and geographical range is also deliberately large: from ancient Greek and Roman gardens, through Islamic and Mughal examples, to nineteenth-century English estates; from India to Surry County, Virginia, from Versailles to Philadelphia.
Certain themes come to dominate the volume: the values of archeology to garden history and conservation; the different or even rival uses of literature, painting, archival, and other documentation; geographical understanding of territory; above all, the rich resources of gardens for historical study and the importance of landscape architectural history in its own right as a major contributor to humanistic knowledge.
Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.
With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.
Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.
"I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune
"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."—Tom Turner, Times Higher Education
"When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism—it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it.
“Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ‘gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.’”—Jonathan Bate, The Spectator
McLaughlin gives you all the tricks and tips you need to grow the sustainable garden of your dreams. Drawing from established traditions, such as permaculture and French intensive gardening, and McLaughlin’s hard-earned experience, The Good Garden is a joyful guide for newbies and experienced gardeners alike. It will teach you the fundamentals, including how to choose the right plant varieties for your microclimate, and proven methods to fight pests without chemicals. You will also discover the nuances of developing a green thumb, from picking species to attract specific types of pollinators to composting techniques based on time available. Lovely four-color photography will show you good gardening in action.
Most importantly, The Good Garden will help you foster a sense of meaning in your garden. Maybe the goal is to reduce food miles and plastic waste by growing delicious berries. Maybe it’s to meet neighbors who also care about the planet through a seed-swap. Maybe it’s a quiet moment patting the bunny whose manure will replace toxic fertilizers in the soil. A good garden offers endless possibilities and The Good Garden offers a wealth of knowledge and inspiration.
On the East Coast, so the story goes, newcomers are asked where they come from; on the West Coast they are asked what they do for a living; in Iowa people ask them, “How's your garden doing?” Maybe this is not a true story, but it does epitomize the importance of gardening for Iowans, blessed as they are with the rich glacial soil so hospitable to corn and soybeans. Rural and urban Iowans alike start planning next summer's garden in midwinter, when their plots are still snow-covered and deep-frozen; by state fair time their trees, shrubs, vegetables—including the ubiquitous zucchini—and flowers are thriving. Veronica Fowler's month-by-month guide to gardening in Iowa is a concise, valuable resource for all novice and experienced gardeners.
Beginning in January, Fowler presents a monthly checklist to allow gardeners to prioritize seasonal tasks. Her winter chapters focus on garden design, cold-weather gardening, and starting plants from seeds; in spring she moves into soil preparation, shopping for plants, wildflower and rose cultivation, and lawn care basics; summer brings landscaping, flowers for cutting, and organic gardening; and fall involves cold frames, winter-harvest vegetables, forcing bulbs and perennials, trees and shrubs, and ground covers and vines best suited for Iowa's climate as well as information on mail-order suppliers, gardens to visit, where to go for help, and garden club memberships. Tips from some of the more than two thousand members of the Federated Garden Clubs of Iowa round out this plentiful harvest of useful advice.
On a day in February when the wind chill is, well, chilling and the forecast calls for more of the same, the arrival of the first garden catalog of the season brings warmth to any gardener. Veronica Fowler's accessible, information-packed book will become part of every gardener's life both indoors and out.
Each of the seven villages in Amana relied on the food prepared in its communal kitchens, and each kitchen depended on its communal garden for most of the dishes served (the kitchens in Rettig’s hometown produced more than four hundred gallons of sauerkraut in 1900). Rettig begins by describing the evolution of communal gardening in old Amana, focusing especially on planting, harvesting, and storing vegetables from asparagus to egg lettuce to turnips. With the passing of the old order in 1932, the number of the society’s large vegetable gardens and orchards dwindled, but Larry Rettig and his wife, Wilma, still grow some of the colonies’ heirloom varieties in their fourth-generation South Amana vegetable garden. In 1980 they founded a seed bank to preserve them for future generations.
Rettig’s chapters on modern vegetable and flower gardening in today’s Amana Colonies showcase his Cottage-in-the-Meadow Gardens, now listed with the Smithsonian in its Archives of American Gardens. Old intermingles with new across his gardens: heirloom lettuce keeps company with the latest cucumber variety, a hundred-year-old rose arches over the newest daylilies and heucheras, and ancient grapevines intertwine with newly planted wisteria, all adding up to a rich array of colorful plantings.
Rettig extends his gardening advice into the kitchen and workroom. He shares family recipes for any number of traditional dishes, including radish salad, dumpling soup, Amana pickled ham, apple bread, eleven-minute meat loaf, and strawberry rhubarb pie. Moving into the workroom, he shows us how to make hammered botanical prints, Della Robbia centerpieces, holiday wreaths, a gnome home, and a waterless fountain. Touring his gardens, with their historic and unusual plants, will make gardeners everywhere want to reproduce the groupings and varieties that surround Larry and Wilma Rettig’s 1900 red brick house.
Participants in La Mesa Verde home garden program engage in the practices of growing and sharing food to envision and continuously work to enact alternative food systems that connect people to their food and communities. They are building on ancestral knowledge, as well as learning new forms of farming, gardening, and healing through convivial acts of sharing.
The individuals featured in the book are imagining and building alternative worlds and futures amid the very real challenges they embody and endure. Climate change, for example, is forcing thousands of migrants to urban areas, which means recent immigrants’ traditional environmental, nutritional, and healing knowledge will continue to be threatened by the pervasiveness of modernity and the homogenization of global capitalism. Moreover, once rural people migrate to urban areas, their ability to retain traditional foodways will remain difficult without spaces of autonomy. The stories in this book reveal how people create the physical space to grow food and the political space to enact autonomy to revive and restore agroecological knowledge needed for an uncertain future.
Featured in the 2018 film The Gardener, Les Quatre Vents in Charlevoix County, Quebec, has been acclaimed as the most aesthetically satisfying and horticulturally exciting landscape experience in North America. This twenty-acre garden seamlessly combines traditional and novel elements into a splendid composition, adorned with unexpected touches and perfectly compatible with its natural surroundings.
The Greater Perfection, first published in 2001, illustrates the delights, diversions, and surprises that await the garden’s visitors. Francis H. Cabot’s account of the challenges he faced in developing Les Quatre Vents reveals the fascinating process behind the creation of a world-class garden that has become a mecca for horticultural enthusiasts around the globe. Winner of the 2003 Annual Literature Award of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries and featuring stunning full-color images by five leading garden photographers, The Greater Perfection is one of the most beautiful books on gardens to appear in years. This new printing includes a foreword by Marianne Cabot Welch, Cabot’s daughter, that further contextualizes the gardens and explores how a place rooted in the past can confront the future.
This fascinating two-volume set includes a photographic reproduction of an anonymous seventeenth-century Italian gardener’s notebook from Dumbarton Oaks’s Rare Books Collection.
The notebook is a record of the planting of three flower gardens at San Lorenzo. It is now believed that the gardens were created for Margherita de’ Medici Farnese, duchess of Parma and Piacenza. The notebook provides insight into the creation of a seventeenth-century garden, from identifying flowers to planning flowerbeds. In turn, these sketches reveal the gardener’s own intentions and reflections on the designs.
Ada Segre’s accompanying study of the notebook is a groundbreaking example of garden archaeology. She considers its provenance and connection to the world of the duchess and her gardens. Segre also evaluates the importance of the manuscript as an object and as a source of information on garden design and practice in Italy during the mid-seventeenth century. Three computer-generated recreations of the garden’s planting beds are included with the reproduction.
Pleasure gardens, or horti, offered elite citizens of ancient Rome a retreat from the noise and grime of the city, where they could take their leisure and even conduct business amid lovely landscaping, architecture, and sculpture. One of the most important and beautiful of these gardens was the horti Sallustiani, originally developed by the Roman historian Sallust at the end of the first century B.C. and later possessed and perfected by a series of Roman emperors. Though now irrevocably altered by two millennia of human history, the Gardens of Sallust endure as a memory of beauty and as a significant archaeological site, where fragments of sculpture and ruins of architecture are still being discovered.
In this ambitious work, Kim Hartswick undertakes the first comprehensive history of the Gardens of Sallust from Roman times to the present, as well as its influence on generations of scholars, intellectuals, and archaeologists. He draws from an astonishing array of sources to reconstruct the original dimensions and appearance of the gardens and the changes they have undergone at specific points in history. Hartswick thoroughly discusses the architectural features of the garden and analyzes their remains. He also studies the sculptures excavated from the gardens and discusses the subjects and uses of many outstanding examples.
As the horticultural epicenter of the United States, Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, suburbs, and countryside are blessed with more public gardens in a concentrated area than almost any other region in the world. Stretching from Trenton, New Jersey through Philadelphia and down to Newark, Delaware, this area (often called the Delaware Valley) offers more horticultural riches than a visitor can possibly see even in a coupl of weeks of hectic garden-hopping.
In A GUIDE TO THE GREAT GARDENS OF THE PHILADELPHIA REGION you will find:
Detailed coverage of almost 100 gardens
Maps to indicate where area gardens are in relation to each other to plan day trip itineraries
Key information about each major garden, including hours, fees, time needed for a tour, history, acreage, and special features
Over a dozen gardens that have never before been featured in any garden guidebook
Arranged by interest, to help guide readers to gardens that will most meet their needs
Notations about historical houses, cafes/restaurants, gift shops, and chidren's features at each major garden
Garden as Art: Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks features essays and photographs of this remarkable landscape as a living and breathing work of art. Published on the occasion of the centennial of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in 2021, the book illuminates the stewardship of one of the most beautiful gardens on earth.
Edited by Thaïsa Way, this volume includes essays from scholars and practitioners as well as photographs by landscape photographer Sahar Coston-Hardy. The essays place the garden in the context of its historical surroundings, explore its archival significance, and reflect on its effects on the world of contemporary design. Accompanying the essays is a collection of newly commissioned photographs by Coston-Hardy that document the seasons and growth in the gardens over the course of a year and that invite the reader to contemplate the art of garden design and the remarkable beauty of the natural world. Archival images of the gardens offer a chronicle of evolving design concepts as well as illustrate how gardens change over time as living works of art. Garden as Art offers an inspiring view of a place that has been remarkably influential in design and the art of landscape architecture.
Gardens have exerted a deep influence on the culture of cities. Considering each city as a whole, this book presents the profoundly different roles of gardens in cultural development and social life.
Private and princely gardens, from Roman antiquity to approximately 1850, are considered, whether in China, India, the Ottoman Empire, Europe, or the United States. Turning to the subject of planning, the dire lack of a municipal garden policy is examined in contemporary Marrakech. In-depth evaluations of parks and garden planning reveal the successes and limitations of different policies in Stockholm, Tokyo, Kerala (India), historic Suzhou (China), and the U.S. New Towns of the 1960s. This book unveils an exciting domain of interplay between public and private action that is little known by citizen groups, city planners, and managers.
During the Civil War, when the supply of cotton from southern fields was disrupted, the owners of northern textile mills looked elsewhere for raw fiber. One source was silk. Among those experimenting with silkworm production was a Frenchman named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, who had settled outside of Boston. It was Trouvelot who imported the gypsy moths and inadvertently allowed them to escape. Soon the invasion was on and a counteroffensive was required.
Spear reveals the turbulent undercurrents in the eradication campaign when the enthusiasm of the entomologists in charge turned into desperation upon the discovery that their alien adversary was much tougher than they thought. Fighting a war they could not win and dared not lose, the leaders of the campaign resorted to political maneuvering, cheap tricks, and outright misrepresentation to maintain a façade of success, urging the Commonwealth to continue funding the war long after any chance of victory had faded.
More than just reviewing the important events of this historic episode, Spear tells the story in an engaging way, often through the first-hand accounts of those who were directly involved. Much of what Spear has written is new, the recounting is lively, and the information he presents shows that almost all of the previous beliefs about the campaign to eradicate the gypsy moths are myths. In the process, he also traces the rise of modern economic entomology and the birth of the pesticide industry.
The Ground at My Feet is a memoir about loss and grief as well as a portrait of a family, a region, and an industry. Combining personal story and research, Stinson weaves essays, poems, history, and science into a rich and layered account of life in a family forest in the Pacific Northwest. She maps interactions between the land and its people over two centuries: the Cowlitz peoples, homesteaders, and several generations of logging families who have worked the property. She follows her family’s logs as they become lumber for fence boards and suburban homes, touring a local cedar mill and traveling with her father to visit mills in Japan.
Stinson adds a landowner’s voice to conversations about the human tendency to demand more of the land than it can sustain. With its uniquely personal view of the Pacific Northwest’s timber and forestry heritage, The Ground at My Feet is an engaging addition to the literature of the landscape and ecology of the West.
Alabama has the third-largest commercial forest in the nation, after only Georgia and Oregon. Fully two-thirds of the state’s land supports the growth of over fifteen billion trees on twenty-two million acres, which explains why Alabama looks entirely green from space. Green Gold presents the story of human use of and impact on Alabama’s forests from pioneer days to the present, as James E. Fickle chronicles the history of the industry from unbridled greed and exploitation through virtual abandonment to revival, restoration, and enlightened stewardship.
As the state’s largest manufacturing industry, forest products have traditionally included naval stores such as tar, pitch, and turpentine, especially in the southern longleaf stands; sawmill lumber, both hardwood and pine; and pulp and paper milling. Green Gold documents all aspects of the industry, including the advent of “scientific forestry” and the development of reforestation practices with sustained yields. Also addressed are the historical impacts of Native Americans and of early settlers who used axes, saws, and water- and steam-powered sawmills to clear and utilize forests. Along with an account of railroad logging and the big mills of the lumber bonanza days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book also chronicles the arrival of professional foresters to the state, who began to deal with the devastating legacy of “cut out and get out” logging and to fight the perennial curse of woods arson. Finally, Green Gold examines the rise of the tree farm movement, the rebirth of large-scale lumbering, the advent of modern environmental concerns, and the movement toward the “Fourth Forest” in Alabama.
Now for the first time, a survey of the country's natural and cultural landscapes is available in one volume. Essays by leading scholars of history, geography, and the social sciences move beyond the Green movement to uncover the enduring yet ever-changing cultural patterns, social institutions, and geographic factors that have sustained Germany's relationship to its land.
Unlike the American environmental movement, which is still dominated by debates about wilderness conservation and the retention of untouched spaces, discussions of the German landscape have long recognized human impact as part of the "natural order." Drawing on a variety of sites as examples, including forests, waterways, the Autobahn, and natural history museums, the essays demonstrate how environmental debates in Germany have generally centered on the best ways to harmonize human priorities and organic order, rather than on attempts to reify wilderness as a place to escape from industrial society.
Germany's Nature is essential reading for students and professionals working in the fields of environmental studies, European history, and the history of science and technology.
Early descriptions of the Great Plains often focus on a vast, grassy expanse that was either burnt or burning. The scene continued to burn until the land was plowed under or grazed away and broken by innumerable roads and towns. Yet, where the original landscape has persisted, so has fire, and where people have sought to restore something of that original setting, they have had to reinstate fire. This has required the persistence or creation of a fire culture, which in turn inspired schools of science and art that make the Great Plains today a regional hearth for American fire.
Volume 5 of To the Last Smoke introduces a region that once lay at the geographic heart of American fire, and today promises to reclaim something of that heritage. After all these years, the Great Plains continue to bear witness to how fires can shape contemporary life, and vice versa. In this collection of essays, Stephen J. Pyne explores how this once most regularly and widely burned province of North America, composed of various subregions and peoples, has been shaped by the flames contained within it and what fire, both tame and feral, might mean for the future of its landscapes.
Included in this volume:
- How wildland and rural fire have changed from the 19th century to the 21st century
- How fire is managed in the nation’s historic tallgrass prairies, from Texas to South Dakota, from Illinois to Nebraska
- How fire connects with other themes of Great Plains life and culture
- How and why Texas has returned to the national narrative of landscape fire
The authors show how the administration used news events such as wildfires to propel legislation through Congress. Focusing blame for wildfires on legal obstacles and environmentalists' use of appeals to challenge fuel-reduction projects, the administration restricted opportunities for environmental analysis, administrative appeals, and litigation. The authors argue that these tools have a history of use by diverse interests and have long protected Americans' right to question government decisions.
This readable study identifies the players, events, and strategies that expedited the policy shift and contextualizes it in the president's career and in legislative and administrative history. Revealing a policy change with major implications for the future of public lands and public process, George W. Bush's Healthy Forests will become required reading in environmental studies and political science.
To maintain thriving, sustainable fisheries in the Laurentian Great Lakes, an understanding of the numerous and complex ecological, societal, economic, management, and policy issues surrounding them is critical. This incisive study provides a collaborative, interjurisdictional, and multi-use perspective that is shaped by the United states and Canada together as part of their shared governance of these waters. This book offers an informed look at the Great Lakes fisheries and their ecosystems, as the contributors examine both the threats they have faced and the valuable opportunities they provide for basin citizens and industries. Divided into four sections—the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes Fisheries, Fisheries case studies, and outlook for the Future—this is a valuable and up-to-date tool for students, researchers, policymakers, and managers alike.
For hundreds of years, the New England cod fishery was one of the most productive in the world, with higher average annual landings than any comparable ocean area. But in the late 1980s, fish catches dropped precipitously, as the cod, flounder, and other species that had long dominated the region seemed to lose their ability to recover from the massive annual harvests. Even today, with fishing sharply restricted, populations have not recovered.
Largely overlooked in this disaster is the intriguing human and scientific puzzle that lies at its heart: an anguished, seemingly inexplicable conflict between government scientists and fishermen over how fish populations are assessed, which has led to bitter disputes and has crippled efforts to agree on catch restrictions. In The Great Gulf, author David Dobbs offers a fascinating and compelling look at both sides of the conflict.
With great immediacy, he describes the history of the fisheries science in this most studied of oceans, and takes the reader on a series of forays over the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank on both fishing boats and research vessels. He introduces us to the challenges facing John Galbraith, Linda Despres, and Jay Burnett, passionate and dedicated scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service who spend countless hours working to determine how many fish there really are, and to the dilemma of Dave Goethel, a whipsmart, conscientious fisherman with 20 years's experience who struggles to understand the complex world he works in while maintaining his livelihood in an age of increasing regulation.
Dobbs paints the New England fishery problem in its full human and natural complexity, vividly portraying the vitality of an uncontrollable, ultimately unknowable sea and its strange, frightening, and beautiful creatures on the one hand, and on the other, the smart, irrepressible, unpredictable people who work there with great joy and humor, refusing to surrender to the many reasons for despair or cynicism. For anyone who read Cod or The Perfect Storm, this book offers the next chapter of the story -- how today's fishers and fisheries scientists are grappling with the collapse of this fishery and trying to chart, amid uncertain waters, a course towards its restoration.
The Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries is the first and only book to provide accurate, country-by-country fishery data. This groundbreaking information has been gathered from independent sources by the world’s foremost fisheries experts, and edited by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the Sea Around Us Project. The Atlas includes one-page reports on 273 countries and their territories, plus fourteen topical global chapters. National reports describe the state of the country's fishery, by sector; the policies, politics, and social factors affecting it; and potential solutions. The global chapters address cross-cutting issues, from the economics of fisheries to the impacts of mariculture. Extensive maps and graphics offer attractive and accessible visual representations.
While it has long been clear that the world’s oceans are in trouble, the lack of reliable data on fishery catches has obscured the scale, and nuances, of the crisis. The atlas shows that, globally, catches have declined rapidly since the 1980s, signaling an even more critical situation than previously understood. The Global Atlas of Marine Fisheries provides a comprehensive picture of our current predicament and steps that can be taken to ease it. For researchers, students, fishery managers, professionals in the fishing industry, and all others concerned with the status of the world’s fisheries, the Atlas will be an indispensable resource.
Grab your tackle and hit the road with Ron Bern and Manny Luftglass as they take you to the choicest places to fish in New York in Gone Fishin': The 100 Best Spots in New York, their follow-up to the highly successful Gone Fishin': The 100 Best Spots in New Jersey.
Truly great freshwater and saltwater fishing abounds throughout the state, from the classic Catskills trout streams to the mighty Hudson and Delaware rivers; from Lake Ontario to the Finger Lakes; from Long Island Sound to the bluewater canyons off the coast; from saltwater bays to artificial reefs; from the smaller sweetwater rivers and New York City reservoirs to surprising trout streams and bass ponds on Long Island.
Luftglass and Bern provide readers with immediately useful insights into each of the 100 best sites. They furnish easy-to-follow directions, descriptions of the body of water, boat launch information, and detailed advice on live and artificial bait, fishing methods, equipment, depths, best times of day and year, secret tips particular to each site, and even specific places to work bait or lures. Gone Fishin' also includes places that are good for children, as well as those which are handicapped accessible.
Throughout the book, Bern and Luftglass share anecdotes about their own fishing adventures and some of the big ones that didn't get away in their more than 33 years of fishing together. The information they cram into every chapter will help you find the spot, fish it more effectively, and catch more fish.
Whether you fish 150 times a year or you are planning to fish for the first time, you're sure to fall hook, line, and sinker for this entertaining and educational guide.
moose and deer poacher in Maine, was the hero of scores of funny stories of
how he outwitted game wardens. Preserving these oral histories, Edward Ives
documents Magoon's life and explores his significance as a folk hero within
the context of the conservation movement, the cult of the sportsman, and Maine's
increasingly restrictive game laws.
"A rich and subtle book, an
important work by a major scholar. . . . It is a major contribution to folklore
studies, and to history and American studies as well."
-- Journal of American Folklore
Around a campfire in the woods through long hours of night, men used to gather to listen to the music of hounds' voices as they chased an elusive and seemingly preternatural fox. To the highly trained ears of these backwoods hunters, the hounds told the story of the pursuit like operatic voices chanting a great epic. Although the hunt almost always ended in the escape of the fox—as the hunters hoped it would—the thrill of the chase made the men feel "that they [were] close to something lost and never to be found, just as one can feel something in a great poem or a dream."
Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers offers a colorful account of this vanishing American folkway—back-country fox hunting known as "hilltopping," "moonlighting," "fox racing," or "one-gallus fox hunting." Practiced neither for blood sport nor to put food on the table, hilltopping was worlds removed from elite fox hunting where red- and black-coated horsemen thundered across green fields in daylight. Hilltopping was a nocturnal, even mystical pursuit, uniting men across social and racial lines as they gathered to listen to dogs chasing foxes over miles of ground until the sun rose. Engaged in by thousands of rural and small-town Americans from the 1860s to the 1980s, hilltopping encouraged a quasi-spiritual identification of man with animal that bound its devotees into a "brotherhood of blood and cause" and made them seem almost crazy to outsiders.
"Notable and quotable. Parman stakes out original territory and provides a vivid snapshot of the Northwoods."—John Motoviloff, author of Wisconsin Wildfoods: 100 Recipes for Badger State Bounties
"Extremely rich and detailed. Parman puts forth original and genuine experiences."—Richard Yatzeck, author of Hunting the Edges
With this book, published more than a half-century ago, Aldo Leopold created the discipline of wildlife management. Although A Sand Country Almanac is doubtless Leopold’s most popular book, Game Management may well be his most important. In this book he revolutionized the field of conservation.
Stalin ordered his execution, but here Peter Palchinsky has the last word. As if rising from an uneasy grave, Palchinsky’s ghost leads us through the miasma of Soviet technology and industry, pointing out the mistakes he condemned in his time, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. The story of this visionary engineer’s life and work, as Loren Graham relates it, is also the story of the Soviet Union’s industrial promise and failure.
We meet Palchinsky in pre-Revolutionary Russia, immersed in protests against the miserable lot of laborers in the tsarist state, protests destined to echo ironically during the Soviet worker’s paradise. Exiled from the country, pardoned and welcomed back at the outbreak of World War I, the engineer joined the ranks of the Revolutionary government, only to find it no more open to criticism than the previous regime. His turbulent career offers us a window on debates over industrialization. Graham highlights the harsh irrationalities built into the Soviet system—the world’s most inefficient steel mill in Magnitogorsk, the gigantic and ill-conceived hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the infamously cruel and mislocated construction of the White Sea Canal. Time and again, we see the effects of policies that ignore not only the workers’ and consumers’ needs but also sound management and engineering precepts. And we see Palchinsky’s criticism and advice, persistently given, consistently ignored, continue to haunt the Soviet Union right up to its dissolution in 1991.
The story of a man whose gifts and character set him in the path of history, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer is also a cautionary tale about the fate of an engineering that disregards social and human issues.
For poverty-stricken families in the Tennessee River Valley during the Great Depression, news of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal plans to create the Tennessee Valley Authority—bringing the promise of jobs, soil conservation, and electricity—offered hope for a better life. The TVA dams would flood a considerable amount of land on the riverbanks, however, forcing many families to relocate. In exchange for this sacrifice for the “greater good,” these families were promised “fair market value” for their land. As the first geographic location to benefit from the electricity provided by TVA, the people of North Alabama had much to gain, but also much to lose.
In The Greater Good: Media, Family Removal, and TVA Dam Construction in North Alabama Laura Beth Daws and Susan L. Brinson describe the region’s preexisting conditions, analyze the effects of relocation, and argue that local newspapers had a significant impact in promoting the TVA’s agenda. The authors contend that it was principally through newspapers that local residents learned about the TVA and the process and reasons for relocation. Newspapers of the day encouraged regional cooperation by creating an overwhelmingly positive image of the TVA, emphasizing its economic benefits and disregarding many of the details of removal.
Using mostly primary research, the volume addresses two key questions: What happened to relocated families after they sacrificed their homes, lifestyles, and communities in the name of progress? And what role did mediated communication play in both the TVA’s family relocation process and the greater movement for the public to accept the TVA’s presence in their lives? The Greater Good offers a unique window into the larger impact of the New Deal in the South. Until now, most research on the TVA was focused on organizational development rather than on families, with little attention paid to the role of the media in garnering acceptance of a government-enforced relocation.
Geoengineering, Persuasion, and the Climate Crisis: A Geologic Rhetoric exposes the deeply worrying state of discourse over geoengineering—the intentional manipulation of the earth’s climate as means to halt or reverse global warming. These climate-altering projects, which range from cloud-whitening to carbon dioxide removal and from stratospheric aerosol injection to enhanced weathering, are all technological solutions to more complex geosocial problems.
Geoengineering represents one of the most alarming forms of deliberative discourse in the twenty-first century. Yet geoengineering could easily generate as much harm as the environmental traumas it seeks to cure. Complicating these deliberations is the scarcity of public discussion. Most deliberations transpire within policy groups, behind the closed doors of climate-oriented startups, between subject-matter experts at scientific conferences, or in the disciplinary jargon of research journals. Further, much of this conversation occurs primarily in the West.
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder makes clear how the deliberative rhetorical strategies coming from geoengineering advocates have been largely deceptive, hegemonic, deterministic, and exploitative. In this volume, he investigates how geoengineering proponents marshal geologic actors into their arguments—and how current discourse could lead to a greater exploitation of the earth in the future.
Pflugfelder’s goal is to understand the structure, content, purpose, and effect of these discourses, raise the alarm about their deliberative directions, and help us rethink our approach to the climate. In highlighting both the inherent problems of the discourses and the ways geologic rhetoric can be made productive, he attempts to give “the geologic” a place at the table to better understand the roles that all earth systems continue to play in our lives, now and for years to come.
By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. All told, cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet while progress has been made, efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns into the military's operations have proven a daunting and intrigue-filled task that has fallen short of professed goals in the post-Cold War era.
In The Greening of the U.S. Military, Robert F. Durant delves into this too-little understood world of defense environmental policy to uncover the epic and ongoing struggle to build an environmentally sensitive culture within the post-Cold War military. Through over 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reports, and trade newsletter accounts, he offers a telling tale of political, bureaucratic, and intergovernmental combat over the pace, scope, and methods of applying environmental and natural resource laws while ensuring military readiness. He then discerns from these clashes over principle, competing values, and narrow self-interest a theoretical framework for studying and understanding organizational change in public organizations. From Dick Cheney's days as Defense Secretary under President George H. W. Bush to William Cohen's Clinton-era-tenure and on to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the battle over "greening" the military has been one with high-stakes consequences for both national defense and public health, safety, and the environment. Durant's polity-centered perspective and arguments will evoke needed scrutiny, debate, and dialogue over these issues in environmental, military, policymaking, and academic circles.
This singular event is surveyed and interpreted from multiple diverse perspectives—college professors, students, and scientists and activists from a range of academic and epistemological backgrounds—with each chapter reflecting unique professional and personal experiences. Contributors examine both the context for this event and responses to it, embedding this discussion within the broader context of the tens of thousands of mines leaking pollutants into waterways and soils throughout Colorado and the failure to adequately mitigate the larger ongoing crisis.
The Gold King Mine spill was the catalyst that finally brought Superfund listing to the Silverton area; it was a truly sensational event in many respects. Gold Metal Waters will be of interest to students and scholars in all disciplines, but especially in environmental history, western history, mining history, politics, and communication, as well as general readers concerned with human relationships with the environment.
Contributors: Alane Brown, Brian L. Burke, Karletta Chief, Steven Chischilly, Becky Clausen, Michael A. Dichio, Betty Carter Dorr, Cynthia Dott, Gary Gianniny, David Gonzales, Andrew Gulliford, Lisa Marie Jacobs, Ashley Merchant, Teresa Montoya, Scott W. Roberts, Lorraine L. Taylor, Jack Turner, Keith D. Winchester, Megan C. Wrona, Janene Yazzie
As recently as the 1880s, most American cities had no effective means of collecting and removing the mountains of garbage, refuse, and manure-over a thousand tons a day in New York City alone-that clogged streets and overwhelmed the senses of residents. In his landmark study, Garbage in the Cities, Martin Melosi offered the first history of efforts begun in the Progressive Era to clean up this mess.
Since it was first published, Garbage in the Cities has remained one of the best historical treatments of the subject. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes two new chapters that expand the discussion of developments since World War I. It also offers a discussion of the reception of the first edition, and an examination of the ways solid waste management has become more federally regulated in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Melosi traces the rise of sanitation engineering, accurately describes the scope and changing nature of the refuse problem in U.S. cities, reveals the sometimes hidden connections between industrialization and pollution, and discusses the social agendas behind many early cleanliness programs. Absolutely essential reading for historians, policy analysts, and sociologists, Garbage in the Cities offers a vibrant and insightful analysis of this fascinating topic.
Howell acknowledges that New Jersey is sometimes imagined, particularly by non-New Jerseyans, as a giant garbage dump for New York and Philadelphia. But every place has had to struggle with the challenges of waste management. New Jersey's trash history is in fact more interesting and more important than most. New Jersey’s waste history includes intensive planning, deep-seated political conflict, organized crime, and literally every level of state and federal judiciary. It is a colorful history, to say the least, and one that includes a number of firsts with regard to recycling, comprehensive planning, and the challenging economics of trash.
Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.
With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s.
Olliff’s study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.
The Detroit, Michigan-based Grand Trunk Corporation was established more than two decades ago by Canadian National to oversee and maximize the potential of its railroad holdings in the United States. By making use of corporate records, oral histories, and archival material, Hofsommer uncovers the interesting and complex history of Grand Trunk from its inception in 1971 through 1992.
Intimate and engaging, Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentality. Stunning archival photos, from the late 1920s when the bridge was built through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.
Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it some day.
- First major book on the George Washington Bridge
- Full of amazing facts about the GWB that will surprise even bridge historians
- Includes over 30 spectacular illustrations, ranging from archival photographs of the building of the bridge to those that show it draped in an enormous flag after 9/11
- Includes personal accounts of the author's adventures on the bridge
Since opening in 1931, the George Washington Bridge, linking New York and New Jersey, has become the busiest bridge in the world, with 103 million vehicles crossing it in 2016. Many people also consider it the most beautiful bridge in the world, yet remarkably little has been written about this majestic structure.
Intimate and engaging, this revised and expanded edition of Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB, as it is often called, that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and even post-9/11 mentalities. This new edition brings new insight since its initial publication in 2008, including a new chapter on the infamous “Bridgegate” Chris Christie-era scandal of 2013, when members of the governor's administration shut down access to the bridge, causing a major traffic jam and scandal and subsequently helping undermine Christie’s candidacy for the US presidency.
Stunning photos, from when the bridge was built in the late 1920s through the present, are a powerful complement to the bridge's history. Rockland covers the competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Readers will learn about the Swiss immigrant Othmar Ammann, an unsung hero who designed and built the GWB, and how a lack of funding during the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers, which we admire today. There are chapters discussing accidents on the bridge, such as an airplane crash landing in the westbound lanes and the sad story of suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and Rockland's personal adventures on the bridge, including scaling its massive towers on a cable.
Movies, television shows, songs, novels, countless images, and even PlayStation 2 games have aided the GWB in becoming a part of the global popular culture. This tribute will captivate residents living in the shadow of the GWB, the millions who walk, jog, bike, skate, or drive across it, as well as tourists and those who will visit it someday.
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Evolving quietly for more than a decade, the green building movement has found its voice. Its principles of human-centered, environmentally sensitive development have reached a critical mass of architects, engineers, builders, developers, professionals in government, and consumers. Green buildings are showing us how we can have healthier indoor environments that use far less energy and water than conventional buildings do. The federal government, eighteen states, and nearly fifty U.S. cities already require new public buildings to meet “green” standards. According to Yudelson, this is just the beginning.
The Green Building Revolution describes the many “revolutions” that are taking place today: in commercial buildings, schools, universities, public buildings, health care institutions, housing, property management, and neighborhood design. In a clear, highly readable style, Yudelson outlines the broader “journey to sustainability” influenced by the green building revolution and provides a solid business case for accelerating this trend.
Illustrated with more than 50 photos, tables, and charts, and filled with timely information, The Green Building Revolution is the definitive description of a major movement that’s poised to transform our world.
In order to write this book, well-known U.S. green building expert Jerry Yudelson interviewed a number of Europe’s leading architects and engineers and visited many exemplary projects. With the help of copious photographs and illustrations, Yudelson describes some of the leading contemporary green buildings in Europe, including the new Lufthansa headquarters in Frankfurt, the Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hannover, a new school at University College London, the Beaufort Court Zero-Emissions building, the Merck Serono headquarters in Geneva, and a zero-net-energy, all-glass house in Stuttgart.
In clear, jargon-free prose, Yudelson provides profiles of progress in the journey towards sustainability, describes the current regulatory and business climates, and predicts what the near future may bring. He also provides a primer on new technologies, systems, and regulatory approaches in Western Europe that can be adopted in North America, including building-integrated solar technologies, radiant heating and cooling systems, dynamic façades that provide natural ventilation, innovative methods for combining climate control and water features in larger buildings, zero-netenergy homes built like Thermos bottles, and strict government timetables for achieving zero-carbon buildings.
Green Building Trends: Europe is an essential resource for anyone interested in the latest developments in this rapidly growing field.
In the late 1990s, West Texas was full of rundown towns and pumpjacks, aging reminders of the oil rush of an earlier era. Today, the towns are thriving as 300-foot-tall wind turbines tower above those pumpjacks. Wind energy has become Texas’s latest boom, with the Lone Star State now leading the nation. How did this dramatic transformation happen in a place that fights federal environmental policies at every turn? In The Great Texas Wind Rush, environmental reporters Kate Galbraith and Asher Price tell the compelling story of a group of unlikely dreamers and innovators, politicos and profiteers.
The tale spans a generation and more, and it begins with the early wind pioneers, precocious idealists who saw opportunity after the 1970s oil crisis. Operating in an economy accustomed to exploiting natural resources and always looking for the next big thing, their ideas eventually led to surprising partnerships between entrepreneurs and environmentalists, as everyone from Enron executives to T. Boone Pickens, as well as Ann Richards, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, ended up backing the new technology. In this down-to-earth account, the authors explain the policies and science that propelled the “windcatters” to reap the great harvest of Texas wind. They also explore what the future holds for this relentless resource that is changing the face of Texas energy.
Beginning with the days when only the wealthy could afford cars (and their chauffeurs doubled as mechanics), the authors show how blacksmiths and carriage repairmen quickly adapted to the increasing ubiquity of the automobile. Noting differences from region to region as well as between large cities and smaller population centers, they look at the growth of car dealerships, with their separation of service and sales floors, and the parallel rise of small, independent repair shops—businesses that have steadily disappeared from the national scene, though some of the buildings that once housed them have survived, refitted for other purposes. The domestic garage—first conceived as a detached structure, then integrated with the house itself—gets its own chapter. And throughout, the authors explore the various ways in which concerns with practicality, commerce, and aesthetics have dictated how garages were laid out and constructed and what services they offered.
A worthy complement to the authors’ earlier collaborative studies of the gas station and the parking lot, The Garage will engage an eclectic audience of architectural and material-culture specialists, historic preservationists, antique car enthusiasts, local historians, and others fascinated by the impact of the automobile on early America and its legacy in the built environment of modern communities.
Jack H. Morris asserts that Newmont is the link between early gold mining and today’s technology-driven industry. We learn how the company’s founder and several early leaders grew up in gold camps and how, in 1917, the company helped finance South Africa’s largest gold company and later owned famous gold mines in California and Colorado. In the 1960s the company developed the process to capture “invisible gold” from small distributions of the metal in large quantities of rock, thereby opening up the rich gold field at Carlin, Nevada.
Modern gold mining has all the excitement and historic significance of the metal’s colorful past. Instead of panning for ready nuggets, today’s corporate miners must face heavy odds by extracting value from ores containing as little as one-hundredth of an ounce per ton. In often-remote locations, where the capital cost of a new mine can top $2 billion, 250-ton trucks crawl from half mile deep pits and ascend, beetle-like, loaded with ore for extraction of the minute quantities of gold locked inside.
Morris had unique access to company records and the cooperation of more than 80 executives and employees of the firm, but the company exercised no control over content. The author tells a story of discovery and scientific breakthrough; strong-willed, flamboyant leaders like founder Boyce Thompson; corporate raiders such as T. Boone Pickens and Jimmy Goldsmith; shakedowns by the Indonesian government and monumental battles with the French over the richest mine in Peru; and learning to operate in the present environmental regulatory climate. This is a fascinating story of the metal that has ignited passions for centuries and now sells for over $1,000 an ounce.
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