front cover of The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan
The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan
The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth Ecosystems
K. Norman Johnson
Oregon State University Press, 2023
Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.

For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself. Combining this new science with environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle to meet conservation imperatives while also enabling the timber harvests that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort led to the creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the goal of federal forest management toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests and the streams that run through them.

In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and effects of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates short commentaries and histories from key figures—including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.
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Managing the River Commons
Fishing and New England's Rural Economy
Erik Reardon
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
New England once hosted large numbers of anadromous fish, which migrate between rivers and the sea. Salmon, shad, and alewives served a variety of functions within the region's preindustrial landscape, furnishing not only maritime areas but also agricultural communities with an important source of nutrition and a valued article of rural exchange.

Historian Erik Reardon argues that to protect these fish, New England's farmer-fishermen pushed for conservation measures to limit commercial fishing and industrial uses of the river. Beginning in the colonial period and continuing to the mid-nineteenth century, they advocated for fishing regulations to promote sustainable returns, compelled local millers to open their dams during seasonal fish runs, and defeated corporate proposals to erect large-scale dams. As environmentalists work to restore rivers in New England and beyond in the present day, Managing the River Commons offers important lessons about historical conservation efforts that can help guide current campaigns to remove dams and allow anadromous fish to reclaim these waters.
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Manatee Lagoon
Poems
Jenna Le
Acre Books, 2022
The third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment.

In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself. Le aligns the genial but vulnerable sea cow with mermaids, neurologists, the month of November, harmful political speech, and even a family photo at the titular lagoon.

In these poems, Le also reflects on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America. The morning after the 2016 election, as three women of color wait for the bus, one says, “In this new world, we must protect each other.”

Manatee Lagoon is a treasury of voices, bringing together the personal and the persona, with poems dedicated to Kate Spade, John Ashbery, and Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. With this book, Le establishes herself as a talented transcriber of the human condition—and as one of the finest writers of formal verse today.
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Manoomin
The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan
Barbara J Barton
Michigan State University Press, 2018
This is the first book of its kind to bring forward the rich tradition of wild rice in Michigan and its importance to the Anishinaabek people who live there. Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan focuses on the history, culture, biology, economics, and spirituality surrounding this sacred plant. The story travels through time from the days before European colonization and winds its way forward in and out of the logging and industrialization eras. It weaves between the worlds of the Anishinaabek and the colonizers, contrasting their different perspectives and divergent relationships with Manoomin. Barton discusses historic wild rice beds that once existed in Michigan, why many disappeared, and the efforts of tribal and nontribal people with a common goal of restoring and protecting Manoomin across the landscape.
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Marine Conservation Biology
The Science of Maintaining the Sea's Biodiversity
Edited by Elliott A. Norse and Larry B. Crowder; Foreword by Michael E. Soule ; Marine Conservation Biology Institute
Island Press, 2005

Humans are terrestrial animals, and our capacity to see and understand the importance and vulnerability of life in the sea has trailed our growing ability to harm it. While conservation biologists are working to address environmental problems humans have created on land, loss of marine biodiversity, including extinctions and habitat degradation, has received much less attention. At the same time, marine sciences such as oceanography and fisheries biology have largely ignored issues of conservation.

Marine Conservation Biology brings together for the first time in a single volume, leading experts from around the world to apply the lessons and thinking of conservation biology to marine issues. Contributors including James M. Acheson, Louis W. Botsford, James T. Carlton, Kristina Gjerde, Selina S. Heppell, Ransom A. Myers, Julia K. Parrish, Stephen R. Palumbi, and Daniel Pauly offer penetrating insights on the nature of marine biodiversity, what threatens it, and what humans can and must do to recover the biological integrity of the world's estuaries, coastal seas, and oceans.

Sections examine: distinctive aspects of marine populations and ecosystems; threats to marine biological diversity, singly and in combination; place-based management of marine ecosystems; the often-neglected human dimensions of marine conservation.

Marine Conservation Biology breaks new ground by creating the conceptual framework for the new field of marine conservation biology -- the science of protecting, recovering, and sustainably using the living sea. It synthesizes the latest knowledge and ideas from leading thinkers in disciplines ranging from larval biology to sociology, making it a must-read for research and teaching faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students (who share an interest in bringing conservation biology to marine issues). Likewise, its lucid scientific examinations illuminate key issues facing environmental managers, policymakers, advocates, and funders concerned with the health of our oceans.

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Meander Scars
Reflections on Healing the Willamette River
Abby Phillips Metzger
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Abby Phillips Metzger’s book of personal stories recounts a forgotten Oregon river, the Willamette, as it was before white settlement. Once a rich network of channels and sloughs, the Willamette today bears the scars of development and degradation.

Yet, through canoe trips and intimate explorations of the river, Metzger discovers glints of resiliency: a beaver trolling through a slough, native fish in quiet backwaters, and strong currents that carry undertones of the wild Willamette. Together with tales from farmers and scientists alike, these experiences lead Metzger to ask whether something scarred can fully heal, and whether a disjointed river can be whole again.

A story of re-discovery as told by a learner, Meander Scars will appeal to readers of literary nonfiction, river advocates, naturalists, and outdoor enthusiasts interested in sustaining healthy river systems for themselves, their children, and beyond.
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The Meaning of Rivers
Flow and Reflection in American Literature
T. S. McMillin
University of Iowa Press, 2011
In the continental United States, rivers serve to connect state to state, interior with exterior, the past to the present, but they also divide places and peoples from one another. These connections and divisions have given rise to a diverse body of literature that explores American nature, ranging from travel accounts of seventeenth-century Puritan colonists to magazine articles by twenty-first-century enthusiasts of extreme sports. Using pivotal American writings to determine both what literature can tell us about rivers and, conversely, how rivers help us think about the nature of literature, The Meaning of Rivers introduces readers to the rich world of flowing water and some of the different ways in which American writers have used rivers to understand the world through which these waters flow.
      Embracing a hybrid, essayistic form—part literary theory, part cultural history, and part fieldwork—The Meaning of Rivers connects the humanities to other disciplines and scholarly work to the land. Whether developing a theory of palindromes or reading works of American literature as varied as Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and James Dickey’s Deliverance, McMillin urges readers toward a transcendental retracing of their own interpretive encounters.
      The nature of texts and the nature of “nature” require diverse and versatile interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. By taking us upstream as well as down, McMillin draws attention to the potential of rivers for improving our sense of place and time.
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Mega-Dams in World Literature
Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building
Margaret Ziolkowski
University of Wyoming Press, 2024
Mega-Dams in World Literature reveals the varied effects of large dams on people and their environments as expressed in literary works, focusing on the shifting attitudes toward large dams that emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Margaret Ziolkowski covers the enthusiasm for large-dam construction that took place during the mid-twentieth-century heyday of mega-dams, the increasing number of people displaced by dams, the troubling environmental effects they incur, and the types of destruction and protest to which they may be subject.
 
Using North American, Native American, Russian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese novels and poems, Ziolkowski explores the supposed progress that these structures bring. The book asks how the human urge to exploit and control waterways has affected our relationships to nature and the environment and argues that the high modernism of the twentieth century, along with its preoccupation with development, casts the hydroelectric dam as a central symbol of domination over nature and the power of the nation state. 
 
Beyond examining the exultation of large dams as symbols of progress, Mega-Dams in World Literature takes a broad international and cultural approach that humanizes and personalizes the major issues associated with large dams through nuanced analyses, paying particular attention to issues engendered by high modernism and settler colonialism. Both general and specialist readers interested in human-environment relationships will enjoy this prescient book.
 
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Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises
Success on the Commons and the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene
David Barton Bray
University of Arizona Press, 2020
The road to sustainable forest management and stewardship has been debated for decades. Some advocate for governmental control and oversight. Some say that the only way to stem the tide of deforestation is to place as many tracts as possible under strict protection. Caught in the middle of this debate, forest inhabitants of the developing world struggle to balance the extraction of precarious livelihoods from forests while responding to increasing pressures from national governments, international institutions, and their own perceptions of environmental decline to protect biodiversity, restore forests, and mitigate climate change.

Mexico presents a unique case in which much of the nation’s forests were placed as commons in the hands of communities, who, with state support and their own entrepreneurial vigor, created community forest enterprises (CFEs). David Barton Bray, who has spent more than thirty years engaged with and researching Mexican community forestry, shows that this reform has transformed forest management in that country at a scale and level of maturity unmatched anywhere else in the world.

For decades Mexico has been conducting a de facto large-scale experiment in the design of a national social-ecological system (SES) focused on community forests. What happens when you give subsistence communities rights over forests, as well as training, organizational support, equipment, and financial capital? Do the communities destroy the forest in the name of economic development, or do they manage them sustainably, generating current income while maintaining intergenerational value as a resource for their children? Bray shares the scientific and social evidence that can now begin to answer these questions. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and the interested public on the future of global forest resilience and the possibilities for a good Anthropocene.
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Milwaukee
A City Built on Water
John Gurda
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Paddle through the watery history of the Midwest’s Cream City. 

The success and survival of Milwaukee lies in the rivers that meander through its streets and the great lake at its shore. The area’s earliest inhabitants recognized the value of an abundant, clean water supply for food and transportation. Settlers, shipbuilders, and city leaders used the same waters to travel greater distances, power million-dollar industries, and even have a bit of fun. 

In Milwaukee: A City Built on Water, celebrated historian John Gurda expands on his popular Milwaukee Public Television documentary, relating the mucky history of the waters that gave Milwaukee life—and occasionally threatened the city through erosion, invasive species, and water-borne diseases.

Telling tales of brewers, brickmakers, ecologists, and engineers, Gurda explores the city’s complicated connection with its most precious resource and greatest challenge. You’ll meet the generations of people, from a Potawatomi chief to fur traders and fishermen, who settled on the small spit of land known as Jones Island; learn how Milwaukee’s unique water composition creates its distinct cream-colored bricks; visit Wisconsin’s first waterparks; and see how city leaders transformed the Milwaukee River—once described as a “vast sewer” with an “odorous tide”—into today’s lively and lovely Riverwalk.
 
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Money Trees
The Douglas Fir and American Forestry, 1900-1944
Emily K. Brock
Oregon State University Press, 2015
Around the start of the last century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were viewed as dynamic sites of industrial production, and also as natural landscapes of ecological integrity. These competing visions arose as the nation’s professional foresters faced conflicting demands from lumber companies and government regulators. External pressures converged with internal scientific debates within the profession, leading foresters to question the proper scope of their work.
 
Money Trees is an interdisciplinary history of the crucial decades that shaped the modern American conception of the value of the forest. It begins with early 20th century environmental changes in the Douglas Fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, which led to increasing divisiveness and controversy among foresters. Brock balances this regional story with a national view of the intellectual and political currents that governed forest management, marshaling archival evidence from industry, government, and scientific sources.
 
An important contribution to environmental scholarship, Money Trees offers a nuanced vision of forestry’s history and its past relationship to both wilderness activism and scientific ecology. With fresh perspectives on well-known environmental figures such as Bob Marshall and Gifford Pinchot, it will add to the conversation among scholars in environmental history, history of science, and the history of the American West. It will be welcomed as a key resource across the spectrum of environmental studies, and by anyone interested in natural resources, land management, the role of science in environmentalism, and the modern wilderness movement.
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The Mortal Sea
Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
W. Jeffrey Bolster
Harvard University Press, 2012

Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.

While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.

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Mount Le Conte
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2016

In print for the first time in fifty years, Mount Le Conte is a reissue of the important 1966 self-published memoir by Paul J. Adams (1901–1985), a well-known Tennessee naturalist and the first custodian of the Smoky Mountain’s majestic summit in the years before the area was declared a national park.

Appointed custodian of Mount Le Conte in 1925 by the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, Adams went to work immediately and spent a year making the camp suitable for overnight visitors. Mount Le Conte, a massive mile-high formation extending five miles from the main divide of the Great Smoky Mountains, with its rugged landscapes, rushing streams, and fecund forests, was considered a prime showplace in efforts to establish the Smokies as a national park.

In addition to an extensive introduction, the editors have augmented the original text of Mount Le Conte with several photographs and sketches gleaned from Adams’s personal papers, resulting in a fuller, more complete reconstruction of Adams’s role in establishing the camp that would later come to be known as Le Conte Lodge.

An important source on the fascinating history of Mount Le Conte in the pre-Park era, this book is a companion to the recently published Smoky Jack: The Adventures of a Dog and his Master on Mount Le Conte (University of Tennessee Press, 2016).

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Mountaineering Essays
John Muir
University of Utah Press, 1997

One of the world’s foremost writers of the mountaineering essay—his writings are finely wrought expressions of the transcendental joy he found in the mountains—John Muir also founded the Sierra Club in 1892 as a way of supporting his belief that Americans must preserve national parks throughout the country in order that future generations might be spiritually inspired. Characterized by an iron endurance and an insatiable curiosity, Muir vowed to spend his days studying God’s unwritten Bible—nature—or what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Muir early on learned to keep a journal in the manner of Emerson, but he is also considered one of America’s pioneer glaciologists, an interest he gained while wandering in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Whether frozen in a subzero blizzard on Mount Shasta, seemingly doomed on the unforgiving slopes of Mount Ritter, or exhilarated by the ice-shapes viewed from the summit of Mount Rainier, Muir reveled in the mountain experience.

This volume contains eleven mountain essays that include both adventurous narrative, joyful exultation, and descriptions of natural features such as alpine soil beds, ancient glaciers and living glaciers, and mountain sculpture. In each, Muir maintains a careful and subtle balance between the physical aspects of ascending and the more symbolic observations of the sublimity of his surroundings. Mountains are for him a source of discovery that provide an affirmation of the human spirit.
 

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Mythical River
Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest
Melissa L. Sevigny
University of Iowa Press, 2016
In a lyrical mix of natural science, history, and memoir, Melissa L. Sevigny ponders what it means to make a home in the American Southwest at a time when its most essential resource, water, is overexploited and undervalued. Mythical River takes the reader on a historical sojourn into the story of the Buenaventura, an imaginary river that led eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, fur trappers, and emigrants astray for seventy-five years. This mythical river becomes a metaphor for our modern-day attempts to supply water to a growing population in the Colorado River Basin. Readers encounter a landscape literally remapped by the search for “new” water, where rivers flow uphill, dams and deep wells reshape geography, trees become intolerable competitors for water, and new technologies tap into clouds and oceans.

In contrast to this fantasy of abundance, Sevigny explores acts of restoration. From a dismantled dam in Arizona to an accidental wetland in Mexico, she examines how ecologists, engineers, politicians, and citizens have attempted to secure water for desert ecosystems. In a place scarred by conflict, she shows how recognizing the rights of rivers is a path toward water security. Ultimately, Sevigny writes a new map for the future of the American Southwest, a vision of a society that accepts the desert’s limits in exchange for an intimate relationship with the natural world. 
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