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La Frontera
Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory
Thomas Miller Klubock
Duke University Press, 2014
In La Frontera, Thomas Miller Klubock offers a pioneering social and environmental history of southern Chile, exploring the origins of today’s forestry "miracle" in Chile. Although Chile's forestry boom is often attributed to the free-market policies of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Frontera shows that forestry development began in the early twentieth century when Chilean governments turned to forestry science and plantations of the North American Monterey pine to establish their governance of the frontier's natural and social worlds. Klubock demonstrates that modern conservationist policies and scientific forestry drove the enclosure of frontier commons occupied by indigenous and non-indigenous peasants who were defined as a threat to both native forests and tree plantations. La Frontera narrates the century-long struggles among peasants, Mapuche indigenous communities, large landowners, and the state over access to forest commons in the frontier territory. It traces the shifting social meanings of environmentalism by showing how, during the 1990s, rural laborers and Mapuches, once vilified by conservationists and foresters, drew on the language of modern environmentalism to critique the social dislocations produced by Chile's much vaunted neoliberal economic model, linking a more just social order to the biodiversity of native forests.
 
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The Land Between the Lakes
A Geography of the Forgotten Future
Ronald A. Foresta
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Between Barkley and Kentucky Lakes—two great, artificial bodies of water in western Tennessee and western Kentucky—lies a wooded land that looks from above like the flattened thumb of a green giant. Once a land of marginal farms and small settlements, this 240-square-mile peninsula, known as the Land Between the Lakes, has been a national recreation area for the last half-century. Its rolling, wooded hills and open bottomlands give the place charm but little majesty.  The place swallows up its few campgrounds and visitors they attracts, creating a vacuous tranquility. In this volume, Foresta explores how this forgotten and bypassed region became a national recreation area.  He uses its history to retrieve our old attitudes toward nature, progress, and personal development. He also uses its history to retrieve a vision of the future that rallied idealists, intellectuals, and even public officials to its banner. 
    In the early 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to create a great park for posterity at the Land Between the Lakes.  The park was to host the vast stretches of leisure that wealthy, secure, and more equal Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have at their disposal. It would be a place where such Americans could turn that leisure into happiness, psychic well-being, and strength of character. The TVA cleared the land of its inhabitants to create the park, removing people from their homes and severing their roots, thus effacing the history of the place. It then set about reshaping the land in the image of an anticipated future.  But when that future never arrived, managers struggled to fit the place to the America that actually came into being.  In the end they failed, leaving the Land Between the Lakes enveloped in a haunting sense of emptiness.
    A deft blend of environmental history, geography, politics, and cultural history, Land Between the Lakes demonstrates both the idealism of mid-twentieth-century planners and how quickly such idealism can fall out of alignment with the flow of history.  In so doing it explores a forgotten vision of the future that was in many ways more appealing than the present that came into being in its place.
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A Land Between Waters
Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico
Edited by Christopher R. Boyer
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Mexico is one of the most ecologically diverse nations on the planet, with landscapes that range from rainforests to deserts and from small villages to the continent’s largest metropolis. Yet historians are only beginning to understand how people’s use of the land, extraction of its resources, and attempts to conserve it have shaped both the landscape and its inhabitants.

A Land Between Waters explores the relationship between the people and the environment in Mexico. It heralds the arrival of environmental history as a major area of study within the field of Mexican history. This volume brings together a dozen original works of environmental history by some of the foremost experts in Mexican environmental history from both the United States and Mexico.

The contributions collected in this seminal volume explore a wide array of topics, from the era of independence to the present day. Together they examine how humans have used, abused, and attended to nature in Mexico over more than two hundred years. Written in clear, accessible prose, A Land Between Waters showcases the breadth of Mexican environmental history in a way that defines the key topics in the field and suggests avenues for subsequent work. Most importantly, it assesses the impacts of environmental changes that Mexico has faced in the past with an eye to informing national debates about the challenges that the nation will face in the future.
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Land of Big Rivers
French and Indian Illinois, 1699-1778
M. J. Morgan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

Drawing on research from a variety of academic fields, such as archaeology, history, botany, ecology, and physical science, M. J. Morgan explores the intersection of people and the environment in early eighteenth-century Illinois Country—a stretch of fecund, alluvial river plain along the Mississippi river. Arguing against the traditional narrative that describes Illinois as an untouched wilderness until the influx of American settlers, Morgan illustrates how the story began much earlier.

She focuses her study on early French and Indian communities, and later on the British, nestled within the tripartite environment of floodplain, riverine cliffs and bluffs, and open, upland till plain/prairie and examines the impact of these diverse groups of people on the ecological landscape. By placing human lives within the natural setting of the period—the abundant streams and creeks, the prairies, plants and wildlife—she traces the environmental change that unfolded across almost a century. She describes how it was a land in motion; how the occupying peoples used, extracted, and extirpated its resources while simultaneously introducing new species; and how the flux and flow of life mirrored the movement of the rivers. Morgan emphasizes the importance of population sequences, the relationship between the aboriginals and the Europeans, the shared use of resources, and the effects of each on the habitat.

Land of Big Rivers is a unique, many-themed account of the big-picture ecological change that occurred during the early history of the Illinois Country. It is the first book to consider the environmental aspects of the Illinois Indian experience and to reconsider the role of the French and British in environmental change in the mid-Mississippi Valley. It engagingly recreates presettlement Illinois with a remarkable interdisciplinary approach and provides new details that will encourage understanding of the interaction between physical geography and the plants, animals, and people in the Illinois Country. Furthermore, it exhibits the importance of looking at the past in the context of environmental transformation, which is especially relevant in light of today’s global climate change.

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Land of Extremes
A Natural History of the Arctic North Slope of Alaska
Alex Huryn and John Hobbie
University of Alaska Press, 2012

This book is a comprehensive guide to the natural history of the North Slope, the only arctic tundra in the United States. The first section provides detailed information on climate, geology, landforms, and ecology. The second provides a guide to the identification and natural history of the common animals and plants and a primer on the human prehistory of the region from the Pleistocene through the mid-twentieth century. The appendix provides the framework for a tour of the natural history features along the Dalton Highway, a road connecting the crest of the Brooks Range with Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean, and includes mile markers where travelers may safely pull off to view geologic formations, plants, birds, mammals, and fish. Featuring hundreds of illustrations that support the clear, authoritative text, Land of Extremes reveals the arctic tundra as an ecosystem teeming with life.

 
 
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A Land of Ghosts
The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia
Campbell, David G
Rutgers University Press, 2007

For thirty years David G. Campbell has explored the Amazon, an enchanting terrain of forest and river that is home to the greatest diversity of plants and animals to have ever existed, anywhere at any time, during the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

With great artistic flair, Campbell describes a journey up the Rio Moa, a remote tributary of the Amazon River, 2,800 miles from its mouth. Here he joins three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together deep into the rainforest and set up camp in order to survey every woody plant on a two-hectare plot of land with about as many tree species as in all of North America.

Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, a Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These pioneers live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them. He explores the intimate relationship between the extinction of native language and the extirpation of biological diversity. "It's hard for a people to love a place that is not defined in words and thus cannot be understood. And it's easy to give away something for which there are no words, something you never knew existed."

In elegant prose that enchants and entrances, Campbell has written an elegy for the Amazon forest and its peoples-for what has become a land of ghosts.

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Land of Sunshine
An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles
William Deverell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism--is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer.

Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the lost opportunities of "roads not taken," these essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians, instead consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature.
In the nineteenth century, for example, "density" was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks "made life seem worth the living."

We now call that vision "sprawl," and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. History matters.

So here are the plants and animals of the Los Angeles basin, its rivers and watersheds. Here are the landscapes of fact and fantasy, the historical actors, events, and circumstances that have proved transformative over and over again. The result is a nuanced and rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.

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Landscape and Interaction. The Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, Cyprus. Volume 1. Methodology, Analysis and Interpretation
Michael Given
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2013
The Troodos Mountain range in central Cyprus is a region of great physical and cultural diversity. The landscapes range from fertile, cultivated plains to narrow, dry valleys and forested mountain regions and this physical topography is overlain by a rich human cultural landscape of farming, mining, industry, settlement, burial and ritual behaviour. Over six field seasons, a team of specialists and fieldwalkers from the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project (TAESP) investigated the northern edge of this region and explored the complex and dynamic relationship between landscape and people over 12,000 years. The results of their integrated and interpretative approach are presented here, in the first of two volumes. Beginning with a considered overview of the context, research aims and methodology of the project, Volume 1 provides detailed accounts of the archaeology, material culture, geography and environmental record of the entire survey area. This wealth of information is then bought together to produce a series of chronological and thematic analyses of the interaction between people and landscape in this region of Cyprus from the Prehistoric through to the Modern period.
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Landscapes of Power and Identity
Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic
Cynthia Radding
Duke University Press, 2005
Landscapes of Power and Identity is a groundbreaking comparative history of two colonies on the frontiers of the Spanish empire—the Sonora region of northwestern Mexico and the Chiquitos region of eastern Bolivia’s lowlands—from the late colonial period through the middle of the nineteenth century. An innovative combination of environmental and cultural history, this book reflects Cynthia Radding’s more than two decades of research on Mexico and Bolivia and her consideration of the relationships between human societies and the geographic landscapes they inhabit and create. At first glance, Sonora and Chiquitos are quite different: one a scrub-covered desert, the other a tropical rainforest of the greater Amazonian and Paraguayan river basins. Yet the regions are similar in many ways. Both were located far from the centers of colonial authority, organized into Jesuit missions and linked to the principal mining centers of New Spain and the Andes, and then absorbed into nation-states in the nineteenth century. In each area, the indigenous communities encountered European governors, missionaries, slave hunters, merchants, miners, and ranchers.

Radding’s comparative approach illuminates what happened when similar institutions of imperial governance, commerce, and religion were planted in different physical and cultural environments. She draws on archival documents, published reports by missionaries and travelers, and previous histories as well as ecological studies and ethnographies. She also considers cultural artifacts, including archaeological remains, architecture, liturgical music, and religious dances. Radding demonstrates how colonial encounters were conditioned by both the local landscape and cultural expectations; how the colonizers and colonized understood notions of territory and property; how religion formed the cultural practices and historical memories of the Sonoran and Chiquitano peoples; and how the conflict between the indigenous communities and the surrounding creole societies developed in new directions well into the nineteenth century.

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The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
Edited by Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow.

The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.

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Law and the Living Colorado River
Robert W. Adler
University of Utah Press, 2023

Law and the Living Colorado River asserts that the so-called Law of the River—the vast assemblage of interstate compacts, international treaties, federal and state statutes, regulations, contracts, and other legal documents governing use and management of the Colorado River—ignores the needs of the river as a nested system of aquatic and aquatic-dependent ecosystems. Although society now recognizes and appreciates the natural values of the Colorado River, the Law of the River remains fixed in service of human economies like irrigation and hydropower. Robert W. Adler contends that the law must respond to changing values that prioritize natural systems alongside human ones. He proposes acknowledging the legal rights of the river itself, following the recent movement to recognize rights of nature in other ecosystems around the world. Recognizing that U.S. law has significant barriers to that proposal, however, Adler borrows from aspects of international water law to propose as a shorter-term strategy amendments to the Colorado River Compact that would enhance protection of the river’s environmental needs and values.

Adler delivered this lecture on March 17, 2022, at the 27th annual symposium of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, jointly sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Center and the Water & Tribes Initiative | Colorado River Basin.

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Leaded
The Poisoning of Idaho's Silver Valley
Michael C. Mix
Oregon State University Press, 2016
Leaded is a timely and deeply researched account of one of the largest environmental disasters in western US history. It examines the origin, evolution, and causes of the harmful environmental and human health effects caused by mining operations in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Mining District—the “Silver Valley”—from 1885 to 1981. During that period, district mines produced over $5 billion worth of lead, silver, and zinc. The Bunker Hill Company dominated business and community activities in the district as owners and operators of the largest mine, lead smelter, and zinc plant.

During the first half of the twentieth century, industrial mining operations caused severe environmental damage to area waterways and lands from releases of sulfur gases, lead, and other toxic metals. Damaging human health effects were evident soon after the smelter opened in 1917, when Bunker Hill workers suffered from lead poisoning. Despite the obvious devastation, due to the influence of the mine and lead industry in state and federal politics, as well as scientific uncertainties about pollution effects, no effective federal laws regulating mining and smelting operations were passed until the 1970s.

In 1974, uncontrolled Bunker Hill lead smelter emissions led to the worst community lead exposure problem in the United States and resulted in a widespread lead poisoning epidemic of Silver Valley children. In response, the Environmental Protection Agency ultimately mandated federal air lead standards. At the same time, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health passed national standards reducing allowable occupational lead exposures. Bunker Hill could not meet the new standards, which was a major factor in forcing the company to close, leaving behind a contaminated geographic area that was classified at the time as the largest Superfund site in the United States.

Leaded will resonate with anyone who is concerned about the long-term effects of industrial pollution, as well as students of environmental history, western US history, mining history, environmental ethics, and environmental law.
 
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Leavetakings
Essays
Corinna Cook
University of Alaska Press, 2020
Leavetaking is an Alaska-based essay collection propelled by movements of departure and return. Corinna Cook asks: What can coming and going reveal about place? About how a place calls to us? About heeding that call? And might wandering serve not only to map new places but also to map the most familiar ones, like home? Departures and returns in these essays derive in large part from the narrator’s personal experiences of cross-continental travel by pickup truck and by airplane, human-powered expedition-style travel by kayak, regional travel by ferry, and her daily or local travel on foot. But the movement of coming and going at the heart of this collection exceeds the physical, for these essays are also intent on understanding spiritual and psychological pulses of proximity and distance in human connections to other people, their stories, and their homes.
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Life Along the Delaware Bay
Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds
Niles, Lawrence
Rutgers University Press, 2012

The Delaware Bay is the second largest and most diverse bay on the East Coast. It has a rich cultural history, has played an important role in the region’s commerce and tourism, and has spectacular and vital natural resources. Birdwatchers gather along its shores to watch the spectacle of thousands of spawning horseshoe crabs, the dense flocks of migrant shorebirds, the fall hawk migration, and the huge migration of monarch butterflies.

 Life Along the Delaware Bay focuses on the area as an ecosystem, the horseshoe crab as a keystone species within that system, and the crucial role that the bay plays in the migratory ecology of shorebirds. An abundance of horseshoe crabs spawning on the Delaware Bay beaches results in an abundance of eggs brought to the surface, providing a source of high-quality food and bringing hundreds of thousands of shorebirds to the bay to forage in late May and early June. A dramatic decline in horseshoe crabs has resulted in a rapid and dramatic decline in birds, particularly the red knot. This decline has sounded an alarm throughout the world, prompting a host of biologists to converge on the bay each spring, to understand the biology and conservation of red knots and other shorebirds. 

Lawrence Niles, Joanna Burger, and Amanda Dey examine current efforts to protect the bay and identify new efforts that must take place to ensure it remains an intact ecological system. Over three hundred stunning color photographs and maps capture the beauty and majesty of this unique treasure—one that must be protected today and for generations to come.

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Life in Oil
Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia
By Michael L. Cepek, Photographs by Bear Guerra
University of Texas Press, 2018

Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as their forests fell, their rivers ran black, and their bodies succumbed to new illnesses. In 1993, they became plaintiffs in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that aims to compensate them for the losses they have suffered. Yet even in the midst of a tragic toxic disaster, the Cofán have refused to be destroyed. While seeking reparations for oil’s assault on their lives, they remain committed to the survival of their language, culture, and rainforest homeland.

Life in Oil presents the compelling, nuanced story of how the Cofán manage to endure at the center of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction. Michael L. Cepek has lived and worked with Cofán people for more than twenty years. In this highly accessible book, he goes well beyond popular and academic accounts of their suffering to share the largely unknown stories that Cofán people themselves create—the ones they tell in their own language, in their own communities, and to one another and the few outsiders they know and trust. Their words reveal that life in oil is a form of slow, confusing violence for some of the earth’s most marginalized, yet resilient, inhabitants.

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Life in the Himalaya
An Ecosystem at Risk
Maharaj K. Pandit
Harvard University Press, 2017

The collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates around fifty million years ago profoundly altered earth’s geography and regional climates. The rise of the Himalaya led to intensification of the monsoon, the birth of massive glaciers and turbulent rivers, and an efflorescence of ecosystems along the most extreme elevational gradient on Earth. When the Ice Age ended, humans became part of this mix, and today nearly one quarter of the world’s population inhabits its river basins, from Afghanistan to Myanmar. Life in the Himalaya examines the region’s geophysical and biological systems and explores the past and future of human sustainability in the mountain’s shadow.

Maharaj Pandit divides the Himalaya’s history into four phases. During the first, the mountain and its ecosystems formed. In the second, humans altered the landscape, beginning with nomadic pastoralism, continuing to commercial deforestation, and culminating in pockets of resistance to forest exploitation. The third phase saw a human population explosion, accompanied by road and dam building and other large-scale infrastructure that degraded ecosystems and caused species extinctions. Pandit outlines a future networking phase which holds the promise of sustainable living within the mountain’s carrying capacity.

Today, the Himalaya is threatened by recurrent natural disasters and is at risk of catastrophic loss of life. If humans are to have a sustainable future there, Pandit argues, they will need to better understand the region’s geological vulnerability, ecological fragility, and sociocultural sensitivity. Life in the Himalaya outlines the mountain’s past in order to map a way forward.

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Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands
New Approaches to Archaeology in the Yucatán Peninsula
Edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Bethany A. Morrison
University of Arizona Press, 2006
The flat, dry reaches of the northern Yucatán Peninsula have been largely ignored by archaeologists drawn to the more illustrious sites of the south. This book is the first volume to focus entirely on the northern Maya lowlands, presenting a broad cross-section of current research projects in the region by both established and up-and-coming scholars. To address the heretofore unrecognized importance of the northern lowlands in Maya prehistory, the contributors cover key topics relevant to Maya studies: the environmental and historical significance of the region, the archaeology of both large and small sites, the development of agriculture, resource management, ancient politics, and long-distance interaction among sites. As a volume in the series Native Peoples of the Americas, it adds a human dimension to archaeological findings by incorporating modern ethnographic data.

By exploring various social and political levels of Maya society through a broad expanse of time, Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands not only reconstructs a little-known past, it also suggests the broad implications of archaeology for related studies of tourism, household economies, and ethnoarchaeology. It is a benchmark work that pointedly demonstrates the need for researchers in both north and south to ignore modern geographic boundaries in their search for new ideas to further their understanding of the ancient Maya.
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Lincoln and the Natural Environment
James Tackach
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

In this groundbreaking environmental biography of Abraham Lincoln, James Tackach maps Lincoln’s lifelong relationship with the natural world from his birth and boyhood on Midwestern farms through his political career and presidency dealing with the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War.
 
Lincoln was born in a generation that grew up on farms but began to move to cities as industrialization transformed the American economy. Turning away from the outdoor, manual labor of his youth, he chose careers in law and politics but always found solace outside first on the prairies of Illinois and, later, at the woodsy presidential retreat. As Tackach shows, Lincoln relied on examples and metaphors from the natural world in his speeches and writings.
 
As a member of the Whig Party Lincoln endorsed the Industrial Revolution, which transformed the nation’s economy and its physical, social, and cultural landscapes, and advocated for the creation of railroads, canals, roads, and bridges to facilitate growth and the distribution of products. But he and his party failed to take steps to protect the natural environment. Surveying the destruction of the environment in the mid-nineteenth century, Tackach outlines how some American writers, the first voices for protection and conservation, began to call attention to the results of deforestation and the overhunting of animals during Lincoln’s lifetime.
 
As commander in chief during the Civil War, Lincoln approved a strategy that included significant infrastructure and environmental damage. In the South, where most of the battles occurred, Union troops burned cities and towns and destroyed plantations, farms, and natural landscapes. Tackach argues that, midway through his presidency, Lincoln seemed to sense that postwar Reconstruction would have to be spiritual, political, economic, and environmental in order to heal the nation’s wounds. He signed the Morrill Act, creating the land-grant colleges, and the environmentally progressive Yosemite Grant Act, which preserved thousands of acres of forest in California.
 
The first scholar to thoroughly investigate Lincoln’s lifelong relationship with the natural environment, Tackach paints Lincoln’s personal and professional life against the backdrop of nineteenth-century American environmental history, issues, and writers, providing insights into contemporary environmental issues.
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Listening to the Land
Stories from the Cacapon and Lost River Valley
Jamie S. Ross
West Virginia University Press, 2013
The Cacapon and Lost Rivers are located in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. Well loved by paddlers and anglers, these American Heritage Rivers are surrounded by a lush valley of wildlife and flora that is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Although still rural and mostly forested, development and land fragmentation in the Cacapon and Lost River Valley have increased over the last decades. Listening to the Land: Stories from the Cacapon and Lost River Valley is a conversation between the people of this Valley and their land, chronicling this community’s dedication to preserving its farms, forests, and rural heritage.
United around a shared passion for stewardship, the Cacapon and Lost Rivers Land Trust and local landowners have permanently protected over 11,000 acres by incorporating local values into permanent conservation action. Despite the economic pressures that have devastated nearby valleys over the past twenty years, natives and newcomers alike have worked to protect this valley by sustaining family homesteads and buying surrounding parcels.This partnership between the Land Trust and the people of this Valley, unprecedented in West Virginia and nationally recognized for its success, greatly enriches historic preservation and conservation movements, bringing to light the need to investigate, pursue, and listen to the enduring connection between people and place.  
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Living with Florida's Atlantic Beaches
Coastal Hazards from Amelia Island to Key West
David M. Bush, William J. Neal, Norma J. Longo, Kenyon C. Lindeman, Deborah F. Pilkey, Luciana Slomp Esteves, John D. Congleton, and Orrin H. Pilkey
Duke University Press, 2004

From Amelia Island just south of Georgia to Key West's southern tip, beaches are one of Florida's greatest assets. Yet these beaches are in danger: rapid structural development on a highly erodible coast make them vulnerable to some of nature's greatest storms. The same development that has been driven by the attraction of beautiful beaches and coastal amenities now threatens those very resources. In turn, coastal structures are at risk from sea-level rise, shoreline retreat, winter storms, and hurricanes. Most of the methods for reducing losses associated with storms protect property only in the short term—at a growing cost in dollars and loss of natural habitat in the long term.

Living with Florida's Atlantic Beaches is a guide to mitigating or reducing losses of property, human life, and natural resources by living with, rather than just at, the shore. This illustrated volume provides an introduction to coastal processes and geology as well as a brief history of coastal hazards and short-sighted human responses. This is the first volume in the Living with the Shore series to discuss the significant long-term impact of dredge-and-fill beach construction on living marine resources. Guidance is provided for long-term risk reduction in the form of tips on storm-resistant construction and site evaluation; maps for evaluating relative vulnerability to hazards are also included. A brief review of coastal regulations will help property owners understand and navigate the various permit requirements for developing coastal property. Living with Florida's Atlantic Beaches is an invaluable source of information for everyone from the curious beach visitor to the community planner, from the prudent property investor to the decision-making public official.

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Living with Lead
An Environmental History of Idaho's Coeur D'Alenes, 1885-2011
Bradley D. Snow
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
The Coeur d’Alenes, a twenty-five by ten mile portion of the Idaho Panhandle, is home to one of the most productive mining districts in world history. Historically the globe’s richest silver district and also one of the nation’s biggest lead and zinc producers, the Coeur d’Alenes’ legacy also includes environmental pollution on an epic scale. For decades local waters were fouled with tailings from the mining district’s more than one hundred mines and mills and the air surrounding Kellogg, Idaho was laced with lead and other toxic heavy metals issuing from the Bunker Hill Company’s smelter. The same industrial processes that damaged the environment and harmed human health, however, also provided economic sustenance to thousands of local residents and a string of proud, working-class communities. Living with Lead endeavors to untangle the costs and benefits of a century of mining, milling, and smelting in a small western city and the region that surrounds it.
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Living with the South Carolina Coast
Gered Lennon, William J. Neal, David Bush, Orrin H. Pilkey, Matthew Stutz and Jane Bullock
Duke University Press, 1996
Living with the South Carolina Coast is the latest volume in the Living with the Shore series that comprehensively investigates the status of a specific state's coastal region. Completely revising a previously published work in the series that dealt with South Carolina, this book not only brings up-to-date a wealth of information on migrating shorelines, selection of building sites, and pertinent regulations, but also reflects an expanded concept of the coast to include a broad range of coastal hazards.
Powerful storms have always played a major role in coastal processes in South Carolina, and the effects of Hurricane Hugo, the storm that ravaged the area in 1989, are thoroughly discussed. A series of Coastal Risk Maps are also included. These maps, graphically depicting areas of predictable erosion and storm damage potential, have been provided for every developed beach or barrier island in the state. Beyond the threat of hurricanes and coastal erosion, South Carolina, home of the Charleston Seismic Region, is also at risk for earthquakes. An entire chapter is devoted to earthquake-resistant construction, and the great Charleston earthquake of 1886 is examined in detail. Fires and floods are discussed. The Beachfront Management Act of 1990—the first state legislation of its kind that provides a system for dealing with migrating shorelines while preserving beaches for future generations—is also explained.
Covering everything from a history of the development of South Carolina's coast to recommendations on how to select an island homesite, this book will be a resource to professional coastal planners and managers, residents, prospective homeowners, and naturalists.
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Loss and Wonder at the World’s End
Laura A. Ogden
Duke University Press, 2021
In Loss and Wonder at the World's End, Laura A. Ogden brings together animals, people, and things—from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and birdsong—to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Repeated algal blooms have closed fisheries in the archipelago. Glaciers are in retreat. Extractive industries such as commercial forestry, natural gas production, and salmon farming along with the introduction of nonnative species are rapidly transforming assemblages of life. Ogden archives forms of loss—including territory, language, sovereignty, and life itself—as well as forms of wonder, or moments when life continues to flourish even in the ruins of these devastations. Her account draws on long-term ethnographic research with settler and Indigenous communities; archival photographs; explorer journals; and experiments in natural history and performance studies. Loss and Wonder at the World's End frames environmental change as imperialism's shadow, a darkness cast over the earth in the wake of other losses.
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