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Saving Lake Tahoe
An Environmental History of a National Treasure
Michael J. Makley
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The history of Lake Tahoe begins with the Washoe Indians who resided on its shores for thousands of years, with minimal impact on the landscape. The relatively brief American history at Lake Tahoe began in the mid-nineteenth century. Though awestruck by its beauty, the new arrivals were also intent on harvesting its abundant resources. In a mere half century, the basin’s forests and fisheries were destroyed, the lake’s pristine clarity dramatically reduced.

Left alone, nature healed itself, and by the 1960s mature forests once again surrounded the lake and its water clarity improved, with visibility more than one hundred feet deep. However, Tahoe’s wonders brought a new kind of threat: millions of annual visitors and incessant development, including ski resorts and casinos. Saving Lake Tahoe looks at the interaction through the years between human activities and Tahoe’s natural ecosystems. It is a dramatic story of ecological disasters and near misses, political successes and failures. Utilizing primary sources and interviews with key figures, Makley provides a meticulously researched account of the battles surrounding the management of the Tahoe basin.

Makley takes the story up to the present, describing the formation and evolution of a new type of governing body, the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, and groundbreaking efforts to utilize science in establishing policy. He depicts the passionate fights between those who seek to preserve the environment and advocates of individual property rights. Although Tahoe remains unique in its splendor, readers will understand why, with continued pressure for development, reversing environmental deterioration and improving the lake water’s clarity remain elusive goals.
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Saving the Big Thicket
From Exploration to Preservation, 1685-2003
James J. Cozine Jr.
University of North Texas Press, 2004

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Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability
Inventing Ecotopia
Jeffrey Craig Sanders
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Seattle, often called the “Emerald City,” did not achieve its green, clean, and sustainable environment easily. This thriving ecotopia is the byproduct of continuing efforts by residents, businesses, and civic leaders alike. In Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability, Jeffrey Craig Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the “urban crisis” of the 1960s and its aftermath.


Like much activism during this period, the environmental movement began at the grassroots level—in local neighborhoods over local issues. Sanders links the rise of local environmentalism to larger movements for economic, racial, and gender equality and to a counterculture that changed the social and political landscape. He examines emblematic battles that erupted over the planned demolition of Pike Place Market, a local landmark, and environmental organizing in the Central District during the War on Poverty. Sanders also relates the story of Fort Lawton, a decommissioned army base, where Audubon Society members and Native American activists feuded over future land use.


The rise and popularity of environmental consciousness among Seattle’s residents came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements. Yet, as Sanders reveals, it was in the small, local struggles that urban environmental activism began.

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Seeing Things Whole
The Essential John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell; Edited by William deBuys
Island Press, 2001

John Wesley Powell was an American original. He was the last of the nation's great continental explorers and the first of a new breed of public servant: part scientist, part social reformer, part institution builder. His work and life reveal an enduringly valuable way of thinking about land, water, and society as parts of an interconnected whole; he was America's first great bioregional thinker.

Seeing Things Whole presents John Wesley Powell in the full diversity of his achievements and interests, bringing together in a single volume writings ranging from his gripping account of exploring the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to his views on the evolution of civilization, along with the seminal writings in which he sets forth his ideas on western settlement and the allocation and management of western resources.

The centerpiece of Seeing Things Whole is a series of selections from the famous 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region and related magazine articles in which Powell further develops the themes of the report. In those, he recommends organizing the Arid Lands into watershed commonwealths governed by resident citizens whose interlocking interests create the checks and balances essential to wise stewardship of the land. This was the central focus of John Wesley Powell's bioregional vision, and it remains a model for governance that many westerners see as a viable solution to the resource management conflicts that continue to bedevil the region.

Throughout the collection, award-winning writer and historian William deBuys brilliantly sets the historical context for Powell's work. Section introductions and extensive descriptive notes take the reader through the evolution of John Wesley Powell's interests and ideas from his role as an officer in the Civil War through his critique of Social Darwinism and landmark categorization of Indian languages, to the climatic yet ultimately futile battles he fought to win adoption of his land-use proposals.

Seeing Things Whole presents the essence of the extraordinary legacy that John Wesley Powell has left to the American people, and to people everywhere who strive to reconcile the demands of society with the imperatives of the land.

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Seventh Generation Earth Ethics
Native Voices of Wisconsin
Patty Loew
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014
Wisconsin’s rich tradition of sustainability rightfully includes its First Americans, who along with Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Gaylord Nelson shaped its landscape and informed its “earth ethics.” This collection of Native biographies, one from each of the twelve Indian nations of Wisconsin, introduces the reader to some of the most important figures in Native sustainability: from anti-mining activists like Walt Bresette (Red Cliff Ojibwe) and Hillary Waukau (Menominee) to treaty rights advocates like James Schlender (Lac Courte Oreille Ojibwe), artists like Truman Lowe (Ho-Chunk), and educators like Dorothy “Dot” Davids (Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians), along with tribal geneologists, land stewards, and preservers of language and culture. Each of the biographies speaks to traditional ecological values and cultural sensibilities, highlighting men and women who helped to sustain and nurture their nations in the past and present.
 
The Native people whose lives are depicted in Seventh Generation Earth Ethics understood the cultural gravity that kept their people rooted to their ancestral lands and acted in ways that ensured the growth and success of future generations. In this way they honor the Ojibwe Seventh Generation philosophy, which cautions decision makers to consider how their actions will affect seven generations in the future—some 240 years.
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Sharing Fencelines
Linda Hussa
University of Utah Press, 2002

In the lightly-populated northwestern corner of Nevada, a former geologist and rural schoolteacher, a published poet and ranch owner, and an artist and environmentalist make for an intriguing—perhaps even unlikely—trio of friends. In this evocative collection of personal essays, each offers her voice as a testament to the joys and struggles of creating a home and connecting to the land and the people who live there.

Stories of ranch hands and Ladies’ Clubs, raising chickens and raising children, pulling up roots and planting dreams tumble together in a mélange of lives lived well and thoughtfully. Sharing Fencelines is as much about art as it is about activism, as much about personal growth as it is about growing community. What these women offer us is the sweet taste of what is possible, and the blended harmony of their voices echoes across the mountains and washes and deserts, resonating in our own hearts, our own homes.

Carolyn Dufurrena’s "The Flying Heart Museum" pays homage to a layered landscape of unique individuals—not the least of which are her students, searching for themselves in the Nevada wilderness: "You know how your spirit betrays you when you’re not thinking to protect yourself. Jose has been dreaming, doodling away, and his pencil has discovered this flying heart, as big as the Puritan meetinghouse....He has drawn the log cabin around the heart, and labeled it. At recess I ask him, gently, 'So, Jose, what’s in there, in your Flying Heart Museum?'"

In "Shared Fencelines," Linda Hussa reveals the mystery of horses, the gift of water, and the serendipity of love: "My first hurt came from a horse when I tried to shinny up the feathered leg of our old gelding as I’d seen my brother and sister do. Twelve hundred pounds of him stepped on my bare foot. Mom carried her shrieking two-year-old to the house...she cut off the dangling nail saying Popeye didn’t mean to, he just didn’t notice my little foot. Then she cradled my face in her cool hands and said she hoped I would forgive him and we could be friends again."

"Fire Hall" by Sophie Sheppard paints a picture of a families and communities forged against the backdrop of a rugged, rural life: "Here, when there is a funeral, the whole town comes. First to arrive are the older women, vestiges of the Lake City Ladies Club that was disbanded a few years ago because most of the younger women have jobs and no longer stay at home. At the potluck funeral dinner everyone will file in together: the women unfamiliar in dresses ordered from catalogs, the mens' hatless foreheads glowing pale in contrast to the tan of their freshly shaven jaws, the younger people that I won’t recognize."

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A Short History of Lake Tahoe
Michael J. Makley
University of Nevada Press, 2011

Lake Tahoe is one of the scenic wonders of the American West, a sapphire jewel that attracts millions of visitors each year. But the lake drew Native Americans to its summer shores for millennia, as well as more recent fortune hunters, scientists, and others.

A Short History of Lake Tahoe recounts the long, fascinating history of Lake Tahoe. Author Michael J. Makley examines the geology and natural history of the lake and introduces the people who shaped its history, including the Washoe Indians and such colorful characters as Mark Twain and legendary teamster Hank Monk, and later figures like entertainer Frank Sinatra and Olympic skier Julia Mancuso. He also covers the development of the lake's surrounding valley, including the impacts of mining, logging, and tourism, and the economic, political, and social controversies regarding the use and misuse of the lake's resources.

Generously illustrated with historic photographs, this book is an engaging introduction to one of the most magnificent sites in the world. It also illuminates the challenges of protecting natural beauty and a fragile environment while preserving public access and a viable economy in the surrounding communities.

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Siberia, Siberia
Valentin Rasputin
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Valentin Rasputin—one of the most gifted and influential Russian prose writers of the past thirty years—offers a sweeping account of and penetrating reflection on the Russians' four hundred years of experience in Siberia. Beginning with Yermak, whose Cossacks crossed into Siberia in the 1580s, through the rapid Russian exploration, conquest, and colonialization, to today, Rasputin reveals the peculiarities of the Siberians, studying the gap between dreams and reality that has plagued Russians in Siberia for centuries.
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Sinking Chicago
Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment
Harold L. Platt
Temple University Press, 2018

In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. 

Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region’s waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers’ heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

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Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods
Design for Environment and Community
Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett
Island Press, 2006

Cities are growing at unprecedented rates. Most continue to sprawl into the countryside. Some are only now adopting policies that attempt to control air pollution from vehicles, reduce water pollution from urban runoff, and repair fragmented urban ecosystems. Can good urban design and sound environmental design coincide at a neighborhood level to create healthy communities?

Absolutely, and the strategies presented by Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett in Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods illustrate how to weave together contemporary thinking in urban planning with open space planning and urban ecology. Drawing from eighteen case studies, these green neighborhoods are the best examples of how the natural environment can play integral roles in neighborhoods.

Green neighborhoods offer a mix of housing types in order to serve a broad cross-section of people with a finely-grained variety of land uses and services, all close to home. In ecologically sound communities, the urban landscape is a functioning part of the whole ecosystem. Wooded areas, meandering streams, wetlands, and open spaces are planned and engineered to clean the air and the water. Skinnier streets and practical pathways weave into a functional, economical network to provide a range of equally good transportation choices, from walking to mass transit, that move people efficiently and economically.

This book moves beyond identifying problems to demonstrate proven methods and models that solve multiple, complex problems in concert. With innovative ideas and practical advice, Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods is a guide for today's planners, architects, engineers, and developers to design better neighborhoods and a more natural metropolis.

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Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula
Benjamin Reilly
Ohio University Press, 2015

In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil.

This book synthesizes for the first time a body of historical and ethnographic data about slave-based agriculture in the Arabian Peninsula. Reilly uses an innovative methodology to analyze the limited historical record and a multidisciplinary approach to complicate our understandings of the nature of work in an area that is popularly thought of solely as desert. This work makes significant contributions both to the global literature on slavery and to the environmental history of the Middle East—an area that has thus far received little attention from scholars.

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Social History and African Environments
William Beinart
Ohio University Press, 2003

The explosion of interest in African environmental history has stimulated research and writing on a wide range of issues facing many African nations.

This collection represents some of the finest studies to date. The general topics include African environmental ideas and practices; colonial science, the state and African responses; and settlers and Africans' culture and nature. The contributors are Emmanuel Kreike, Karen Middleton, Innocent Pikirayi, Terence Ranger, JoAnn McGregor, Helen Tilley, Grace Garswell, John McCracken, Ingrid Yngstrom, David Bunn, Sandra Swart, Robert J. Gordon, and Jane Carruthers.

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Sonoran Desert Journeys
Ecology and Evolution of Its Iconic Species
Theodore H. Fleming
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Lizards dashing rapidly between plants. Songbirds and woodpeckers flying to and from their nests. Hawks perched on saguaros. What kinds of journeys have these and many other animals and plants and their ancestors taken in space and time to arrive in the Sonoran Desert? How long have these species been living together here?

In Sonoran Desert Journeys ecologist Theodore H. Fleming discusses two remarkable journeys. First, Fleming offers a brief history of our intellectual and technical journey over the past three centuries to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Next, he applies those techniques on a journey of discovery about the evolution and natural history of some of the Sonoran Desert’s most iconic animals and plants. Fleming details the daily lives of a variety of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants, describing their basic natural and evolutionary histories and addressing intriguing issues associated with their lifestyles and how they cope with a changing climate. Finally, Fleming discusses the complexity of Sonoran Desert conservation.

This book explores the evolution and natural history of iconic animals and plants of the northern Sonoran Desert through the eyes of a curious naturalist and provides a model of how we can coexist with the unique species that call this area home.
 
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Sowing the Forest
A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes
William Balée
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Explores how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests
 
William Balée is a world-renowned expert on the cultural and historical ecology of the Amazon basin. His new collection, Sowing the Forest, is a companion volume to the award-winning Cultural Forests of the Amazon, published in 2013. Sowing the Forest engages in depth with how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests, making the landscapes of palm forests and other kinds of forests, and how these and related forests have fed back into the vocabulary and behavior of current indigenous occupants of the remotest parts of the vast hinterlands.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Substrate of Intentionality,” comprises chapters on historical ecology, indigenous palm forests, plant names in Amazonia, the origins of the Amazonian plantain, and the unknown “Dark Earth people” of thousands of years ago and their landscaping. Together these chapters illustrate the phenomenon of feedback between culture and environment.

In Part 2, “Scope of Transformation,” Balée lays out his theory of landscape transformation, which he divides into two rubrics—primary landscape transformation and secondary landscape transformation—and for which he provides examples and various specific effects. One chapter compares environmental and social interrelationships in an Orang Asli group in Malaysia and the Ka’apor people of eastern Amazonian Brazil, and another chapter covers loss of language and culture in the Bolivian Amazon. A final chapter addresses the controversial topic of monumentality in the rainforest. Balée concludes by emphasizing the common thread in Amazonian historical ecology: the long-term phenomenon of encouraging diversity for its own sake, not just for economic reasons.
 
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Speaking for the River
Confronting Pollution on the Willamette, 1920s-1970s
James V. Hillegas-Elting
Oregon State University Press, 2018
Since the late 1960s, Oregon has been at the forefront of environmental protection in the United States. The state generally, and Portland in particular, continue to have strong “green” credentials well into the twenty-first century. Within this forty year period of progress, however, the health of the Willamette River has been a consistent blot on the record. Willamette River water pollution has not gone away—the problem has, in fact, gotten much more complex. James Hillegas-Elting’s book, Speaking for the River, provides a historical look at this dilemma.

Willamette River cleanup efforts between 1926 and 1975 centered on a struggle between abatement advocates and the two primary polluters in the watershed, the City of Portland and the pulp and paper industry. Beginning in 1926, clean streams advocates created ad hoc groups of public health experts, sanitary engineers, conservationists, sportsmen, and others to pressure Portland officials and industry representatives to cease polluting the river. By the late 1960s, these grassroots initiatives found political footholds at the state level. As governor between 1967 and 1975, Tom McCall took the issue of environmental protection personally, providing the charisma and leadership that was needed to finally make substantive progress toward cleaning the Willamette.

Speaking for the River is the first book to describe the historical roots of Willamette River pollution, providing important context for understanding the political, fiscal, and technological antecedents to the present-day conundrum. Hillegas-Elting’s contribution to the academic literature on environmental and urban history in Oregon will be welcomed by policy makers, environmentalists, and concerned citizens alike.
 
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Sprawl City
Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta
Edited by Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres
Island Press, 2000
A serious but often overlooked impact of the random, unplanned growth commonly known as sprawl is its effect on economic and racial polarization. Sprawl-fueled growth pushes people further apart geographically, politically, economically, and socially. Atlanta, Georgia, one of the fastest-growing areas in the country, offers a striking example of sprawl-induced stratification.Sprawl City uses a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze and critique the emerging crisis resulting from urban sprawl in the ten-county Atlanta metropolitan region. Local experts including sociologists, lawyers, urban planners, economists, educators, and health care professionals consider sprawl-related concerns as core environmental justice and civil rights issues.Contributors focus on institutional constraints that are embedded in urban sprawl, considering how government housing, education, and transportation policies have aided and in some cases subsidized separate but unequal economic development and segregated neighborhoods. They offer analysis of the causes and consequences of urban sprawl, and outline policy recommendations and an action agenda for coping with sprawl-related problems, both in Atlanta and around the country.Contributors are Natalie Brown, Robert D. Bullard, William W. Buzbee, James Chapman, Dennis Creech, Russell W. Irvine, Charles Jaret, Chad G. Johnson, Glenn S. Johnson, Kurt Phillips, Elizabeth P. Ruddiman, and Angel O. Torres.The book illuminates the rising class and racial divisions underlying uneven growth and development, and provides a timely source of information for anyone concerned with those issues, including the growing environmental justice movement as well as planners, policy analysts, public officials, community leaders, and students of public policy, geography, or planning.
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St. Louis
Evolution Of American Urban Landscape
ERIC SANDWEISS
Temple University Press, 2001
St. Louis's story stands for the story of all those cities whose ambitions and civic self-image, forged from the growth of the mercantile and industrial eras, have been dramatically altered over time. More dramatically, perhaps, than most -- but in a manner shared by all -- St. Louis's changing economic base, shifting population and altered landscape have forced scholars, policymakers, and residents alike to acknowledge the transciency of what once seemed inexorable metropolitan trends: concentration, growth, accumulated wealth, and generally improved well-being.

In this book, Eric Sandweiss scrutinizes the everyday landscape -- streets, houses, neighborhoods, and public buildings -- as it evolved in a classic American city. Bringing to life the spaces that most of us pass without noticing, he reveals how the processes of dividing, trading, improving, and  dwelling upon land are acts that reflect and shape social relations. From its origins as a French colonial settlement in the eighteenth century to the present day, St. Louis offers a story not just about how our past is diagrammed in brick and asphalt, but also about the American city's continuing viability as a place where the balance of individual rights and collective responsibilities can be debated, demonstrated and adjusted for generations to come.
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Stealing Shining Rivers
Agrarian Conflict, Market Logic, and Conservation in a Mexican Forest
Molly Doane
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Winner, Best Social Sciences Book (Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section)

What happens to indigenous people when their homelands are declared by well-intentioned outsiders to be precious environmental habitats? In this revelatory book, Molly Doane describes how a rain forest in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca was appropriated and redefined by environmentalists who initially wanted to conserve its biodiversity. Her case study approach shows that good intentions are not always enough to produce results that benefit both a habitat and its many different types of inhabitants.

Doane begins by showing how Chimalapas—translated as “shining rivers”—has been “produced” in various ways over time, from a worthless wasteland to a priceless asset. Focusing on a series of environmental projects that operated between 1990 and 2008, she reveals that environmentalists attempted to recast agrarian disputes—which actually stemmed from government-supported corporate incursions into community lands and from unequal land redistribution—as environmental problems.

Doane focuses in particular on the attempt throughout the 1990s to establish a “Campesino Ecological Reserve” in Chimalapas. Supported by major grants from the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), this effort to foster and merge agrarian and environmental interests was ultimately unsuccessful because it was seen as politically threatening by the state. By 2000, the Mexican government had convinced the WWF to redirect its conservation monies to the state government and its agencies.

The WWF eventually abandoned attempts to establish an “enclosure” nature reserve in the region or to gain community acceptance for conservation. Instead, working from a new market-based model of conservation, the WWF began paying cash to individuals for “environmental services” such as reforestation and environmental monitoring.
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The Story of Vermont
A Natural and Cultural History, Second Edition
Christopher McGrory Klyza and Stephen C. Trombulak
University Press of New England, 2015
In this second edition of their classic text, Klyza and Trombulak use the lens of interconnectedness to examine the geological, ecological, and cultural forces that came together to produce contemporary Vermont. They assess the changing landscape and its inhabitants from its pre-human evolution up to the present, with special focus on forests, open terrestrial habitats, and the aquatic environment. This edition features a new chapter covering from 1995 to 2013 and a thoroughly revised chapter on the futures of Vermont, which include discussions of Tropical Storm Irene, climate change, eco-regional planning, and the resurgence of interest in local food and energy production. Integrating key themes of ecological change into a historical narrative, this book imparts specific information about Vermont, speculates on its future, and fosters an appreciation of the complex synergy of forces that shaped this region. This volume will interest scholars, students, and Vermonters intrigued by the state’s long-term natural and human history.
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Swamplife
People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades
Laura A. Ogden
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Little in North America is wilder than the Florida Everglades—a landscape of frightening reptiles, exotic plants in profusion, swarms of mosquitoes, and unforgiving heat. And yet, even from the early days of taming the wilderness with clearing and drainage, the Everglades has been considered fragile, unique, and in need of restorative interventions. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with hunters in the Everglades, Laura A. Ogden explores the lives and labors of people, animals, and plants in this most delicate and tenacious ecosystem.

Today, the many visions of the Everglades—protectionist, ecological, commercial, historical—have become a tangled web of contradictory practices and politics for conservation and for development. Yet within this entanglement, the place of people remains highly ambivalent. It is the role of people in the Everglades that interests Ogden, as she seeks to reclaim the landscape’s long history as a place of human activity and, in doing so, discover what it means to be human through changing relations with other animals and plant life.

Ogden tells this story through the lives of poor rural whites, gladesmen, epitomized in tales of the Everglades’ most famous outlaws, the Ashley Gang. With such legends and lore on one side, and outsized efforts at drainage and development on the other, Swamplife strikes a rare balance, offering a unique insight into the hidden life of the Everglades—and into how an appreciation of oppositional culture and social class operates in our understanding of wilderness in the United States.
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