Arthur Carhart, the first biography of this Republican environmentalist and major American thinker, writer, and activist, reveals the currency of his ideas. Tom Wolf elucidates Carhart 's vision of conservation as "a job for all of us," with citizens, municipal authorities, and national leaders all responsible for the environmental effects of their decisions. Carhart loved the local and decried interest groups - from stockmens' associations to wilderness lobbies - as cliques attempting blanket control. He pressured land management agencies to base decisions on local ecology and local partnerships. A lifelong wilderness advocate who proposed the first wilderness preserve at Trappers Lake, Colorado, in 1919, Carhart chose to oppose the Wilderness Act, heartsick at its compromises with lobbies.
Because he shifted his stance and changed his views in response to new information, Carhart is not an easy subject for a biography. Wolf traces Carhart's twists and turns to show a man whose voice was distinctive and contrary, who spoke from a passionate concern for the land and couldn't be counted on for anything else. Readers of American history and outdoor writing will enjoy this portrait of a historic era in conservation politics and the man who so often eschewed politics in favor of the land and people he loved.
In the 1978 Love Canal toxic waste crisis, concerned citizens "did a far better job of evaluating the health of the community than did the professionals of the New York Health Department," asserts Marvin Legator. In Chemical Alert! A Community Action Handbook, he and coeditor Sabrina Strawn offer a step-by-step guide that can be used by any lay person or citizens' group to determine whether a health risk exists in their area.
Writing for the general reader with no scientific expertise, environmental, medical, and legal professionals instruct communities on the organizational and investigative techniques that will produce a valid, scientific case study. With these tools, citizens living near petrochemical plants or waste disposal areas—or who may have simply noticed a high incidence of certain health problems in their community—can determine for themselves whether a problem really exists and seek remediation. Given the reality that government agencies often lack the resources—or the will—to detect health hazards before they affect a community, an informed citizenry should be its own best environmental watchdog.
Born in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, in 1916, Gaylord grew up as immersed in his parents' political work and community service as he was in playing practical jokes and exploring the natural world surrounding his home town. Along the way he encountered experiences that would shape him in fundamental ways: as a man who stood up for what he believed in the face of opposition and yet who also understood how to treat his opponents with respect. Both traits would serve him well as he rose from law student to state senator to Wisconsin governor and finally to three terms as a United States Senator.
Nelson fought to treat all races equally and to condemn McCarthy-era paranoia, but his greatest contribution was to sound the alarm about another battle: the fight to save the natural world and the earth itself. It was his idea to use teach-ins to let people know that the environment needed their help. Thanks to him, more natural resources were conserved and new laws demanded clean air and water. Now, every year on April 22, people all over the world plant trees and pick up litter to celebrate Earth Day. The Earth and its inhabitants aren't safe yet, but Gaylord Nelson demonstrated that even one person can help to save the world.
A biography of Bruce Crawford, a southwest Virginia journalist-writer of the radical tradition and one of the first to interpret Appalachian labor history.
Hell’s Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history.
His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford’s Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers’ Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state’s official guidebook.
In Hell’s Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition’s ongoing salience: “Present-day Appalachia’s fights were [Crawford’s], and his fights are still ours.”
In an age when many of the major environmental policies established over the past four decades are under siege, Michael McCloskey reminds us of better days. . .days when conservation initiatives were seen not as political lightning rods, but as opportunities to cope with disturbing threats to the quality of our environment.
In 1961, a young let's-get-it-done McCloskey was hired as the Sierra Club's first field representative for the Northwest. From there, for nearly forty years, he rose to guide the oldest and most powerful environmental organization in the world. He helped to pave the way for the original Wilderness Act in 1964, and as the club's conservation director worked to see it implemented. He successfully lobbied for the creation of new national parks and wilderness areas, the North Cascades and Redwood National Park among them. As executive director, he was present at the creation of Earthday in 1970, directed lobbying for the enactment of over one hundred environmental laws, and watched Sierra Club membership rise from about 70,000 to more than 500,000. In the nineties, he led the Sierra Club in mounting fights against attempts to undercut EPA regulations and against trade agreements that curtailed environmental programs.
His tenure was no walk in the park or smooth glide across a placid mountain lake. The large and very public Sierra Club was fraught with brush fires, seismic tremors, and pitched battles, both within and without. He survived the ouster of his mentor, the charismatic but controversial David Brower, succeeding him as the second executive director in the club's history, and put the Sierra Club back on firm financial footing. Under less than ideal political circumstances, McCloskey helped to keep the environmental agenda moving steadily forward, even in the face of Ronald Reagan's virulently pro-development Interior Secretary James Watt (whom he was instrumental in expelling from office).
In the Thick of It describes not only McCloskey's life as an environmental activist; it reveals the inner workings and politics of one of the nation's most influential environmental nonprofit organizations during an era of ground-breaking environmental legislation. In addition to sharing the details of battles exhilaratingly won and disappointingly lost on the environmental front, he demonstrates how it is indeed possible to turn idealism and hope into practical action that can make an impact at the national level. With this book McCloskey offers not only invaluable insight into the past, but also inspiration to carry into the future.
On Earth Day 1970 twenty million Americans displayed their commitment to a clean environment. It was called the largest demonstration in human history, and it permanently changed the nation’s political agenda. By Earth Day 2000 participation had exploded to 500 million people in 167 countries.
The seemingly simple idea—a day set aside to focus on protecting our natural environment—was the brainchild of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. It accomplished, far beyond his expectations, his lifelong goal of putting the environment onto the nation’s and the world’s political agendas.
A remarkable man, Nelson ranks as one of history’s leading environmentalists. He also played a major role as an early, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and as a senate insider was a key player in civil rights, poverty, civil liberties and consumer protection issues.
The life of Nelson, a small town boy who learned his values and progressive political principles at an early age, is woven through the political history of the twentieth century. Nelson’s story intersects at times with Fighting Bob La Follette, Joe McCarthy, and Bill Proxmire in Wisconsin, and with George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Russell Long, Walter Mondale, John F. Kennedy, and others on the national scene.
Winner, Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize, University of Wisconsin Press
Russell E. Train, was chairman emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund, has led a remarkable life in conservation and environmental politics. Though many of his contributions have been unsung, Train was the catalyst for many of the nation's most important positive environmental policies that remain with us today. In the current political climate, where party divisions are so sharp and environmental concerns are so often shunted aside, Train's journey as a life-long Republican and an ardent conservationist is an inspiring story.
Much of the important environmental policy Train helped to devise and implement occurred during two Republican administrations, those of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Train served as undersecretary of Interior early in Nixon's administration before becoming chair of the president's Council on Environmental Quality (1970-1973). He then moved on to many accomplishments as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1973 until 1978. At the end of the Ford administration, Train left government to become president of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the U.S. where he played a key role in developing that institution into the major conservation organization it is today.
Politics, Pollution, and Pandas is a fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the politics of the environment over much of the last half century, as told by one of its master architects.
A passionate advocate for preserving wilderness and fighting the bureaucratic and business forces that would destroy it, Edward Abbey (1927–1989) wrote fierce, polemical books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang that continue to inspire environmental activists. In this eloquent memoir, his friend and fellow desert rat Charles Bowden reflects on Abbey the man and the writer, offering up thought-provoking, contrarian views of the writing life, literary reputations, and the perverse need of critics to sum up “what he really meant and whether any of it was truly up to snuff.”
The Red Caddy is the first literary biography of Abbey in a generation. Refusing to turn him into a desert guru, Bowden instead recalls the wild man in a red Cadillac convertible for whom liberty was life. He describes how Desert Solitaire paradoxically “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground” that Abbey wanted to protect, while sealing his literary reputation and overshadowing the novels that Abbey considered his best books. Bowden also skewers the cottage industry that has grown up around Abbey’s writing, smoothing off its rougher (racist, sexist) edges while seeking “anecdotes, little intimacies . . . pieces of the True Beer Can or True Old Pickup Truck.” Asserting that the real essence of Abbey will always remain unknown and unknowable, The Red Caddy still catches gleams of “the fire that from time to time causes a life to become a conflagration.”
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