BiblioVault - Books about Natural history

Walking Home Ground

In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth

Robert Root

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017

When longtime author Robert Root moves to a small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in place—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the way, Root investigates the changes to the natural landscape over nearly two centuries, and he chronicles his own transition from someone on unfamiliar terrain to someone secure on his home ground.In prose that is at turns introspective and haunting, Walking Home Ground inspires us to see history’s echo all around us: the parking lot that once was forest; the city that once was glacier. "Perhaps this book is an invitation to walk home ground," Root tells us. "Perhaps, too, it’s a time capsule, a message in a bottle from someone given to looking over his shoulder even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet."

[more]

Walking Towards Walden

A Pilgrimage in Search of Place

John Hanson Mitchell

University Press of New England, 2015

Walking Towards Walden is an exploration of the sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters. Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author’s fifteen-mile bushwhack through woods, backyards, and marshes—from a hilltop in Westford, Massachusetts, to the town of Concord, Massachusetts—trespassing all along the way. A mock epic, complete with encounters with armed mercenaries and vicious dogs, the book covers all the aspects of place—art, literature, myth, and even music.

[more]

Walking with Muir across Yosemite

Thomas R. Vale

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

Does today’s visitor trekking Yosemite National Park find it much different from what John Muir encountered a century ago? Thomas and Geraldine Vale retrace Muir’s path, based upon journal descriptions of his activities and experiences during his first summer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From the foothills through Yosemite Valley and on up to the Tuolumne Meadows, the Vales follow the present roads and trails that crossed Muir’s route, imagining his reaction to the landscape while reflecting on the natural world in both his time and ours.
Illustrated with drawings by John Muir and drawings and photos by the Vales, Walking with Muir across Yosemite emphasizes that current visitors to Yosemite—indeed to any national park—can still experience the solitude, wildness, and romanticism of nature. They believe, however, that this modern exploration would benefit from a national parks policy that actively promotes nature study and encourages a more profound interaction between humans and the natural world.

[more]

Walt Whitman and the Earth

A Study of Ecopoetics

M. Jimmie Killingsworth

University of Iowa Press, 2005

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
—Walt Whitman, from “This Compost”

How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language.

Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman’s feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of “This Compost”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature.

Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.

[more]

Wapiti Wilderness

Margaret Murie

University Press of Colorado, 1985

For over thirty-seven years, Margaret and Olaus Murie made their home in the mountainous wilderness of the Tetons, where Olaus Murie conducted his famous studies of the American elk, the wapiti. Through these years their home was almost a nature-conservation shrine to thousands of Americans interested in the out-of-doors, in animals, in nature in general. Wapiti Wilderness, begun by Mrs. Murie as a sequel to her Two in the Far North, which told of the Muries' life and expeditions in Alaska, became a book written by both the Muries.

In alternate chapters, Olaus tells of his work as a field biologist for the old U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and recounts stories of his studies of the elk and the other great animals of the West. And Mrs. Murie, from her side, describes their life together, on the trail, in the various camps, and nature adventures in that wilderness in all seasons. The book is replete with stories of Jackson Hole people, "pioneer poets," and the wild creatures that made their way into the Murie household. Olaus Murie's evocative pen-and-ink drawings illuminate each chapter, and four pages of photographs help complete the picture of what life was like in the wapiti wilderness.

[more]

The War Against The Beavers

Learning to Be Wild in the North Woods

Verena Andermatt Conley

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

A lifelong city dweller, Verena Andermatt Conley had long harbored romantic ideals about the natural world and dreamed of a wilderness retreat for herself and her husband, Tom. When a sizable tract of land along the Vermillion River on the edge of Minnesota's Boundary Waters - complete with two primitive log cabins - became available, they jumped at the chance to own a piece of paradise.The War against the Beavers is a wry and funny account of two people's ten-year apprenticeship in backwoods living, from their arrival as literal babes in the woods to their education in the ways of nature as they face plagues of insects, fungus, storms, and droughts, and embark on a lengthy campaign to eradicate a colony of beavers that threatens the peace and beauty of their forest refuge. It is only the coming of a mechanized and much more menacing threat - bulldozers and other heavy machinery clear-cutting the woods - that restores perspective to the obsessed cabin dwellers.

[more]

The Way to the Salt Marsh

A John Hay Reader

John Hay

Brandeis University Press, 1998

"In common things are greater extensions of ourselves than we ever conceived of." "Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult," observes John Hay, naturalist, essayist, sage, and inveterate walker of byways. This collection from the 50-year long career of America's preeminent nature writer illustrates the full range of Hay's work. An elegant and lyrical stylist, he is, in Merrill's words, "the nature writer's writer, an illustrator of the Emersonian notion that 'the world is emblematic.'" And so Hay reveals the ubiquitous but often unnoticed emblems all around us. The mad, impossible rush of alewives flinging themselves upstream to mate, for example, represents "the drive to be, a common and terrible sending out, to which men are also bound in helplessness." In the migratory movements of the terns and the green turtles past his beloved Cape Cod Hay sees the mystery and magnificence of homing: "To know your direction and return through outer signs, is as new as it is ancient. We are still people of the planet, with all its original directions waiting in our being." Whether describing the rugosa or bayberry of a sand dune, the plight of stranded pilot whales, or a spider swinging on its gossamer, Hay encourages us to enlarge our inner universe by observing, appreciating, and preserving the outer one we so often ignore. As a result, he says, "we may find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us," and by recognizing our "deep alliance with natural forces we find a new depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living things."

[more]

We Came Naked and Barefoot

The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca across North America

By Alex D. Krieger

University of Texas Press, 2002

Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003

Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.

The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca.

This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.

[more]

What Should a Clever Moose Eat?

Natural History, Ecology, and the North Woods

John Pastor

Island Press, 2015

How long should a leaf live? When should blueberries ripen? And what should a clever moose eat? Questions like these may seem simple or downright strange—yet they form the backbone of natural history, a discipline that fostered some of our most important scientific theories, from natural selection to glaciation. Through careful, patient observations of the organisms that live in an area, their distributions, and how they interact with other species, we gain a more complete picture of the world around us, and our place in it.

In What Should a Clever Moose Eat?, John Pastor explores the natural history of the North Woods, an immense and complex forest that stretches from the western shore of Lake Superior to the far coast of Newfoundland. The North Woods is one of the most ecologically and geologically interesting places on the planet, with a host of natural history questions arising from each spruce or sugar maple. From the geological history of the region to the shapes of leaves and the relationship between aspens, caterpillars, and predators, Pastor delves into a captivating range of topics as diverse as the North Woods themselves. Through his meticulous observations of the natural world, scientists and nonscientists alike learn to ask natural history questions and form their own theories, gaining a greater understanding of and love for the North Woods—and other natural places precious to them.

In the tradition of Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau, John Pastor is a joyful observer of nature who makes sharp connections and moves deftly from observation to theory. Take a walk in John Pastor's North Woods—you'll come away with a new appreciation for details, for the game trails, beaver ponds, and patterns of growth around you, and won't look at the natural world in the same way again.

[more]

What's Nature Worth

Terre Satterfield

University of Utah Press, 2004

Based on either written or oral interviews with a dozen prominent environmental writers, What’s Nature Worth? explores how the art of storytelling might bring new perspectives and insights to economic and policy discussions regarding the "value" of nature and the environment. The diverse points of view explored, and the writers’ insistence on careful interpretation, demonstrate that environmental values are complex, rich, and deeply felt—far more so than mainstream economic methodology would have us believe. There is general consensus among the contributors that the narrative form allows for an exploration of the richness of what it means to "value" nature without being preachy or didactic. Following interviews with the twelve authors, examples of their work demonstrate how indirect expressions of value, in the words of Allison Hawthorne Deming, have an "emotional hue" that can replenish the energy depleted by the coldness of cost-benefit arguments.

[more]

When the Rains Come

A Naturalist’s Year in the Sonoran Desert

John Alcock

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Life in the desert is a waiting game: waiting for rain. And in a year of drought, the stakes are especially high.

John Alcock knows the Sonoran Desert better than just about anyone else, and in this book he tracks the changes he observes in plant and animal life over the course of a drought year. Combining scientific knowledge with years of exploring the desert, he describes the variety of ways in which the wait for rain takes place—and what happens when it finally comes.

The desert is a land of five seasons, featuring two summers—hot, dry months followed by monsoon—and Alcock looks at the changes that take place in an entire desert community over the course of all five. He describes what he finds on hikes in the Usery Mountains near Phoenix, where he has studied desert life over three decades and where frequent visits have enabled him to notice effects of seasonal variation that might escape a casual glance.

Blending a personal perspective with field observation, Alcock shows how desert ecology depends entirely on rainfall. He touches on a wide range of topics concerning the desert’s natural history, noting the response of saguaro flowers to heat and the habits of predators, whether soaring red-tailed hawk or tiny horned lizard. He also describes unusual aspects of insects that few desert hikers will have noticed, such as the disruptive color pattern of certain grasshoppers that is more effective than most camouflage.

When the Rains Come is brimming with new insights into the desert, from the mating behaviors of insects to urban sprawl, and features photographs that document changes in the landscape as drought years come and go. It brings us the desert in the harshest of times—and shows that it is still teeming with life.

[more]

Where the Crooked River Rises

A High Desert Home

Ellen Waterston

Oregon State University Press, 2010

Where the Wild Animals Is Plentiful

Diary of an Alabama Fur Trader's Daughter, 1912-1914

May Jordan

University of Alabama Press, 2006

This rare find--a journal of a young backwoods woman--provides a unique picture of rural life in southwestern Alabama early in the 20th century.

"I am a little Alabama girl living on the frontier where the wild animals is plentiful," wrote May Jordan in 1912. During the hunting season her father traveled Washington County buying furs, and May--already 23--accompanied him on two of these trips, cooking meals, helping out with the business, and recording their experiences.

May's diary of these trips from December 1912 to March 1914 describes the routine of the fur trade and provides a vivid portrait of wilderness travel and social customs. Through May's eyes, readers can experience the sights and sounds of pine forests and swamps, the difficulty of wading through waist-deep mud, and the neighborliness of the people living in this isolated area. May also shares both the solace of religious faith and her love of laughter as reflected in the jokes she records.

Elisa Moore Baldwin provides an introduction that traces Jordan family history and describes economic, social, and political conditions during the period. Baldwin also includes annotations based on court records, census rolls, and other primary sources and photographs of many of the characters in May's narrative to provide a vivid picture of the times. Because few first-person accounts exist of the life of poor whites, this diary will be invaluable to students of southern and women's history; no comparable work exists for this part of Alabama during this era. May's journal takes us to another world and teaches us about the lively human spirit in the face of hardship and loneliness.

[more]

Whispers and Shadows

A Naturalist’s Memoir

Jerry Apps

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

In these times of technological innovation and fast-paced electronic communication, we often take nature for granted—or even consider it a hindrance to our human endeavors. In Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist’s Memoir, Jerry Apps explores such topics as the human need for wilderness, rediscovering a sense of wonder, and his father’s advice to “listen for the whispers” and “look in the shadows” to learn nature’s deepest lessons.

Combining his signature lively storytelling and careful observations of nature, Apps draws on a lifetime of experiences, from his earliest years growing up on a central Wisconsin farm to his current ventures as gardener, tree farmer, and steward of wetlands, prairies, and endangered Karner blue butterflies. He also takes inspiration from the writings of Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, Sigurd Olson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Richard Louv, and Rachel Carson. With these eloquent essays, Jerry Apps reminds us to slow down, turn off technology, and allow our senses to reconnect us to the natural world. For it is there, he writes, that “I am able to return to a feeling I had when I was a child, a feeling of having room to stretch my arms without interfering with another person, a feeling of being a small part of something much larger than I was, and I marvel at the idea.”

[more]

Whispers in the Pines

A Naturalist in the Northeast

Burger, Joanna

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In this book, naturalist Joanna Burger takes us on a series of delightful trips through the Pine Barrens. From the Albany Pine Bush, the Long Island Barrens, and the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the Northeast, to the pinelands of South Carolina and Florida, Burger describes in lively detail how these habitats have come to harbor such a unique assemblage of species.

She introduces us to amphibians and reptiles, neotropical migrants and other birds, and a range of common and unusual mammals. Burger also traces the regions’ historic and geologic backgrounds, and the impact of human occupation from the time of the paleo-Indians to the present. She revisits the tension between development and preservation, reminding us that a healthy pine barren region requires uninterrupted land and rejuvenating fires, both of which are increasingly jeopardized.

Whispers in the Pines is essential reading for everyone concerned with the history and preservation of these unique landscapes and their wildlife.

[more]

White Waters and Black

Gordon MacCreagh

University of Chicago Press, 2001

With a wicked eye for absurdities, Gordon MacCreagh recounts his adventures with eight "Eminent Scientificos" as they set out to explore the Amazon in 1923 without any idea of what lies ahead of them: rapids, malaria, monkey stew, and "dangerous savages." A combination of Twain's The Innocents Abroad and a cautionary tale for explorers, this is one of the most honest accounts ever written of a scientific expedition.

[more]

Wide Rivers Crossed

The South Platte and the Illinois of the American Prairie

Ellen E. Wohl

University Press of Colorado, 2013

In Wide Rivers Crossed, Ellen Wohl tells the stories of two rivers—the South Platte on the western plains and the Illinois on the eastern—to represent the environmental history and historical transformation of major rivers across the American prairie. Wohl begins with the rivers’ natural histories, including their geologic history, physical characteristics, ecological communities, and earliest human impacts, and follows a downstream and historical progression from the use of the rivers’ resources by European immigrants through increasing population density of the twentieth century to the present day.

During the past two centuries, these rivers changed dramatically, mostly due to human interaction. Crops replaced native vegetation; excess snowmelt and rainfall carried fertilizers and pesticides into streams; and levees, dams, and drainage altered distribution. These changes cascaded through networks, starting in small headwater tributaries, and reduced the ability of rivers to supply the clean water, fertile soil, and natural habitats they had provided for centuries. Understanding how these rivers, and rivers in general, function and how these functions have been altered over time will allow us to find innovative approaches to restoring river ecosystems.

The environmental changes in the South Platte and the Illinois reflect the relentless efforts by humans to control the distribution of water: to enhance surface water in the arid western prairie and to limit the spread of floods and drain the wetlands along the rivers in the water-abundant east. Wide Rivers Crossed looks at these historical changes and discusses opportunities for much-needed protection and restoration for the future.

[more]

Wild New Jersey

Nature Adventures in the Garden State

David Wheeler

Rutgers University Press, 2011

The fastest animal on earth dive-bombs him from the skies. A young black bear bounds up a mountain trail a few yards away. Poisonous snakes swirl at his feet. A thousand bats careen past his head in a pitch-black roost. Pods of dolphins swim right past him by the scores. Who? Experienced naturalist David Wheeler. Where? In Wild New Jersey, of course.

Wild New Jersey invites readers along Wheeler’s whirlwind year-long tour of the most ecologically diverse state for its size in America. Along with the expert guidance of charismatic wildlife biologists and local conservationists, he explores mountains, valleys, beaches, pine barrens, caves, rivers, marshlands, and more—breathtaking landscapes and the state’s Noah’s Ark of fascinating creatures.

This isn’t your ordinary ride on the Jersey Turnpike. Fasten your seatbelts and join Wheeler as he . . .

Kayaks through the Meadowlands under the watchful eye of the Empire State Building,
Pans for cretaceous fossils in a hidden brook once home to mastodons and giant sloths,
Rides a fishing boat in the frigid snows of winter on a high-seas quest for Atlantic puffins,
Trudges through the eerie darkness of a bog on a mysterious night hike,
Dogsleds across the windswept alpine slopes in the haunts of the porcupine and bobcat.

With Wheeler’s compelling narrative, in-depth background details, and eye for revealing the offbeat, you can count this as the first nature book to paint the extraordinary picture of New Jersey’s unlikely wilderness in all its glory. Come along for all the adventure and insight in Wild New Jersey!

[more]

The Wildlife of New England

A Viewer's Guide

John S. Burk

University of New Hampshire Press, 2011

With practical guidance, helpful tips, and informative overviews of each location, The Wildlife of New England invites you to discover more than 80 wildlife-viewing areas around New England.

• Where are you most likely to spot a moose, black bear, or otter in the wild?
• On what hilltop can you see thousands of migrating hawks in a single day?
• Where might you see a basking shark, seal, or sea star?

Experienced nature writer and photographer John S. Burk answers these questions and more in this unique guidebook. Organized by state, each viewing location is discussed in detail, including its natural habitats and their unique features, characteristic species to watch for and when to see them, and recommended trails, auto roads, and driving directions. The Wildlife of New England also offers informative introductions to 60 of the region's iconic animals organized by their natural habitats and shown in stunning photographs, many in color.

[more]

Wind in the Rock

The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah

Ann Zwinger

University of Arizona Press, 1978

Lively, readable nature writing. As she details several treks through the beautiful, rocky canyons, [Zwinger's] feel for the animals and plants native to this arid region enhances the precise sketches which punctuate the text. Readers interested in ancient Indian cultures of the Southwest will also find fascinating reading, as Zwinger describes their campsites and lifestyles. —Library Journal

[more]

The Windward Shore

A Winter on the Great Lakes

Jerry Dennis

University of Michigan Press, 2012

"Our country is lucky to have Jerry Dennis. A conservationist with the soul of a poet whose beat is Wild Michigan, Dennis is a kindred spirit of Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson. The Windward Shore---his newest effort---is a beautifully written and elegiac memoir of outdoor discovery. Highly recommended!"
---Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

"Come for a journey; stay for an awakening. Jerry Dennis loves the Great Lakes, the swell of every wave, the curve of every rock. He wants you to love them too before our collective trashing of them wipes out all traces of their original character. Through his eyes, you will treasure the hidden secrets that reveal themselves only to those who linger and long. Elegant and sad at the same time, The Windward Shore is a love song for the Great Lakes and a gentle call to action to save them."
---Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

"In prose as clear as the lines in a Dürer etching, Jerry Dennis maps his home ground, which ranges outward from the back door of his farmhouse to encompass the region of vast inland seas at the heart of our continent. Along the way, inspired by the company of water in all its guises---ice, snow, frost, clouds, rain, shore-lapping waves---he meditates on the ancient questions about mind and matter, time and attention, wildness and wonder. As in the best American nature writing---a tradition that Dennis knows well---here the place and the explorer come together in brilliant conversation."
---Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto

If you have been enchanted by Jerry Dennis’s earlier work on sailing the Great Lakes, canoeing, angling, and the natural wonders of water and sky—or you have not yet been lucky enough to enjoy his engaging prose—you will want to immerse yourself in his powerful and insightful new book on winter in Great Lakes country.

Grounded by a knee injury, Dennis learns to live at a slower pace while staying in houses ranging from a log cabin on Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Peninsula to a $20 million mansion on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. While walking on beaches and exploring nearby woods and villages, he muses on the nature of time, weather, waves, agates, books, words for snow and ice, our complex relationship with nature, and much more.

From the introduction: “I wanted to present a true picture of a complex region, part of my continuing project to learn at least one place on earth reasonably well, and trusted that it would appear gradually and accumulatively—and not as a conventional portrait, but as a mosaic that included the sounds and scents and textures of the place and some of the plants, animals, and its inhabitants. Bolstered by the notion that a book is a journey that author and reader walk together, I would search for promising trails and follow them as far as my reconstructed knee would allow.”

[more]

A Wonderment Of Mountains

The Great Smokies

Carson Brewer

University of Tennessee Press, 2003

“Carson Brewer at his absolute best.” – Sam Venable

Carson Brewer on…

Mountain places

Snow was nice and crunchy underfoot. Not crunchy like peanuts or cornflakes. Rather, it was a silky whispery crunchy.

Mountain plants

You can bury your nose deep in the cool violet bed and smell the mix of life and death while pondering the unceasing cycle of each into the other.

Mountain People

Lem Ownby…has plowed oxen, mules, and horses on the forty-four acre farm on Jakes Creek. But he has never owned or driven an automobile.

The Author: Carson Brewer was a reporter and columnist for more than forty years. His columns on conservation issues and on the Great Smoky Mountains earned him the E.J. Meeman Conservation Award (twice) from the Scripps-Howard Foundation, the Golden Press Card award from the Society of Professional Journalists (which also named a scholarship in his honor in 1984), and the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the Knoxville Writers Guild. He died on January 15, 2003.

[more]

Wordsworth and the Green Romantics

Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century

Lisa Ottum

University of New Hampshire Press, 2016

Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological phenomenon of affect as a force central to how we develop conscious attitudes and commitments. Together, these trends offer suggestive insights for the study of Green Romanticism.

[more]

A World Between Waves

Edited by Frank Stewart

Island Press, 1992

A World Between Waves is a collection of essays on the natural history of Hawaii by some of America's most renowned writers. It is a testament to the biological and geological wealth of this unique and threatened island landscape, and a passionate call to action on behalf of what may soon be gone.

[more]

Woven Shades of Green

An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature

Tim Wenzell

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature by authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. It begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, and James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

[more]

Wrestling with Nature

From Omens to Science

Edited by Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank

University of Chicago Press, 2011

When and where did science begin? Historians have offered different answers to these questions, some pointing to Babylonian observational astronomy, some to the speculations of natural philosophers of ancient Greece. Others have opted for early modern Europe, which saw the triumph of Copernicanism and the birth of experimental science, while yet another view is that the appearance of science was postponed until the nineteenth century.

Rather than posit a modern definition of science and search for evidence of it in the past, the contributors to Wrestling with Nature examine how students of nature themselves, in various cultures and periods of history, have understood and represented their work. The aim of each chapter is to explain the content, goals, methods, practices, and institutions associated with the investigation of nature and to articulate the strengths, limitations, and boundaries of these efforts from the perspective of the researchers themselves. With contributions from experts representing different historical periods and different disciplinary specializations, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of science and on what it meant, in other times and places, to wrestle with nature.

[more]

Writing Natural History

Dialogue with Authors

Edward Lueders

University of Utah Press, 1989

Writing Natural History is the edited record of four public dialogues held at the University of Utah in 1988 between eminent writers in the fields of natural history. In these interchanges the writers discussed their traditions, perspectives, values, purposes, techniques, and personal insights. Their conversations, like their work, link the sciences with the humanities in surprising ways, enhancing our understanding and appreciation of both. This volume maintains the vitality of the spoken dialogues and conveys a lively sense of each speaker’s concern with the processes of the natural world and our human position in it.

Half of the authors began as professionals in the natural sciences before becoming recognized for their literary skills; the other half are established writers whose works reflect their vital human affinity with and respect for nature. Writing Natural History will appeal to all readers involved in conservation, nature study, creative writing, environmental issues, the natural sciences, the outdoors, and the ecological politics of Earth.

Authors dialogues feature Barry Lopez and Edward O. Wilson, Robert Finch and Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Paul Nabhan and Ann Zwinger, Paul Brooks and Edward Lueders.

[more]