front cover of The Way to the Salt Marsh
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."
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A Week in Yellowstone's Thorofare
A Journey Through the Remotest Place
Michael J. Yochim
Oregon State University Press, 2016
The remotest place in the country, outside of Alaska, is a region in Yellowstone National Park ironically named the Thorofare, for its historic role as a route traversed by fur trappers. A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare is a history and celebration of this wild place, set within a week-long expedition that the author took with three friends in 2014.
 
Drawing upon the first-person accounts of rangers who have patrolled the area, archival documents, and Michael Yochim’s personal experiences over almost three decades, A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare distinguishes between the notions of wildness and wilderness. Through historic vignettes, descriptions of natural resources, and the author’s own experiences, it argues that wildness is the most precious, and easily lost, attribute of wilderness.
 
The Thorofare is remote not only from roads, but also largely unexplored in the vast body of wilderness literature. A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare aims to fill that void. Recognizing both the value and the fragility of wildness, the rangers who manage the area have struggled through many eras to preserve it. This book chronicles many of the struggles through which it has remained protected for visitors today.
 
Yochim offers poignant insight into the passions that motivate those who manage, defend, and journey through the Thorofare. His story demonstrates the importance of wild places for touching and understanding a fundamental part of the human experience. Part history, memoir, travelogue, natural history, and reflection, the book will appeal to readers interested in preservation, the wilderness movement, the history of National Parks, or the natural treasures of Yellowstone.
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Where Roads Will Never Reach
Wilderness and Its Visionaries in the Northern Rockies
Frederick H. Swanson
University of Utah Press, 2015

The Rocky Mountains of Idaho and Montana are home to some of the most important remaining American wilderness areas, preserved because of citizens who stood against massive development schemes that would have diminished important wildlife habitat and the abiding sense of remoteness found in such places. Where Roads Will Never Reach tells the stories of hunters, anglers, outfitters, scientists, and other concerned citizens who devoted themselves to protecting remnant wild lands and ecosystems in the Northern Rockies. Environmental historian Frederick Swanson argues that their heartfelt, dedicated work helped boost the American wilderness movement to its current prominence.

Based on newly available archival sources and interviews with many of the participants, this groundbreaking study explores for the first time the grassroots campaigns that yielded some of the largest designated wilderness areas in America. 


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Wild Hope
On the Front Lines of Conservation Success
Andrew Balmford
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Tropical deforestation. The collapse of fisheries. Unprecedented levels of species extinction. Faced with the plethora of gloom-and-doom headlines about the natural world, we might think that environmental disaster is inevitable. But is there any good news about the environment? Yes, there is, answers Andrew Balmford in Wild Hope, and he offers several powerful stories of successful conservation to prove it. This tragedy is still avoidable, and there are many reasons for hope if we find inspiration in stories of effective environmental recovery.
 
Wild Hope is organized geographically, with each chapter taking readers to extraordinary places to meet conservation’s heroes and foot soldiers—and to discover the new ideas they are generating about how to make conservation work on our hungry and crowded planet. The journey starts in the floodplains of Assam, where dedicated rangers and exceptionally tolerant villagers have together helped bring Indian rhinos back from the brink of extinction. In the pine forests of the Carolinas, we learn why plantation owners came to resent rare woodpeckers—and what persuaded them to change their minds. In South Africa, Balmford investigates how invading alien plants have been drinking the country dry, and how the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest conservation program is now simultaneously restoring the rivers, saving species, and creating tens of thousands of jobs. The conservation problems Balmford encounters are as diverse as the people and their actions, but together they offer common themes and specific lessons on how to win the battle of conservation—and the one essential ingredient, Balmford shows, is most definitely hope.
 
Wild Hope, though optimistic, is a clear-eyed view of the difficulties and challenges of conservation. Balmford is fully aware of failed conservation efforts and systematic flaws that make conservation difficult, but he offers here innovative solutions and powerful stories of citizens, governments, and corporations coming together to implement them. A global tour of people and programs working for the planet, Wild Hope is an emboldening green journey.
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Wild Ideas
David Rothenberg
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

A new view of what’s “wild,” and a new path for environmentalism.

At the very heart of American respect for nature, historically and philosophically, is the notion of the wild. This notion comes under scrutiny in Wild Ideas, a collection of essays that bring a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the center of our civilization.

Blending well-known and new voices, the volume surveys classical and romantic concepts of wilderness, from the scary to the sublime, and shows why neither serves us anymore. Instead, the authors argue for a “wild culture,” in which nature is not opposed to humanity, a mere matter of resources and consumers. A cogent reassessment of the ideas that drive the conservation movement, Wild Ideas points out a new direction for future environmentalism.Among the topics discussed are the confluence of wilderness, empire, and race in the United States; the way the ecology movement uses language; gendered views of the wilderness; maps and topology, and how they affect our view of the wild; healing by the wilderness experience; and the idea of an urban wilderness. Contributors: David Abram; Douglas Buege, U of Wisconsin; Denis Cosgrove, U of London; Robert Greenway, Sonoma State U; Ed Grumbine, Sierra Institute; Marvin Henberg, Linfield College; Irene Klaver, Montana State U; Andrew Light, U of Alberta; Lois Lorentzen, U of San Francisco; Max Oelschlaeger, U of North Texas; R. Murray Schafer; Tom Wolf.
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Wildbranch
An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing
Edited by Florence Caplow and Susan A. Cohen. Foreword by H. Emerson Blake
University of Utah Press, 2010

Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing is a powerful collection of mostly unpublished essays and poetry by both prominent American environmental writers and exciting new voices. The poetry and essays by more than fifty contributors offer the reader glimpses into places as diverse as a forest in West Africa, the moors of Ireland, the canyons of the Sonoran desert mountains, and the fields of New England, and they reflect the varied perspectives of field biologists, hunters, farmers, environmental educators, wilderness guides, academics, writers, and artists.

The collection is an intimate portrait of the natural world drawn through the wisdom, ecological consciousness, and open hearts of these exceptional contributors. The Wildbranch Writing Workshop, cosponsored by Orion magazine and Sterling College, has encouraged thoughtful natural history, outdoor, and environmental writing for more than twenty years. The Wildbranch faculty has included its founder E. Anne Proulx, the essayists Edward Hoagland, Janisse Ray, and Scott Russell Sanders, the poet Alison Hawthorne Deming, and many other notable authors. Many have work included in the anthology.

Winner of the New Mexico Book Association's Southwest Book Design & Production Awards for Excellence in the category Trade Books: Non-illustrated. 

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Wilderness Tapestry
An Eclectic Approach To Preservation
Vause Zeveloff
University of Nevada Press, 1992

To further understanding of the meanings and values of wilderness, this volume explores wilderness and its significance to humans from myriad viewpoints, based on a meeting of the North American Interdisciplinary Wilderness Conference.

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Wildlife in the Anthropocene
Conservation after Nature
Jamie Lorimer
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated—where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature?

In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet— Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation. Wildlife in the Anthropocene examines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation.

Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.

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front cover of Wildlife Policies in the U.S. National Parks
Wildlife Policies in the U.S. National Parks
Frederic H. Wagner, Ronald Foresta, R. Bruce Gill, Dale R. McCullough, Michael R. Pelton, William F. Porter, and Hal Salwasser
Island Press, 1995

This volume presents the results of a five-year study of wildlife-management policies in national parks. It synthesizes interviews with individuals inside and outside the National Park Service, provides a comprehensive review of published and unpublished literature, and draws on the collective experience of the authors with various units of the system over the past three decades. Among the topics examined are:

  • the structure and history of the National Park System and Service
  • wildlife "problems" in the parks
  • the role of science in formulating policies and in management
  • recommendations for changes in policy formulation, management, and scientific research procedures
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front cover of The World and the Wild
The World and the Wild
Expanding Wilderness Conservation Beyond its American Roots
Edited by David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Can nature be restored to a pristine state through deliberate action? Must the preservation of wilderness always subordinate the interests of humans to those of other species? Can indigenous peoples be entrusted with the guardianship of their own wild resources? This collection of international writings tackles tough questions like these as it expands wilderness conservation beyond its American roots. One of the first anthologies to consider wilderness as a global issue, it takes a stand against the notion that wilderness is a northern colonialist conceit and is irrelevant to the plans of third world countries. Contributions from all over the planet— Nepal, Borneo, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, South Africa, India, and the United States— show instead that wilderness has an important place in the environmental thought and policy of any nation, industrial or developing. The World and the Wild boldly advances the idea that our concept of wilderness must expand to take in new vistas. It breaks fresh ground in global environmentalism and is essential reading for anyone concerned with development issues related to conservation. Contents
Foreword: Whither World Wilderness? / Vance G. Martin
Introduction: Wilderness in the Rest of the World / David Rothenberg
How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle? / Pramod Parajuli
The Unpaintable West / Zeese Papanikolas
Restoring Wilderness or Reclaiming Forests? / Sahotra Sarkar
For Indian Wilderness / Philip Cafaro and Monish Verma
In the Dust of Kilimanjaro / David Western
Why Conservation in the Tropics Is Failing / John Terborgh
"Trouble in Paradise": An Exchange / David Western and John Terborgh
Zulu History / Ian Player
Bruno Manser and the Penan / William W. Bevis
Roads Where There Have Long Been Trails / Kathleen Harrison
Volcano Dreams / Tom Vanderbilt
Recycled Rain Forest Myths / Antonio Carlos Diegues
The Park of Ten Thousand Waterfalls / Dan Imhoff
Mapping the Wild / Edward A. Whitesell
Earth Jazz / Evan Eisenberg
They Trampled on Our Taboos / Damien Arabagali
[more]


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