W. Scott Olsen and Bret Lott invited a dozen friends to consider one particular calendar month in the place they call home. The result is A Year in Place, a captivating collection of new writing by twelve eminent American writers.
More than a montage of voices and experiences, A Year in Place illustrates, as Olsen and Lott explain in their introduction, the trends in American thinking about who we are and what we care about. Rick Bass takes us to the Yaak Valley of Montana in June, where fawns are arriving, "newly-emerged, knocked-legged and groggy, legs still unfolding from that long sleeping passage." Peggy Shumaker explores the special social and cultural time that is March in Fairbanks, Alaska, where a long winter has whetted the psychic despair of inhabitants who find in the "sky’s unbearable brightness . . . a waking pain beyond endurance." Michael Martone transports us through memory to Indiana in the 1950s where each May a blimp "yawed and floated up," wallowing above a suburban neighborhood on its way to the Indianapolis 500.
These and nine other contributions yield an unforgettable book about "the places we find ourselves blessed enough to be."
Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s contemporary water crisis, mapping the confluence of forces that have shaped the predicament that the world’s most populous nation now faces in managing its water reserves.
Chinese governments have long struggled to maintain ecological stability along the Yellow River, undertaking ambitious programs of canal and dike construction to mitigate the effects of recurrent droughts and floods. But particularly during the Maoist years the North China Plain was radically re-engineered to utilize every drop of water for irrigation and hydroelectric generation. As David A. Pietz shows, Maoist water management from 1949 to 1976 cast a long shadow over the reform period, beginning in 1978. Rapid urban growth, industrial expansion, and agricultural intensification over the past three decades of China’s economic boom have been realized on a water resource base that was acutely compromised, with effects that have been more difficult and costly to overcome with each passing decade. Chronicling this complex legacy, The Yellow River provides important insight into how water challenges will affect China’s course as a twenty-first-century global power.
The world's first national park, Yellowstone is a symbol of nature's enduring majesty and the paradigm of protected areas across the globe. But Yellowstone is constantly changing. How we understand and respond to events that are putting species under stress, say the authors of Yellowstone's Wildlife in Transition, will determine the future of ecosystems that were millions of years in the making. With a foreword by the renowned naturalist E. O. Wilson, this is the most comprehensive survey of research on North America's flagship national park available today.
Marshaling the expertise of over thirty contributors, Yellowstone's Wildlife in Transition examines the diverse changes to the park's ecology in recent decades. Since its creation in the 1870s, the priorities governing Yellowstone have evolved, from intensive management designed to protect and propagate depleted large-bodied mammals to an approach focused on restoration and preservation of ecological processes. Recognizing the importance of natural occurrences such as fires and predation, this more ecologically informed oversight has achieved notable successes, including the recovery of threatened native species of wolves, bald eagles, and grizzly bears.
Nevertheless, these experts detect worrying signs of a system under strain. They identify three overriding stressors: invasive species, private-sector development of unprotected lands, and a warming climate. Their concluding recommendations will shape the twenty-first-century discussion over how to confront these challenges, not only in American parks but for conservation areas worldwide. Highly readable and fully illustrated, Yellowstone's Wildlife in Transition will be welcomed by ecologists and nature enthusiasts alike.
The mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania provide the setting for the most popular whitewater in America: the Youghiogheny River at Ohiopyle. People from all over the nation come to run the rapids, while others simply enjoy the natural beauty of Ohiopyle State Park. But this Appalachian river has many faces as it flows from its source among the scattered mountain farms of western Maryland to its confluence with the Monongahela in the industrial outskirts of Pittsburgh. Though always a home to people who cherish their mountain roots, the region’s river offers recreation for millions of Americans.
By canoe, raft, van, and on foot, Tim Palmer explores the river from its highest spring to its industrial end. He writes about the people - afternoon visitors and eigth-generation natives - and about their pasts and their hopes, about the shaping of the land, and the land’s inevitable shaping of them.
The author chronicles the rise of the five Ohiopyle rafting companies that host 80,000 visitors each year and then takes the reader on one of these outfitted voyages. Finally, Palmer paddles beyond the Appalachians to the river’s urban end near Pittsburgh. Strip mining, land development, and recreation management are examined with a consciousness that asks, What will happen to this remarkable but threatened place?
In the arid American West, settlement was generally contingent on the availability of water to irrigate crops and maintain livestock and human residents. Early irrigation projects were usually the cooperative efforts of pioneer farmers, but by the early twentieth century they largely reflected federal intentions to create new farms out of the western public domain. The Yuma Reclamation Project, authorized in 1904, was one of the earliest federal irrigation projects initiated in the western United States and the first authorized on the Colorado River. Its story exemplifies the range of difficulties associated with settling the nation’s final frontier—the remaining irrigable lands in the arid West, including Indian lands—and illuminates some of the current issues and conflicts concerning the Colorado River. Author Robert Sauder’s detailed, meticulously researched examination of the Yuma Project illustrates the complex multiplicity of problems and challenges associated with the federal government’s attempt to facilitate homesteading in the arid West. He examines the history of settlement along the lower Colorado River from earliest times, including the farming of the local Quechan people and the impact of Spanish colonization, and he reviews the engineering problems that had to be resolved before an industrial irrigation scheme could be accomplished. The study also sheds light on myriad unanticipated environmental, economic, and social challenges that the government had to confront in bringing arid lands under irrigation, including the impact on the Native American population of the region.The Yuma Reclamation Project is an original and significant contribution to our understanding of federal reclamation endeavors in the West. It provides new and fascinating information about the history of the Yuma Valley and, as a case study of irrigation policy, it offers compelling insights into the history and consequences of water manipulation in the arid West.
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