When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he was called the Fast Water Man. Boatmen he trained went on to found their own competing operations. Always controversial, Nevills had important critics and enemies as well as friends and supporters, but no one can dispute his tremendous impact on the history of western rivers and recreation.
Nevills's complete extant journals of those river expeditions are published for the first time in High, Wide, and Handsome. They contain vivid stories and images of still untamed-by-dams rivers and canyons in the Colorado River system and elsewhere, of wild rides in wooden boats, and of the few intrepid pioneers of adventure tourism who paid Nevills so they could experience it all. They have been transcribed and edited by river historian Roy Webb, author of If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners and Call of the
Colorado.
Think of the Highlands as the “backyard” and “backstop” of the Philadelphia–New York–Hartford metroplex. A backyard that spans over three million acres across Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, the Highlands serves as recreational open space for the metroplex’s burgeoning human population. As backstop, Highlands’ watersheds provide a ready source of high-quality drinking water for over fifteen million people.
The Highlands is the first book to examine the natural and cultural landscape of this four-state region, showing how it’s distinctive and why its conservation is vital. Each chapter is written by a different leading researcher and specialist in that field, and introduces readers to another aspect of the Highlands: its geological foundations, its aquifers and watersheds, its forest ecology, its past iron industry.
In the 1800s, the Highlands were mined, cutover, and then largely abandoned. Given time, the forests regenerated, the land healed, and the waters cleared. Increasingly, however, the Highlands are under assault again—polluted runoff contaminating lakes and streams, invasive species choking out the local flora and fauna, exurban sprawl blighting the rural landscape, and climate change threatening the integrity of its ecosystems.
The Highlands makes a compelling case for land use planning and resource management strategies that could help ensure a sustainable future for the region, strategies that could in turn be applied to other landscapes threatened by urbanization across the country. The Highlands are a valuable resource. And now, so is The Highlands.
People who flyfish know that a favorite river bend, a secluded spot in moving waters, can feel like home—a place you know intimately and intuitively. In prose that reads like the flowing current of a river, scholar and essayist George Handley blends nature writing, local history, theology, environmental history, and personal memoir in his new book Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River.
Handley’s meditations on the local Provo River watershed present the argument that a sense of place requires more than a strong sense of history and belonging, it requires awareness and commitment. Handley traces a history of settlement along the Provo that has profoundly transformed the landscape and yet neglected its Native American and environmental legacies. As a descendent of one of the first pioneers to irrigate the area, and as a witness to the loss of orchards, open space, and an eroded environmental ethic, Handley weaves his own personal and family history into the landscape to argue for sustainable belonging. In avoiding the exclusionist and environmentally harmful attitudes that come with the territorial claims to a homeland, the flyfishing term, “home waters,” is offered as an alternative, a kind of belonging that is informed by deference to others, to the mysteries of deep time, and to a fragile dependence on water. While it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that the Mormon faith is inimical to good environmental stewardship, Handley explores the faith’s openness to science, its recognition of the holiness of the creation, and its call for an ethical engagement with nature. A metaphysical approach to the physical world is offered as an antidote to the suicidal impulses of modern society and our persistent ambivalence about the facts of our biology and earthly condition. Home Waters contributes a perspective from within the Mormon religious experience to the tradition of such Western writers as Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Trimble, and Amy Irvine.
Winner of the Mormon Letters Award for Memoir.
Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2011
Good Brick Award, Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, 2011
Julia Ideson Award, Friends of the Texas Room, 2011
Driven by an almost fanatical desire for whatever is new, "modern," and likely to make money, Houston is constantly in the process of remaking itself. Few structures remain from the nineteenth century, and even much of the twentieth-century built environment has fallen before the wrecking ball of "progress." Indeed, the demolition of older buildings in Houston can be compared to the destruction of cityscapes such as Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo in World War II. But because this wholesale restructuring of Houston's built environment has happened in peacetime, historically minded people have only recently sounded an alarm over what is being lost and the toll this destruction is taking on Houstonians' sense of place.
Houston Lost and Unbuilt presents an extensive catalogue of twentieth-century public and commercial buildings that have been lost forever, as well as an intriguing selection of buildings that never made it off the drawing board. The lost buildings (or lost interiors of buildings) span a wide range, from civic gathering places such as the Houston Municipal Auditorium and the Astrodome to commercial enterprises such as the Foley Brothers, Sears Roebuck, and Sakowitz department stores to "Theatre Row" downtown to neighborhoods such as Fourth Ward/Freedmen's Town. Steven Strom's introductions and photo captions describe each significant building's contribution to the civic life of Houston. The "unbuilt" section of the book includes numerous previously unpublished architectural renderings of proposed projects such as a multi-building city center, monorail, and people mover system, all which reflect Houston's fascination with the future and optimism that technology will solve all of the city's problems.
The Hudson River is one of the great rivers of the world. Not long ago, it was seriously threatened by pollution. Now it is coming back to life as a waterway where fish and birds can thrive again—a river valued once more by communities along its shores.
The sloop Clearwater, founded by folksinger Pete Seeger, has been at the vanguard of this river revival. The environmental education program on board the sloop has taught thousands of children and adults to love the river. Building on its achievements, The Hudson, brings a wealth of knowledge to a wider audience.
Covering the full sweep of the river’s natural history and human heritage, this book introduces readers to the river’s diversity of plants and wildlife, to the geological forces that created it, to the people who explored and settled its banks, to its enduring place in American history and art, and to the battles waged over its environmental preservation. This revised edition also includes new information on the importance of the Hudson’s watershed, the impacts of invasive species, and the latest data on the river’s toxic PCB contamination, as well as new scholarship on the river’s history.
In engaging illustrations, maps, and text––distilled from the best research on the Hudson’s habitat and history––this unique book invites you to explore the river yourself.
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