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Population growth and industrial development have put the wide-open spaces and natural resources that define the West under immense stress. Vested interests clash and come to terms over embattled resources such as water, minerals, and even open space. The federal government controls 40 to 80 percent of the land base in many western states; its sway over the futures of the West's communities and environment has prompted the development of unique policies and politics in the West.

Zachary A. Smith and John Freemuth bring together a roster of top scholars to explicate the issues noted above as well as other key questions in this new edition of Environmental Politics and Policy in the West, which was first published in 1993. This thoroughly revised and updated edition offers a comprehensive and current survey.

Contributors address the policy process as it affects western states, how bureaucracy and politics shape environmental dialogues in the West, how western states innovate environmental policies independently of Washington, and how and when science is involved (or ignored) in management of the West's federal lands. Experts in individual resource areas explore multifaceted issues such as the politics of dam removal and restoration, wildlife resource concerns, suburban sprawl and smart growth, the management of hard-rock mining, and the allocation of the West's tightly limited water resources. Contributors include: Leslie R. Alm, Carolyn D. Baber, Walter F. Baber, Robert V. Bartlett, Hugh Bartling, Matthew A. Cahn, R. McGreggor Cawley, Charles Davis, Sandra Davis, John C. Freemuth, Sheldon Kamieniecki, Matt Lindstrom, William R. Mangun, Denise McCain-Tharnstrom, Daniel McCool, Jaina L. Moan, and Zachary A. Smith.

Population growth, industrial development, and renewed resource extraction have put the wide-open spaces and natural resources that define the West under immense stress. Vested interests clash and come to terms over embattled resources such as water, minerals, and even open space. The federal government controls 40 to 80 percent of the land base in many western states, so its sway over the future of the West’s communities and environments has prompted the development of unique policies and politics. 

In the third edition of Environmental Politics and Policy in the West, Zachary A. Smith and John C. Freemuth bring together a roster of top scholars to explicate the key issues involved. The volume has been completely updated to cover rapidly changing developments in the West, including climate change, land management politics and policy, science controversies, western water and river restoration, tribal sovereignty issues, the management of endangered species, and renewable energy development. Contributors also address how bureaucracy and politics shape environmental dialogues and explore multifaceted issues such as the politics of dam removal and restoration, wildlife resource concerns, suburban sprawl and smart growth, the management of renewable resources, public land reform and science, tribal sovereignty and energy, and the allocation of the West’s tightly limited water resources.

This timely new edition offers a comprehensive and current survey of influential western policy and environmental issues. It will be of great use to students of environmental studies and also public and environmental policy, as well as activists and professionals working in the environmental arena.

Contributors: Leslie R. Alm, Carolyn D. Baber, Walter F. Baber, Robert V. Bartlett, Hugh Bartling, Matthew A. Cahn, R. McGreggor Cawley, Charles Davis, Sandra Davis, John C. Freemuth, Sheldon Kamieniecki, Matt Lindstrom, William R. Mangun, Denise McCain-Tharnstrom, Daniel McCool, Jaina L. Moan, Zachary A. Smith

Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.

Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was the all-conquering masculine hunter hero, the sharpshooting man of the wilderness who tamed and claimed the West with each provident step. Women were also a significant part of the story, treading the game trails as plucky adventurers and resilient homesteaders and acting out their exploits in autobiographical accounts and stage shows.

Epiphany in the Wilderness informs various academic debates surrounding the frontier period, including the construction of nature as a site of personal challenge, gun culture, gender adaptations and the crafting of the masculine wilderness hero figure, wildlife management and consumption, memorializing and trophy-taking, and the juxtaposition of a closing frontier with an emerging conservation movement.

 

The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University toward the publication of this book.

Bennion provides in-depth portraits of nineteenth-century women editors of the West and their diverse publications. The book's title takes its name from an 1898 editorial in the Wasatch Wave which described Piute Pioneer editor Candace Alice De Witt as a "maiden fair, fully equal to the occasion."Equal to the Occasion delves into the lives, publications, and historical contexts in which approximately thirty-five female editors of newspapers and other periodicals worked in the nineteenth-century West. The book covers the period from 1854, when the West's first woman editor began her work, through the turn of the century; it includes research gathered from thirteen western states. With its in-depth portraits of pioneering women editors and its appendix listing more than two hundred women and the major repositories where their extant publications are kept, Equal to the Occasion rescues from obscurity a whole panoply of nineteenth-century western women.

This book is about exile and transformation. It is primarily about Mary Hallock Foote, nineteenth-century artist and writer, easterner-turned-westerner, but it is a hybrid work - as well as being about Mary, it is about what it has been like for me, a twenty-first century American expatriate, Californian-turned-Londoner, to find common ground in the life of a nineteenth century woman.

This is the first book-length collection of essays on Mary Austin's work that covers the range of her writing in varied genres. Austin is revealed as a writer wrestling with issues that continue to challenge us today, including water in the arid West; social and environmental justice as it relates to indigenous peoples, women, and the working class; and the consequences of rigidly hierarchical thinking for western lands and people.