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3 books match the query 'Clearcutting'

cover of Edge Effects: Notes From An Oregon Forest

Edge Effects

Notes From An Oregon Forest

Chris Anderson

University of Iowa Press, 1993

Buying his dream house several years ago on the forest's edge near Corvallis, Oregon, essayist Chris Anderson hoped to find the joys of rural living. Despite interminable Mr. Blandings experiences, he lived embowered by 12,000 acres of seemingly endless fir trees. But not for long. The McDonald-Dunn Forest was about to become the site of a disturbing research project. Little did Anderson know when he bought his house that, in addition to studying the ecological effects of clear-cutting, the researchers wanted to see how urban fringe dwellers might be affected too. The shock of that harvest compelled the essays in this vibrant, graceful record of the relationship between the forest and Anderson's life on its boundary.
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cover of The Bitterroot and Mr. Brandborg: Clearcutting and the Struggle for Sustainable Forestry in the Northern Rockies

The Bitterroot and Mr. Brandborg

Clearcutting and the Struggle for Sustainable Forestry in the Northern Rockies

Frederick H. Swanson

University of Utah Press, 2011

Winner of the Wallace Stegner Prize in American Environmental or Western History

Fredrick Swanson tells the story of Guy M. Brandborg and his impact on the practices of the U.S. Forest Service. As supervisor of Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest from 1935 to 1955, Brandborg engaged in a management style that promoted not only the well-being of the forest community but also the social and economic welfare of the local people. By relying on selective cutting, his goal was to protect the watersheds and wildlife habitats that are devastated by clear-cutting, and to prevent the job losses that follow such practices. Following his retirement, he became concerned that his agency was deviating from the practice of sustained-yield management of the forest’s timber lands, and led a highly visible public outcry that became known as the Bitterroot controversy. Brandborg’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contributed materially to the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976, the single most important law affecting public forestry since the creation of the Forest Service.

Meticulously written, The Bitterroot and Mr. Brandborg articulates Brandborg’s Progressive-era idealism and is based on extensive archival research in collections throughout the Rockies and the Northwest, including the Brandborg family papers. Swanson’s crisp narration of how one national forest supervisor understood the intricate connection between the grasslands and forests under his care and the communities that were so dependent on these invaluable resources, opens a much larger story about the meaning of public lands in a democratic society.

Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction-Contemporary.
 
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cover of This Ecstatic Nation: The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism

This Ecstatic Nation

The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism

Terre Ryan

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

Americans' cultural love affair with their country's landscape started in the nineteenth century, when expansionism was often promoted as divine mission, the West was still the frontier, and scenery became the backdrop of nationalist mythology. With a promise of resources ripe for development, Manifest Destiny–era aesthetics often reinforced a system of environmental degradation while preserving the wide and wild view. Although the aesthetics have evolved, contemporary media are filled with American landscape images inspired by the nineteenth century.

Terre Ryan examines this phenomenon by exploring the overlapping trails of national mythology, landscape aesthetics, patriotic discourse, and public policy. Tracing her journeys around bombing grounds in Nevada, logging sites in Oregon, and energy fields in Wyoming, she argues that business and government agencies often frame commercial projects and national myths according to nineteenth-century beliefs about landscape and bounty. Advertisements and political promotional materials following this aesthetic framework perpetuate frontier-era ideas about the environment as commodity, scenery, and cultural trashlands. Transmitted through all types of media, nineteenth-century perspectives on landscape continue to inform mainstream perceptions of the environment, environmental policies, and representations of American patriotism.

Combining personal narrative with factual reportage, political and cultural critique, and historical analysis, Ryan reframes the images we see every day and places them into a larger national narrative.
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