Books & Profiles

Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement

In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders—Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Each man brought a different background and perspective to the advocacy for wilderness preservation, yet each was spurred by a fear of what growing numbers of automobiles, aggressive road building, and the meteoric increase in Americans turning to nature for their leisure would do to the country’s wild places.

Atomenergie und gespaltene Gesellschaft: Die Geschichte des gescheiterten Projektes Kernkraftwerk Kaiseraugst

Until the project was finally abandoned in 1989, the Kaiseraugst nuclear power plant was the focus of Swiss disputes on nuclear energy for almost twenty years. In this case study, Patrick Kupper pursues the question of how an electro-technical infrastructure project could become the focal point of discourse about common basic values of Swiss society.

Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

The work of John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley represents a widely divergent body of writing. Michael A. Bryson provides a thoughtful examination of these authors, their work, and the ways in which science and nature unite them.