conservation

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.

Stoll traces the origins of nineteenth-century conservation, which grew out of a rich and heated discussion, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, about soil fertility, plant nutrition, and livestock management. More fundamental than any other resource, soil “became the focal point for a conception of nature as strictly limited.” The problem gave rise to a major disagreement about the wisdom of territorial expansion.

In Hanford: A Conversation About Nuclear Waste and Cleanup, Roy Gephart takes us on a journey through a world of facts, values, conflicts, and choices facing the most complex environmental cleanup project in the United States, the US Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.

US history from an environmental perspective.

Focusing on the mountainous area from northern Alabama to West Virginia, this important volume explores the historic and contemporary interrelations between culture and environment in a region that has been plagued by land misuse and damaging stereotypes of its people.

First published in 1933, The People’s Forests makes a passionate case for the public ownership and management of the nation’s forests in the face of generations of devastating practices.

In linking culture with nature, science with history, Man and Nature was the most influential text of its time next to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

In the first comprehensive account of the Kaibab deer controversy, Christian C. Young describes the interactions, rivalries, and conflicts between state and federal agencies, scientists, nature lovers, conservationists, and hunters.

Through a series of ethnographic studies that range from Papua New Guinea to Siberia, Brazil to Namibia, Ethnographies of Conservation argues that the problem is not the disappearance of “pristine nature” or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, critical attention would be better turned on discourses of “primitiveness” and “pristine nature,” so prevalent within conservation ideology.

The eighteen chapters of Restoration of Puget Sound Rivers examine geological and geomorphological controls on river and stream characteristics and dynamics, biological aspects of river systems in the region, and the application of fluvial geomorphology, civil engineering, riparian ecology, and aquatic ecology in efforts to restore Puget Sound Rivers