Tanoak ( Notholithocarpus densiflorus ) is a resilient and common hardwood tree native to California and southwestern Oregon. People’s radically different perceptions of it have ranged from treasured food plant to cash crop to trash tree. Having studied the patterns of tanoak use and abuse for nearly twenty years, botanist Frederica Bowcutt uncovers a complex history of cultural, sociopolitical, and economic factors affecting the tree’s fate. St ...
From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It , trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West , the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport’s long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ulti ...
In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. His project kicked off a half century of research that has expanded our knowledge of climate change. Despite more than fifty years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why?In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer th ...
From Denali's majestic slopes to the Great Swamp of central New Jersey, protected wilderness areas make up nearly twenty percent of the parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and other public lands that cover a full fourth of the nation's territory. But wilderness is not only a place. It is also one of the most powerful and troublesome ideas in American environmental thought, representing everything from sublime beauty and patriotic inspira ...
The Environmental Moment is a collection of documents that reveal the significance of the years 1968-1972 to the environmental movement in the United States. With material ranging from short pieces from the Whole Earth Catalog and articles from the Village Voice to lectures, posters, and government documents, the collection describes the period through the perspective of a diversity of participants, including activists, politicians, scientists, ...
Ellavut / Our Yup'ik World and Weather is a result of nearly ten years of gatherings among Yup'ik elders to document the qanruyutet (words of wisdom) that guide their interactions with the environment. In an effort to educate their own young people as well as people outside the community, the elders discussed the practical skills necessary to live in a harsh environment, stressing the ethical and philosophical aspects of the Yup'i ...
Forests of Belonging examines the history and ongoing transformation of ethnic and social relationships among four distinct communities–Bangando, Baka, Bakwele, and Mbomam–in the Lobeke forest region of southeastern Cameroon. By slotting forest communities into ecological categories such as «hunters» and «gatherers,» previous analyses of social relationships in tropical forests have resulted in binary frameworks that render real-life relations ...
Iceland, Greenland, Northern Norway, and the Faroe Islands lie on the edges of Western Europe, in an area long portrayed by travelers as remote and exotic – its nature harsh, its people reclusive. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this marginalized region has gradually become part of modern Europe, a transformation that is narrated in Karen Oslund’s Iceland Imagined .This cultural and environmental history sweeps across the d ...
