Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction
A history of constructed and designed landscapes in the United States’ national parks.
A history of constructed and designed landscapes in the United States’ national parks.
An edited collection investigating the history of forestry in the United States from the nineteenth century onward.
Hal Rothman’s Neon Metropolis is a colorful and absorbing account of Las Vegas’s rise from the desert landscape of the American West to the cutting edge of metropolitan growth and development.
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.
Using the Malheur Basin in southeastern Oregon as a case study, this intriguing and nuanced book explores the ways people have envisioned boundaries between water and land, the ways they have altered these places, and the often unintended results.
State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future examines changes in the ways cities are managed, built, and lived in that could tip the balance towards a healthier and more peaceful urban future.
The Monkey Wrench Gang fueled a new generation of angry young environmentalists (such as Earth First!) who practice monkey-wrenching, or sabotage for the sake of protecting the wilderness.
Beginning in the pre-modern world, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers both served as critical trade routes connecting cultures in an extensive exchange network, while also sustaining populations through their surrounding wetlands and bottomlands. In modern times, “Mother Volga” and the “Father of Waters” became integral parts of national identity, contributing to a sense of Russian and American exceptionalism. Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building discusses their histories, through which we derive a more nuanced view of human interaction with the environment, which adds another lens to our understanding of the past.
Child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today’s wired generation—he calls it nature-deficit—to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression.