The Presidio: From Army Post to National Park
How a site in San Francisco that had been a military base for much of its modern history became a unique, urban national park.
How a site in San Francisco that had been a military base for much of its modern history became a unique, urban national park.
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.
In this fictional future history, written by the co-founder of Life magazine, the Persian prince and admiral Khan-Li records his astonishing journey through the ruins of “Nhu-Yok,” the famed city of the extinct “Mehrikan” people.
Lorimer’s article for the Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities section discusses rot as a natural process avoided by modern humans, focusing particularly on processes of urbanization in contrast to the nurturing of rot that takes place among natural scientists and managers.