Books & Profiles

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.

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.

Prominent Austrian and German scholars combine science and humanities in interdisciplinary approaches to humans and their environment.

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.

Situating the wolf in the history of Canadian national parks, this controversial study examines the tumultuous relationship between humans and wolves in four Rocky Mountain parks.

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.

Thorough compilation, exhaustive research, and precise chronology are the hallmarks of this work on the Hanford Site Historic District, a plutonium production facility that operated from 1943 to 1990.

US history from an environmental perspective.

In 1993, environmental objections to NAFTA resulted in the establishment of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), the first international organization created to address issues related to trade and the environment. Surprisingly, however, the CEC has received little scholarly attention, to date. This book is intended to fill that gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of how the organization has fulfilled, or failed to fulfill, its mandates.