Content Index

Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930

A review of a collection of essays on the history and adventure of American exploration with several references to sophisticated analyses of trigonometric surveys, the science of empire building, and natural history exchange networks.

Contested Mountains: Nature, Development and Environment in the Cairngorms Region of Scotland, 1880–1980

This contribution to the literature on the recent environmental history of Britain is an exhaustively detailed study of the interplay between tourism, conservation, and landownership in one of the most popular tourist areas in Scotland.

Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century

Saving the Planet is a history of US conservation and environmental movements in the twentieth century.

Roundtable Review of Wired Wilderness by Etienne Benson

Sara Dant, Michael Lewis, and Robert M. Wilson discuss Etienne Benson’s Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife.

Historische Humanökologie: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zu Menschen und Ihrer Umwelt

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

The Culture of Tourism, The Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest

This collection of essays looks at the ways tourism affects people and places in the Southwest and at the region’s meaning on the larger stage of national life.

Warm Sands: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in the Atomic West

Warm Sands gives an institutional analysis of how the debates over legal and political authority, scientific expertise, and public health and safety both delayed and shaped the formation of mill tailings policy in the United States.

Ethnographies of Conservation: Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege

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.

Roundtable Review of Making a Green Machine by Finn Arne Jørgensen

Peter Thorsheim, Heike Weber, Tim Cooper, and Carl A. Zimring discuss Finn Arne Jørgensen’s book on the Scandinavian beverage container deposit-refund system.

Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology

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.