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People'S Forests

by Marshall Robert Marshall

29,15€ + 10% CARD

 Devoted conservationist, environmentalist, and explorer Robert Marshall (1901-1939) was chief of the Division of Recreation and Lands, U.S. Forest Service, when he died at age thirty-eight. Throughout his short but intense life, Marshall helped catalyze the preservation of millions of wilderness acres in all parts of the U.S., inspired countless wilderness advocates, and was a pioneer in the modern environmental movement: he and seven fellow conservationists founded the Wilderness Society in 1935. First published in 1933, The People's Forests made a passionate case for the public ownership and management of the nation's forests in the face of generations of devastating practices; its republication now is especially timely.Marshall describes the major values of forests as sources of raw materials, as essential resources for the conservation of soil and water, and as a "precious environment for recreation" and for "the happiness of millions of human beings." He considers the pros and cons of private and public ownership, deciding that public ownership and large-scale public acquisition are vital in order to save the nation's forests, and sets out ways to intelligently plan for and manage public ownership.The last words of this book capture Marshall's philosophy perfectly: "The time has come when we must discard the unsocial view that our woods are the lumbermen's and substitute the broader ideal that every acre of woodland in the country is rightly a part of the people's forests."
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Sum Of The Parts - The Mathematics And Politics Of Region, Place, And Writing

by Kent C Ryden

33,13€ + 10% CARD

 <div>Proponents of the new regional history understand that regional identities are constructed and contested, multifarious and not monolithic, that they involve questions of dominance and power, and that their nature is inherently political. In this lively new book, writing in the spirit of these understandings, Kent Ryden engagingly examines works of American regional writing to show us how literary partisans of place create and recreate, attack and defend, argue over and dramatize the meaning and identity of their regions in the pages of their books.</div> <div> </div> <div>Cleverly drawing upon mathematical models that complement his ideas and focusing on both classic and contemporary literary regionalists, Ryden demonstrates that regionalism, in the cultural sense, retains a great deal of power as a framework for literary interpretation. For New England he examines such writers as Robert Frost and Hayden Carruth, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Edith Wharton, and Carolyn Chute and Russell Banks to demonstrate that today’s regionalists inspire closer, more democratic readings of life and landscape. For the West and South, he describes Wallace Stegner’s and William Faulkner’s use of region to, respectively, exclude and evade or confront and indict. For the Midwest, he focuses on C. J. Hribal, William Least Heat-Moon, Paul Gruchow, and others to demonstrate that midwesterners continually construct the past anew from the materials at hand, filling the seemingly empty midlands with history and significance.</div> <div> </div> <div>Ryden reveals that there are many Wests, many New Englands, many Souths, and many Midwests, all raising similar issues about the cultural politics of region and place. Writing with appealing freshness and a sense of adventure, he shows us that place, and the stories that emerge from and define place, can be a source of subversive energy that blunts the homogenizing force of region, inscribing marginal places and people back onto the imaginative surface of the landscape when we read it on a place-by-place, landscape-by-landscape, book-by-book basis.</div>
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Meaning Of Rivers - Flow And Reflection In American Literature

by Mcmillin T. S. Mcmillin

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 In the continental United States, rivers serve to connect state to state, interior with exterior, the past to the present, but they also divide places and peoples from one another. These connections and divisions have given rise to a diverse body of literature that explores American nature, ranging from travel accounts of seventeenth-century Puritan colonists to magazine articles by twenty-first-century enthusiasts of extreme sports. Using pivotal American writings to determine both what literature can tell us about rivers and, conversely, how rivers help us think about the nature of literature, The Meaning of Rivers introduces readers to the rich world of flowing water and some of the different ways in which American writers have used rivers to understand the world through which these waters flow. Embracing a hybrid, essayistic form-part literary theory, part cultural history, and part fieldwork-The Meaning of Rivers connects the humanities to other disciplines and scholarly work to the land. Whether developing a theory of palindromes or reading works of American literature as varied as Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and James Dickey's Deliverance, McMillin urges readers toward a transcendental retracing of their own interpretive encounters. The nature of texts and the nature of "nature" require diverse and versatile interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. By taking us upstream as well as down, McMillin draws attention to the potential of rivers for improving our sense of place and time.
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Bad Land Pastoralism In Great Plains Fiction

by Matthew J. C. Cella

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>At the core of this nuanced book is the question that ecocritics have been debating for decades: what is the relationship between aesthetics and activism, between art and community? By using a pastoral lens to examine ten fictional narratives that chronicle the dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature on the Great Plains, Matthew Cella explores literary treatments of a succession of abrupt cultural transitions from the Euroamerican conquest of the "Indian wilderness" in the nineteenth century to the Buffalo Commons phenomenon in the twentieth. By charting the shifting meaning of land use and biocultural change in the region, he posits this bad land—the arid West—as a crucible for the development of the human imagination.</p> <p> Each chapter deals closely with two novels that chronicle the same crisis within the Plains community. Cella highlights, for example, how Willa Cather reconciles her persistent romanticism with a growing disillusionment about the future of rural Nebraska, how Tillie Olsen and Frederick Manfred approach the tragedy of the Dust Bowl with strikingly similar visions, and how Annie Proulx and Thomas King use the return of the buffalo as the centerpiece of a revised mythology of the Plains as a palimpsest defined by layers of change and response. By illuminating these fictional quests for wholeness on the Great Plains, Cella leads us to understand the intricate interdependency of people and the places they inhabit.</p> <p> Cella uses the term "pastoralism" in its broadest sense to mean a mode of thinking that probes the relationship between nature and culture: a discourse concerned with human engagement—material and nonmaterial—with the nonhuman community. In all ten novels discussed in this book, pastoral experience—the encounter with the Beautiful—leads to a renewed understanding of the integral connection between human and nonhuman communities. Propelling this tradition of bad land pastoralism are an underlying faith in the beauty of wholeness that comes from inhabiting a continuously changing biocultural landscape and a recognition of the inevitability of change. The power of story and language to shape the direction of that change gives literary pastoralism the potential to support an alternative series of ideals based not on escape but on stewardship: community, continuity, and commitment.</p> </div>
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Nature And Culture In The Northern Forest - Region, Heritage, And Environment In The Rural Northeast

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 Nearly 30 million acres of the Northern Forest stretch across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Within this broad area live roughly a million residents whose lives are intimately associated with the forest ecosystem. This title includes essays that explore the relationships among place, work, and community in this complex landscape.
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Deep Travel - In Thoreau''S Wake On The Concord And Merrimack

by David K. Leff

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 In the hot summer of 2004, the author floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. This first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones.
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Oneota Flow - The Upper Iowa River And Its People

by David S. Faldet

36,44€ + 10% CARD

 The river, like a keen memory, carries a record of the past. The author has spent forty years in the basin of the Upper Iowa River. In this book, he tells the story of the Upper Iowa as it flows through land and people, holding true to Aldo Leopold's conception of land as a community in which water, people, and soil play interactive parts.
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Place For Dialogue - Language, Land Use, And Politics In Southern Arizona

by Sharon Mckenzie Stevens

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 Looks at the contradictions and collaborations involved in the management of public land in southern Arizona. Revealing the socioecological relationships among cattlemen and environmentalists as well as developers and recreationists, this title analyzes the ways that language shapes landscape by shaping decisions about land use.
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Grove Karl Gilbert - A Great Engine Of Research

by Stephen J. Pyne

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 The life of Grove Karl Gilbert, first chief geologist of the US Geological Survey, spanned the heroic age of American geology during the time that this young earth science was being intellectually and institutionally defined. This biography reveals that few other scientists can match Gilbert's range of talents.
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Haunted By Waters - A Journey Through Race And Place In The American West

by Robert T. Hayashi

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>Even though race influenced how Americans envisioned, represented, and shaped the American West, discussions of its history devalue the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. In this lyrical history of marginalized peoples in Idaho, Robert T. Hayashi views the West from a different perspective by detailing the ways in which they shaped the western landscape and its meaning.</p> <p>As an easterner, researcher, angler, and third-generation Japanese American traveling across the contemporary Idaho landscape—where his grandfather died during internment during World War II—Hayashi reconstructs a landscape that lured emigrants of all races at the same time its ruling forces were developing cultured processes that excluded nonwhites. Throughout each convincing and compelling chapter, he searches for the stories of dispossessed minorities as patiently as he searches for trout.</p> <p>Using a wide range of materials that include memoirs, oral interviews, poetry, legal cases, letters, government documents, and even road signs, Hayashi illustrates how Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, all-white, and democratic West affected the Gem State’s Nez Perce, Chinese, Shoshone, Mormon, and particularly Japanese residents. Starting at the site of the Corps of Discovery’s journey into Idaho, he details the ideological, aesthetic, and material manifestations of these intertwined notions of race and place. As he ?y-?shes Idaho’s fabled rivers and visits its historical sites and museums, Hayashi reads the contemporary landscape in light of this evolution.</p> </div>
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This Vast Book Of Nature - Writing The Landscape Of New Hampshire'S White Mountains, 1784-1911

by Pavel Cenkl

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 This Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire---and, by implication, other wild places---have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknap's 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and---most recently---preservation, a process that continues today.
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Rooted - Seven Midwest Writers Of Place

by David R. Pichaske

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 Paying close attention to text, landscape, and biography, this book examines the relationship between place and art. It focusses on seven midwestern authors who came of age toward the close of the twentieth century, their lives, and their work grounded in distinct places.
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Signs In America'S Auto Age - Signatures Of Landscape And Place

by John A. & Keith A. Jakle & Sculle

37,10€ + 10% CARD

 Cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings. With an emphasis on how to use signs the authors consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the 20th century.
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Botanical Companions - A Memoir Of Plants And Place

by Frieda Knobloch

34,45€ + 10% CARD

 In her inquiry into the intricate connections among work, place, and people, Frieda Knobloch explores the lives of two Rocky Mountain botanists, Aven Nelson (1859-1952) and Ruth Ashton Nelson (1896-1987).
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Mountains Of Memory - A Fire Lookout''S Life

by Don Scheese

27,83€ + 10% CARD

 In this work, seasoned wilderness dweller Don Scheese charts a long season of watching for and fighting fires in Idaho's River of No Return Wilderness - the largest federal wilderness area in mainland USA. He offers a portrait of the forces that have shaped the landscape of the American West.
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Landscape With Figures - Nature & Culture New England

by Kent C. Ryden

33,13€ + 10% CARD

 Kent Ryden does not deny that the landscape of New England is shaped by centuries of humans, but he also believes that nature is everywhere. In this work he dissolves the border between culture and nature to merge ideas about nature, experience in nature, and material alterations of nature.
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Thoreaus Sense Of Place - Essays In American Environmental Writing

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 Recent Thoreau studies have shifted to an emphasis on the green" Thoreau, on Thoreau the environmentalist, rooted firmly in particular places and interacting with particular objects. In the wake of Buell's Environmental Imagination, the nineteen essayists in this challenging volume address the central questions in Thoreau studies today: how "green," how immersed in a sense of place, was Thoreau really, and how has this sense of place affected the tradition of nature writing in America?The contributors to this stimulating collection address the ways in which Thoreau and his successors attempt to cope with the basic epistemological split between perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature; related discussions involve the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place. They focus on the impact on Thoreau and his successors of culturally constructed assumptions deriving from science, politics, race, gender, history, and literary conventions. Finally, they explore the implications surrounding a writer's appropriation or even exploitation of places and objects.
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Circling Back - Chronicle Of A Texas River Valley

by Joe C. Truett

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p> "There was so much space." These words epitomize ecologist Joe Truett''s boyhood memories of the Angelina River valley in East Texas. Years and miles later, back home for the funeral of his grandfather, Truett began a long meditation on the world Corbett Graham had known and he himself had glimpsed, a now-vanished world where wild hogs and countless other animals rustled through the leaves, cows ate pinewoods grass instead of corn, oaks and hickories and longleaf pines were untouched by the corporate ax, and the river flowed freely. Truett''s meditation resulted in this clear-sighted portrait of a place over time, its layers revealed by his love and care and curiosity.Truett celebrates his family''s heritage and the unspoiled natural world of the Piney Woods without nostalgia. He recreates an older, simpler, more worthy age, but he knows that we have lost touch with it because we wanted to: he laments the loss but understands it. What makes his prose so moving and so redeeming is this precise combination of honesty and sorrow, overlaid by a quiet passion for both the natural and the human worlds.</p> </div>
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Mapping The Invisible Landscape - Folklore, Writing, And The Sense Of Place

by Kent C. Ryden

31,80€ + 10% CARD

 Travelling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden - himself a most careful listener and reader - asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings?
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Salt Lantern - Traces Of An American Family

by William Towner Morgan

39,68€ + 10% CARD

 As a child growing up in Pipestone, Minnesota, in the 1930s, William Morgan marveled over his great-grandmother's salt-filled chimney lantern. Full of sea salt and mementos and drawings that commemorated her British home and her journey to America in 1855, this Victorian artifact became the inspiration both for Morgan's pilgrimage to find the original salt lantern and, after many journeys both external and internal, for this multifaceted family history.Morgan began his research by visiting England and Scotland, then traveled to Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and North Dakota searching for the buildings and landscapes related to his mother's ancestors. Tracing his father's family took him to Ireland, where he discovered the thatched-roof house in which his grandmother was born. By studying his family's houses, farm buildings, landforms, letters, and heirlooms, Bill Morgan tells the stories of his ancestors' lives. By adding fresh memories written by his sister and brothers as well as journals and other family documents, he builds upon these stories to create a full life of an American family.
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Bachelor Bess - The Homesteading Letters Of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919

59,56€ + 10% CARD

 In July 1909 twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Corey left her Iowa farm to stake her claim to a South Dakota homestead. Over the next ten years, as she continued her schoolteaching career and carved out a home for herself in this inhospitable territory, she sent a steady stream of letters to her family back in Iowa. From the edge of modern America, Bess wrote long, gossipy accounts-"our own continuing adventure story," according to her brother Paul-of frontier life on the high plains west of the Missouri River. Irrepressible, independent-minded, and evidently fearless, the self-styled Bachelor Bess gives us a firsthand, almost daily account of her homesteading adventures. We can all stake a claim in her energetic letters.
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Main Street Revisited - Time, Space, And Image Building In Small-Town America

by Richard V. Francaviglia

31,80€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>As an archetype for an entire class of places, Main Street has become one of America''s most popular and idealized images. In <i>Main Street Revisited,</i> the first book to place the design of small downtowns in spatial and chronological context, Richard Francaviglia finds the sources of romanticized images of this archetype, including Walt Disney''s Main Street USA, in towns as diverse as Marceline, Missouri, and Fort Collins, Colorado.</p> <p>Francaviglia interprets Main Street both as a real place and as an expression of collective assumptions, designs, and myths; his Main Streets are treasure troves of historic patterns. Using many historical and contemporary photographs and maps for his extensive fieldwork and research, he reveals a rich regional pattern of small-town development that serves as the basis for American community design. He underscores the significance of time in the development of Main Street''s distinctive personality, focuses on the importance of space in the creation of place, and concentrates on popular images that have enshrined Main Street in the collective American consciousness.</p> </div>
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Hard Places - Reading The Landscape Of America''S Historic Mining Districts

by Richard V. Francaviglia

31,80€ + 10% CARD

 <div> <p>Working with the premise that there are much meaning and value in the "repelling beauty" of mining landscapes, Richard Francaviglia identifies the visual clues that indicate an area has been mined and tells us how to read them, showing the interconnections among all of America''s major mining districts. With a style as bold as the landscape he reads and with photographs to match, he interprets the major forces that have shaped the architecture, design, and topography of mining areas. Covering many different types of mining and mining locations, he concludes that mining landscapes have come to symbolize the turmoil between what our society elects to view as two opposing forces: culture and nature.</p> </div>
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Places Of Quiet Beauty - Parks, Preserves, And Environmentalism

by Rebecca Conard

43,66€ + 10% CARD

 Resource protection and public recreation policies have always been subject to the shifting winds of management philosophy governing both national and state parks. Somewhere in the balance, however, parks and preserves have endured as unique places of mind as well as matter. Places of Quiet Beauty allows us to see parks and preserves, forests and wildlife refuges-all those special places that the term "park" conjures up-as measures of our own commitment to caring for the environment. In this broad-ranging book, historian Rebecca Conard examines the complexity of American environmentalism in the twentieth century as manifest in Iowa's state parks and preserves.
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