A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In the century and a half since the Civil War, various entities, both private and public, have earnestly sought to safeguard the legacy of that seismic conflict through the preservation of its battlefields. In Altogether Fitting and Proper—a title taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—Timothy B. Smith provides the most comprehensive synthesis ever written of the long, often fraught history of those preservation efforts, which began even as the war was still raging and have continued up through the present day.
Smith traces the story of battlefield park establishment from the war and the Reconstruction era through the “Golden Age of Preservation” at the turn of the century, to the New Deal period and well beyond. He pays close attention to the evolution of public policy, as the creation and oversight of parks shifted from the War Department to the National Park Service, and explores the evolving ways in which the Civil War has been remembered over the years, most significantly with regard to its causes: slavery and race. While Smith’s primary focus is on the famous national parks—Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga, and others—he also examines the endeavors of state and local governments, as well as an assortment of private organizations, to establish parks and monuments for lesser-known battle sites. The ongoing conflicts between preservationists and commercial developers form another key element of the narrative.
As Smith makes clear, the story of battlefield preservation is in many ways a story of people—from Civil War veterans like Henry Boynton, the Medal of Honor winner who oversaw the development of the first national military park at Chickamauga, to Jim Lighthizer, the president of the Civil War Trust, the private charitable organization spearheading the twenty-first-century preservation movement. In their dedication to this particular cause, such individuals and the groups they represent have kept a central event in American history alive in our collective memory.
From the bald eagle to the pileolated woodpecker, the varied and abundant birdlife of the northwestern national parks is as impressive as the parks' dramatic scenery. To help both beginning and advanced birders make the most of their visits to these parks, Roland Wauer has written this finding guide, which introduces the most common birds and the most likely places to see them.
The book opens with practical advice on getting started in birding—choosing binoculars, bird identification, proper field techniques, etc. Then after a concise discussion of the national parks as "islands" of bird habitat, the succeeding chapters fully describe each park, including its plant and animal communities and the facilities and interpretive activities available to visitors. Wauer takes readers on "walks" through each park's most popular and accessible places, where he explains the identification and behavior of the birds that visitors are most likely to see. He closes each account with a review of the park's bird life and a list of key species. Pen-and-ink drawings illustrate many of the birds.
Part memoir and part scholarly analysis of the psychological and societal dimensions of place-creation, Canyon, Mountain, Cloud details the author’s experiences working and living in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, Adirondack State Park, and arctic Alaska. Along the way, Olstad explores canyons, climbs mountains, watches clouds, rafts rivers, searches for fossils, and protects rare and fragile vegetation. She learns and shares local natural and cultural histories, questions perceptions of “wilderness,” deepens her appreciation for wildness, and reshapes her understanding of self and self-in-place.
Anyone who has ever felt appreciation for wild places and who wants to think more deeply about individual and societal relationships with American parks and protected areas will find humor, fear, provocation, wonder, awe, and, above all, inspiration in these pages.
Biddulph’s masterfully woven narrative—part biography, part historical narrative—offers both fascinating factual details about Yellowstone and charming colloquial story telling. The interpretive initiatives of the rangers—nature walks, campfire programs, game stalks, and auto caravans—are enlivened by the colorful personalities of the five men who conducted them. Historians will find that Five Old Men of Yellowstone provides a missing link in the park’s extensive literature, while its humor and sentiment make for an accessible book that will be enjoyed by park history buffs and curious visitors alike.
When twenty-three-year-old George Meléndez Wright arrived in Yosemite National Park in 1927 to work as a ranger naturalist—the first Hispanic person to occupy any professional position in the National Park Service (NPS)—he had already visited every national park in the western United States, including McKinley (now Denali) in Alaska. Two years later, he would organize the first science-based wildlife survey of the western parks, forever changing how the NPS would manage wildlife and natural resources. At a time when national parks routinely fed bears garbage as part of “shows” and killed “bad” predators like wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes, Wright’s new ideas for conservation set the stage for the modern scientific management of parks and other public lands.
Tragically, Wright died in a 1936 car accident while working to establish parks and wildlife refuges on the US-Mexico border. To this day, he remains a celebrated figure among conservationists, wildlife experts, and park managers. In this book, Jerry Emory, a conservationist and writer connected to Wright’s family, draws on hundreds of letters, field notes, archival research, interviews, and more to offer both a biography of Wright and a historical account of a crucial period in the evolution of US parks and the wilderness movement. With a foreword by former NPS director Jonathan B. Jarvis, George Meléndez Wright is a celebration of Wright’s unique upbringing, dynamism, and enduring vision that places him at last in the pantheon of the great American conservationists.
Editor Robert Righter has selected thirty-five contributors whose work takes readers from the Tetons’ geological origins to the time of Euro-American encroachment and the park’s politically tumultuous creation. Selections range from Laine Thom’s Shoshone legend of the Snake River and Owen Wister’s essay “Great God! I’ve Just Killed a Bear,” to Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson’s humorous yet fearful account of crossing the Snake River, and William Owen’s first attempt to climb the Grand Teton. Conservationists, naturalists, and environmentalists are also represented: Terry Tempest Williams chronicles her multiyear encounter with her “Range of Memory,” and Olaus and Mardy Murie recount the difficulties of “park-making” in an often-hostile human environment.
Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the park’s wild beauty and controversial past will want to read these stories by people who lived it.
Drawing upon published sources, oral histories, and previously unused archival documents, Jeffrey P. Shepherd situates the Guadalupe Mountains and the national park in the context of epic tales of Spanish exploration, westward expansion, Native survival, immigrant settlement, the conservation movement, early tourism, and regional economic development. As Americans cope with climate change, polarized political rhetoric, and suburban sprawl, public spaces such as Guadalupe Mountains National Park remind us about our ties to nature and our historical relationships with the environment.
Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually. Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga.
Making sense of the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park Service to create this historical park for the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might prevail over gentrification and profit.
Most scientists and researchers working in tropical areas are convinced that parks and protected areas are the only real hope for saving land and biodiversity in those regions. Rather than giving up on parks that are foundering, ways must be found to strengthen them, and Making Parks Work offers a vital contribution to that effort. Focusing on the "good news" -- success stories from the front lines and what lessons can be taken from those stories -- the book gathers experiences and information from thirty leading conservationists into a guidebook of principles for effective management of protected areas. The book:
- offers a general overview of the status of protected areas worldwide
- presents case studies from Africa, Latin America, and Asia written by field researchers with long experience working in those areas
- analyzes a variety of problems that parks face and suggests policies and practices for coping with those problems
- explores the broad philosophical questions of conservation and how protected areas can -- and must -- resist the mounting pressures of an overcrowded world
Contributors include Mario Boza, Katrina Brandon, K. Ullas Karanth, Randall Kramer, Jeff Langholz, John F. Oates, Carlos A. Peres, Herman Rijksen, Nick Salafsky, Thomas T. Struhsaker, Patricia C. Wright, and others.
Beloved by academic and general readers alike, Mountains Without Handrails, Joseph L. Sax’s thought-provoking treatise on America’s national parks, remains as relevant today as when first published in 1980. Focusing on the long-standing and bitter battles over recreational use of our parklands, Sax proposes a novel scheme for the protection and management of America's national parks. Drawing upon still controversial disputes—Yosemite National Park, the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and the Disney plan for California's Mineral King Valley—Sax boldly unites the rich and diverse tradition of nature writing into a coherent thesis that speaks directly to the dilemma of the parks.
In a new foreword, environmental law scholar Holly Doremus articulates this book’s enduring importance and reflects on what Sax, her former teacher, might have thought about the encroachment of technology into natural spaces, the impact of social media, and growing threats from climate change. At this moment of great uncertainty for the national parks, Mountains Without Handrails should be read (and re-read) by anyone with a stake in America’s natural spaces.
Focusing on the long-standing and bitter battles over recreational use of our national parklands, Joseph L. Sax proposes a novel scheme for the protection and management of America's national parks. Drawing upon the most controversial disputes of recent years---Yosemite National Park, the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and the Disney plan for California's Mineral King Valley---Sax boldly unites the rich and diverse tradition of nature writing into a coherent thesis that speaks directly to the dilemma of the parks.
All of these developments included interpretive activities that shaped public understanding of the past. Yet it was not until the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s that public history found an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service. Even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, according to Meringolo, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.
In 1872, the world’s first national park was founded at Yellowstone. Although ideas of nature conservation were not embraced generally by the American public, five more parks were created before the turn of the century. By 1916, the year that the National Park Service was born, the country could boast of fourteen national parks, including such celebrated areas as Yosemite and Sequoia. Kathy Mason demonstrates that Congress, park superintendents, and the American public were forming general, often tacit notions of the parks’ purpose before the new bureau was established.
Although the Park Service recently has placed some emphasis on protecting samples of North America’s ecosystems, the earliest national parks were viewed as natural museums—monuments to national grandeur that would edify visitors. Not only were these early parks to preserve monumental and unique natural attractions, but they also had to be of no use to mining, lumbering, agriculture, and other “productive” industries. Natural Museums examines the notions of park monumentalism, “worthlessness,” and national significance, as well as the parks’ roles as wilderness preserves and recreational centers.
By examining international efforts to protect migratory birds, the threatened European bison, and the mountain gorilla in the interior of the Belgian Congo, Nature’s Diplomats sheds new light on the launch of major international organizations for nature protection in the aftermath of World War II. Additionally, it covers how the rise of ecological science, the advent of the Cold War, and looming decolonization forced a rethinking of approach and rhetoric; and how old ideas and practices lingered on. It provides much-needed historical context for present-day convictions about and approaches to the preservation of species and the conservation of natural resources, the involvement of local communities in conservation projects, the fate of extinct species and vanished habitats, and the management of global nature.
National parks are the places that present ideas of nature to Americans: Zion, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone bring to mind quintessential and awe-inspiring wilderness. By examining how rhetoric—particularly visual rhetoric—has worked to shape our views of nature and the “natural” place of humans, Observation Points offers insights into questions of representation, including the formation of national identity.
As Thomas Patin reveals, the term “nature” is artificial and unstable, in need of constant maintenance and reconstruction. The process of stabilizing its representation, he notes, is unavoidably political. America’s national parks and monuments show how visual rhetoric operates to naturalize and stabilize representations of the environment. As contributors demonstrate, visual rhetoric is often transparent, structuring experience while remaining hidden in plain sight. Scenic overlooks and turnouts frame views for tourists. Visitor centers, with their display cases and photographs and orientation films, provide their own points of view—literally and figuratively. Guidebooks, brochures, and other publications present still other ways of seeing. At the same time, images of America’s “natural” world have long been employed for nationalist and capitalist ends, linking expansionism with American greatness and the “natural” triumph of European Americans over Native Americans.
The essays collected here cover a wide array of subjects, including park architecture, landscape painting, public ceremonies, and techniques of display. Contributors are from an equally broad range of disciplines—art history, geography, museum studies, political science, American studies, and many other fields. Together they advance a provocative new visual genealogy of representation.
Contributors: Robert M. Bednar, Southwestern U, Georgetown, Texas; Teresa Bergman, U of the Pacific; Albert Boime, UCLA; William Chaloupka, Colorado State U; Gregory Clark, Brigham Young U; Stephen Germic, Rocky Mountain College; Gareth John, St. Cloud State U, Minnesota; Mark Neumann, Northern Arizona U; Peter Peters, Maastricht U; Cindy Spurlock, Appalachian State U; David A. Tschida, U of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; Sabine Wilke, U of Washington.
The national forests are a major source of wood, water, minerals, forage, animal life and habitat, and wilderness. Yet questions of who controls and who benefits from the resources have posed problems and conflicts from the origins of the Forest Service to the present. Based on a 1991 Forest History Society conference, the essays collected here discuss a range of important topics surrounding our national forests, including the relationship between the federal and state systems that regulate the forests; the privately owned lands within the forests that are governed by federal statutes, state laws, and county ordinances; the ill-defined rights of those who lived on the land long before it was a national forest and were forced off the land; and the effect of early policymaking decisions made within the framework of the emerging Conservation Movement.
Contributors. Ron Arnold, Pamela A. Conners, Mary S. Culpin, Stanley Dempsey, Peter Gillis, Donn E. Headley, Robert L. Hendricks, Stephen Larrabee, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Dennis L. Lynch, Michael McCarthy, Char Miller, Joseph A. Miller, James Muhn, Kevin Palmer, Donald Pisani, John F. Reiger, William Rowley, Michael Ryan, William E. Shands, Harold K. Steen, Richard White, Gerald W. Williams
This accessible book explains the complexities of key environmental laws and how they can be used to protect our national parks. It includes discussions of successful and unsuccessful attempts to use the laws and how the courts have interpreted them.
Rettie agrees, as many critics have claimed, that the system is in disarray; he proposes in detail stronger management operations, clearer and more stringent measures of personnel performance, and training of park rangers to help them become professionals knowledgeable about the scientific management and protection of resources.
For a concerned public as well as for policy-makers and students of government, this comprehensive analysis and outline may provide hope--and a future--for the invaluable legacy that is our national park system.
The book, long out of print, was originally published in 1901, its ten essays having previously appeared as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Muir wrote them with a single purpose—to entice people, by his descriptions, to come to the parks, to see and enjoy them. If enough people did so, reasoned Muir, they would surely love the wilderness as he did, and the parks would be preserved.
Muir carried out his public relations mission with remarkable success. Every page of this book carries his unbridled and irresistible enthusiasm. Our National Parks is part reminiscence, part philosophy, and mostly enticing description. It is all vintage Muir.
Although the book treats Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and other national parks of the Western U.S., Muir devotes the bulk of the work to his first love—Yosemite, settled into the heart of the Sierra Nevada. Indeed, six of the book’s chapters are devoted to Yosemite, treating the forests, wild gardens, fountains and streams, animals, and birds of the park. The concluding essay is an impassioned plea to save American forests.
All visitors to the great western national parks—and all who will one day visit them—will be captivated by Muir’s descriptions. The grandeur of this wilderness is reflected in the very spirit of John Muir. Both shine through every page of this remarkable book.
"Yosemite Valley in July of 1967 would have had to be seen to be believed. There was never an empty campsite in the valley; you had to create a space for yourself in a sea of cars, tents, and humanity.... The camp next to ours had fifty people in it, with rugs hung between the trees, incense burning, and a stereo set going full volume."
Scenes such as this will probably never be repeated in Yosemite or any other national park, yet the urgent problem remains of balancing the public's desire to visit the parks with the parks' need to be protected from too many people and cars and too much development. In this book, longtime park visitor and professional geographer Bob O'Brien explores the National Park Service's attempt to achieve "sustainability"—a balance that allows as many people as possible to visit a park that is kept in as natural a state as possible.
O'Brien details methods the NPS has used to walk the line between those who would preserve vast tracts of land for "no use" and those who would tap the Yellowstone geysers to generate electricity. His case studies of six western "crown jewel" parks show how rangers and other NPS employees are coping with issues that impact these cherished public landscapes, including visitation, development, and recreational use.
The Alaskan frontier tempted fur traders, whalers, salmon fishers, gold miners, hunters, and oilmen to take what they could without regard for long-term consequences. Wildlife species, ecosystems, and Native cultures suffered, sometimes irreparably. Damage to wildlife and lands drew the attention of environmentalists, including John Muir, who applied their influence to enact wildlife protection laws and set aside lands for conservation. Alaska served as a testing ground for emergent national resource policy in the United States, as environmental values of species and ecosystem sustainability replaced the unrestrained exploitation of Alaska's early frontier days.
Efforts of conservation leaders and the territory's isolation, small human population, and late development prevented widespread destruction and gave Americans a unique opportunity to protect some of the world's most pristine wilderness.
Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska illustrates the historical precedents for current natural resource disputes in Alaska and will fascinate readers interested in wildlife and conservation.
North America’s grasslands once stretched from southern Canada to northern Mexico, and across this considerable space different prairie types evolved to express the sum of their particular longitude and latitude, soils, landforms, and aspect. This prairie guide is your roadmap to what remains of this varied and majestic landscape.
Suzanne Winckler’s goal is to encourage travelers to get off the highways, out of their cars, and onto North America’s last remaining prairies. She makes this adventure as easy as possible by providing exact driving directions to the more than three hundred sites in her guide. She also includes information about size, management, phone numbers, and outstanding characteristics for every prairie site and provides readers with a thorough list of recommended readings and Web sites.
The scope of the guide is impressive. It encompasses prairies found within national grasslands, parks, forests, recreation areas, wildlife refuges, state parks, preserves, and natural areas and on numerous working ranches in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. A series of maps locate the prairies both geographically and by name.
From “the largest restoration project within the historic range of tallgrass prairie” at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa to Big Bend National Park in Texas, where “the Chisos Mountains, completely surrounded by the park, rise up majestically from the Chihuahuan Desert floor,” Winckler celebrates the dramatic expanses of untouched prairie, the crown jewels of prairie reconstruction and restoration, and the neglected remnants that deserve to be treasured.
Comparing national efforts to preserve public lands, William R. Lowry investigates how effectively and under what conditions governments can provide goods for future generations.
Providing intergenerational goods, ranging from balanced budgets to space programs and natural environments, is particularly challenging because most political incentives reward short-term behavior. Lowry examines the effect of institutional structure on the public delivery of these goods. He offers a theoretical framework accounting for both the necessary conditions — public demand, political stability, and official commitment to long-term delivery — and constraining factors — the tensions between public agencies and politicians as well as between different levels of government — that determine the ability of a nation to achieve long-term goals.
In support of this argument, Lowry evaluates data on park systems from more than one hundred countries and provides in-depth case studies of four — he United States, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica — to show how and why the delivery of intergenerational goods can vary. For each of the cases, he reviews background information, discusses constraints on agency behavior, and assesses expansion of the park systems and restoration of natural conditions at specific locations.
This extensive comparative analysis of the preservation of public lands offers new insights into the capability of nations to pursue long-term goals.
As a journalist, advocate, and professor, Michael Frome has spent decades engaged with conservation topics and has taken particular interest in America’s national parks. He draws on this experience and knowledge to address what remains to be done in order to truly value and preserve these special places. Part memoir, part history, and part broadside against those who would diminish this heritage, Rediscovering National Parks in the Spirit of John Muir, through thoughtful reflections and ruminations, bears witness to the grandeur of our parks and to the need for a renewed sense of appreciation and individual responsibility for their care.
In recollections of his encounters and conversations with key people in national park history, Frome discusses park politics, conflicts between use and preservation, and impacts of commercialization. He proposes a dedicated return to the true spirit in which the parks were established, in the manner of John Muir. He advocates maintaining these lands as wild sanctuaries, places where we can find inspiration, solitude, silence, balance, and simplicity, reminding us why we must preserve our national treasures and why we need to connect with the deeper values they hold.
Revolutionary Parks tells the surprising story of how forty national parks were created in Mexico during the latter stages of the first social revolution of the twentieth century. By 1940 Mexico had more national parks than any other country. Together they protected more than two million acres of land in fourteen states. Even more remarkable, Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico in the 1930s, began to promote concepts akin to sustainable development and ecotourism.
Conventional wisdom indicates that tropical and post-colonial countries, especially in the early twentieth century, have seldom had the ability or the ambition to protect nature on a national scale. It is also unusual for any country to make conservation a political priority in the middle of major reforms after a revolution. What emerges in Emily Wakild’s deft inquiry is the story of a nature protection program that takes into account the history, society, and culture of the times. Wakild employs case studies of four parks to show how the revolutionary momentum coalesced to create early environmentalism in Mexico.
According to Wakild, Mexico’s national parks were the outgrowth of revolutionary affinities for both rational science and social justice. Yet, rather than reserves set aside solely for ecology or politics, rural people continued to inhabit these landscapes and use them for a range of activities, from growing crops to producing charcoal. Sympathy for rural people tempered the radicalism of scientific conservationists. This fine balance between recognizing the morally valuable, if not always economically profitable, work of rural people and designing a revolutionary state that respected ecological limits proved to be a radical episode of government foresight.
Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher.
By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park, and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks—often derided by scholars as colonial impositions—survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the “land question,” democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.
Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks presents twelve case studies of long-term research conducted in and around national parks that address major natural resource issues. These cases demonstrate how the use of longer time scales strongly influence our understanding of ecosystems and how interpretations of short-term patterns in nature often change when viewed in the context of long-term data sets. Most importantly, they show conclusively that scientific research significantly reduces uncertainty and improves resource management decisions. Chosen by scientists and senior park managers, the cases offer a broad range of topics, including: air quality at Grand Canyon; interaction between moose and wolf populations on Isle Royale; control of exotic species in Hawaiian parks; simulation of natural fire in the parks of the Sierra Nevada; and the impact of urban expansion on Saguaro National Monument.
Because national parks are increasingly beset with conflicting views of their management, the need for knowledge of park ecosystems becomes even more critical--not only for the parks themselves, but for what they can tell us about survival in the rest of our world. This book demonstrates to policymakers and managers that decisions based on knowledge of ecosystems are more enduring and cost effective than decisions derived from uninformed consensus. It also provides scientists with models for designing research to meet threats to our most precious natural resources. "If we can learn to save the parks," observe Halvorson and Davis, "perhaps we can learn to save the world."
Examining the major challenges of parks and protected areas throughout the world, contributors provide answers to a number of key conservation questions, such as: How should stewardship address climate change, urban encroachment and pollution, and invasive species? How can society, especially youth, become more engaged with nature and parks, and are there models to guide interactions between parks and their neighbors? What are appropriate conservation objectives for parks in the Anthropocene? Charting a course for the parks of the next century, Science, Conservation, and National Parks is certain not only to catalyze the continued evolution of US park conservation policy, but also to be an inspiration for parks, conservation, and management worldwide.
Sixties Sandstorm is not a book about dunes as much as it is a book about people and their government. It chronicles the public meetings, bills, protests, and congressional interactions that led to the signing of the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes Act in 1970. The Dunes park fight is a case study of the politics, the legislative process, citizen response to the expanded role of government in the 1960s, and the rise of the environmental movement in America during that decade. Since Hart's legislation was made law, millions of Americans have traveled to the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes National Lakeshore. Few imagine what the area would look like today if not for the efforts of people like Senator Hart. On the other hand, few appreciate the sacrifice of the landowners who-not always willingly-gave up their property in this place where, as one resident put it, "stars are closer to the earth than anywhere else in the world."
In detailing political and environmental squabbles over the San Rafael Swell, Durrant illuminates issues that confront land managers, bureaucrats, and elected officials throughout the country. He describes struggles between county commissioners and environmental activists, conflicts over water rights, proposals that repeatedly fail to gain government approval, and political posturings. Caught in the crossfire, and often overwhelmed, the Bureau of Land Management has seen its long-time mission—once centered on grazing and mining rights—transmogrify into a new and, to some, unsettling responsibility for recreation and preservation.
The sandstone crags and twisting valleys of the San Rafael Swell present a formidable landscape, but as this book clearly shows, the political landscape may be even more daunting, strewn with bureaucratic boulders and embedded with fixed positions on the functions and values of public land.
Over 634 million acres of the United States -- nearly a million square miles -- are federally owned. These American Lands is both a history and a celebration of that inheritance. First published in 1986, the book was hailed by Wallace Stegner as "the only indispensable narrative history of the public lands." This completely revised and updated edition is an unsurpassed resource for everyone who cares about, visits, or works with public land in the United States. With over 75 pages of new material, the volume covers:
- national parks
- national forests
- national resource lands
- wildlife refuges
- designated wildernesses
- wild and scenic rivers
- Alaska lands
- national trails
Each chapter outlines the history of the unit of public lands under discussion, clarifies the resource use and policy conflicts that are currently besetting it, and provides a detailed agenda of management, expansion, and preservation goals.
The Rocky Mountains of Idaho and Montana are home to some of the most important remaining American wilderness areas, preserved because of citizens who stood against massive development schemes that would have diminished important wildlife habitat and the abiding sense of remoteness found in such places. Where Roads Will Never Reach tells the stories of hunters, anglers, outfitters, scientists, and other concerned citizens who devoted themselves to protecting remnant wild lands and ecosystems in the Northern Rockies. Environmental historian Frederick Swanson argues that their heartfelt, dedicated work helped boost the American wilderness movement to its current prominence.
Based on newly available archival sources and interviews with many of the participants, this groundbreaking study explores for the first time the grassroots campaigns that yielded some of the largest designated wilderness areas in America.
Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing is a powerful collection of mostly unpublished essays and poetry by both prominent American environmental writers and exciting new voices. The poetry and essays by more than fifty contributors offer the reader glimpses into places as diverse as a forest in West Africa, the moors of Ireland, the canyons of the Sonoran desert mountains, and the fields of New England, and they reflect the varied perspectives of field biologists, hunters, farmers, environmental educators, wilderness guides, academics, writers, and artists.
The collection is an intimate portrait of the natural world drawn through the wisdom, ecological consciousness, and open hearts of these exceptional contributors. The Wildbranch Writing Workshop, cosponsored by Orion magazine and Sterling College, has encouraged thoughtful natural history, outdoor, and environmental writing for more than twenty years. The Wildbranch faculty has included its founder E. Anne Proulx, the essayists Edward Hoagland, Janisse Ray, and Scott Russell Sanders, the poet Alison Hawthorne Deming, and many other notable authors. Many have work included in the anthology.
Winner of the New Mexico Book Association's Southwest Book Design & Production Awards for Excellence in the category Trade Books: Non-illustrated.
This volume presents the results of a five-year study of wildlife-management policies in national parks. It synthesizes interviews with individuals inside and outside the National Park Service, provides a comprehensive review of published and unpublished literature, and draws on the collective experience of the authors with various units of the system over the past three decades. Among the topics examined are:
- the structure and history of the National Park System and Service
- wildlife "problems" in the parks
- the role of science in formulating policies and in management
- recommendations for changes in policy formulation, management, and scientific research procedures
Drawing on extensive historical research, Swanson presents little-known accounts of people who saw in these sculptured landscapes something worth protecting. Readers are introduced to the region’s early explorers, scientists, artists, and travelers as well as the local residents and tourism promoters who worked with the National Park Service to build the system of parks and monuments we know today, when Utah’s national parks and monuments face multiple challenges from increased human use and from development outside their borders. As scientists continue to uncover the astonishing diversity of life in these desert and mountain landscapes, and archaeologists and Native Americans document their rich cultural resources, the management of these federal lands remains critically important. Swanson provides us with a detailed and timely background to advance and inform discussions about what form that management should take.
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