Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholarship, emphasizing the diversity of a region so long considered a homogenous backwater. While Appalachia has a recognizable and real coherence rooted in folkways, agriculture, and politics (among other things), it is also a region of varied environments, people, and histories. These discrete stories are, however, linked through the power of conceptualizing nature and work together to reveal the ways in which ideas and uses of nature often created a sense of identity in Appalachia. Delving into the environmental history of the region reveals that Appalachian environments, rather than separating the mountains from the broader world, often served to connect the region to outside places.

No matter where they are located in the world, communities living in mountain regions have shared experiences defined in large part by contradictions. These communities often face social and economic marginalization despite providing the lumber, coal, minerals, tea, and tobacco that have fueled the growth of nations for centuries. They are perceived as remote and socially inferior backwaters on one hand while simultaneously seen as culturally rich and spiritually sacred spaces on the other. These contradictions become even more fraught as environmental changes and political strains place added pressure on these mountain communities. Shifting national borders and changes to watersheds, forests, and natural resources play an increasingly important role as nations respond to the needs of a global economy. The works in this volume consider multiple nations, languages, generations, and religions in their exploration of upland communities' responses to the unique challenges and opportunities they share. From paintings to digital mapping, environmental studies to poetry, land reclamation efforts to song lyrics, the collection provides a truly interdisciplinary and global study. The editors and authors offer a cross-cultural exploration of the many strategies that mountain communities are employing to face the concerns of the future.

The crash of the Indian plate into Asia is the biggest known collision in geological history, and it continues today. The result is the Himalaya and Karakoram - one of the largest mountain ranges on Earth. The Karakoram has half of the world's highest mountains and a reputation as being one of the most remote and savage ranges of all. In this beautifully illustrated book, Mike Searle, a geologist at the University of Oxford and one of the most experienced field geologists of our time, presents a rich account of the geological forces that were involved in creating these mountain ranges. Using his personal accounts of extreme mountaineering and research in the region, he pieces together the geological processes that formed such impressive peaks.

A pioneering examination of the three-dimensionality of the earth from the perspective of history and the humanities. This book considers the variegated world of mountains and their development during the last 500 years. It takes as its starting point the United Nations environmental conference of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, where the mountains were officially recognised as a topic of the world community. Important precedents for this new agenda were built in the early modern period and in the nineteenth century, as European societies began to exceed their traditional limitations. The book begins with an investigation of this long-term process with respect to science, culture and politics, each of which has transformed our attitudes toward mountainous regions. It then takes up historical problems that have been debated in the latest research, placing them in a comparative framework. At the book's heart stands the question of whether and in what way the 'three-dimensional history' of mountain people may reveal distinctive forms of development.

On September 4, 1915, hundreds of people gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, to celebrate the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. This new nature preserve held the promise of peace, solitude, and rapture that many city dwellers craved. As Jerry Frank demonstrates, however, the park is much more than a lovely place.

Rocky Mountain National Park was a keystone in broader efforts to create the National Park Service, and its history tells us a great deal about Colorado, tourism, and ecology in the American West. To Frank, the tensions between tourism and ecology have played out across a natural stage that is anything but passive. At nearly every turn the National Park Service found itself face-to-face with an environment that was difficult to anticipate--and impossible to control.

Frank first takes readers back to the late nineteenth century, when Colorado boosters--already touting the Rocky Mountains' restorative power for lung patients--set out to attract more tourists and generate revenue for the state. He then describes how an ecological perspective came to Rocky in fits and starts, offering a new way of imagining the park that did not sit comfortably with an entrenched management paradigm devoted to visitor recreation and comfort.

Frank examines a wide range of popular activities including driving, hiking, skiing, fishing, and wildlife viewing to consider how they have impacted the park's flora and fauna, often leaving widespread transformation in their wake. He subjects the decisions of park officials to close but evenhanded scrutiny, showing how in their zeal to return the park to what they understood as its natural state, they have tinkered with its features--sometimes with less than desirable results.

Today's Rocky Mountain National Park serves both competing visions, maintaining accessible roads and vistas for the convenience of tourists while guarding its backcountry to preserve ecological values. As the park prepares to celebrate its centennial, Frank's book advances our understanding of its past while also providing an important touchstone for addressing its problems in the present and future.

Landscape, politics and history: the Italian mountains as a crucible of national and natural identity. This book is part of a wider current in environmental history, that explores the links between nature and nation. It uncovers how Italian identity and mountains have constituted one another. It argues that state regimes since unification in 1861 have made mountains into national symbols and resources, thereby affecting mountain communities and ecosystems. The nationalisation of Italian mountains has been a story of military conquest and resistance, ecological and social transformation, expropriating resources and imposing meanings. The wind of 'big' history was rolling through the Alps and the Apennines: State building and national identities, totalitarianism and democracy, economic development and environmental protection, scientific knowledge and vernacular practices are the substance of this book. The book starts with the revaluation of mountains as the repository of the last Italian wilderness and chronicles the discovery/ invention of mountains as wild, primitive, and rebellious places needing to be tamed. World War I permanently transformed mountain landscapes and people, nationalising both. When the Fascists came to power, the process of politicisation of mountains reached its acme; the regime constructed and exploited mountains both rhetorically and materially, on one hand celebrating ruralism and rural people and, on the other, giving mountain natural resources to large hydro-electric corporations. Having been the sanctuary of Resistance against the Nazi-Fascist occupation, the Italian mountains were emptied by the economic boom of the 1960s; only recently have the green of natural parks and the white of the ski resorts become the distinctive colors of the new, tourist-oriented Italian mountains.

""This then is a book of mountaineering, not presenting the Canadian Rockies in their entirety -- no single volume will ever do that -- but including many of the finest things. It is also a book of mountain travel, under conditions such as perhaps the European traveller experienced in the Alps during the Eighteenth Century. Finally, it is a book of mountain history; for here is Geography in the making, and with a tradition behind it -- a story that has never been properly gathered together, and whose details, in part at least, are gone forever."" -- from the Preface by J. Monroe Thorington Completely re-edited, re-designed and containing with an impressive collection of archival photos and maps, "The Glittering Mountains of Canada" is a must-read for anyone interested in mountain literature. The book's position in the pantheon of outdoor writing as a "classic" is only further enhanced and supported by the passionate Foreword by well-known mountain historian and environmental writer Robert William Sandford, who urges the contemporary reader to embrace Thorington's belief in the importance of landscape and the poetry of place. This is a book that deserves to be read and appreciated alongside the work of Wallace Stegner, Henry David Thoreau and Sid Marty.

'Outstanding Academic Title' Choice, magazine of the Association of College & Research Libraries, American Library Association.Most mountains on Earth occur within relatively well-defined, narrow belts separated by wide expanses of much lower-lying ground. Their distribution is not random but is caused by the now well-understood geological processes of plate tectonics. Some mountains mark the site of a former plate collision - where one continental plate has ridden up over another, resulting in a zone of highly deformed and elevated rocks. Others are essentially volcanic in origin.The most obvious mountain belts today - the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, for example - are situated at currently active plate boundaries. Others, such as the Caledonian mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia, are the product of a plate collision that happened far in the geological past and have no present relationship to a plate boundary. These are much lower, with a generally gentler relief, worn down through millennia of erosion.The presently active mountain belts are arranged in three separate systems: the Alpine-Himalayan ranges, the circum-Pacific belt and the mid-ocean ridges. Much of the Alpine-Himalayan belt is relatively well known, but large parts of the circum-Pacific and ocean-ridge systems are not nearly as familiar, but contain equally impressive mountain ranges despite large parts being partly or wholly submerged.This book takes the reader along the active mountain systems explaining how plate tectonic processes have shaped them, then looks more briefly at some of the older mountain systems whose tectonic origins are more obscure. It is aimed at those with an interest in mountains and in developing an understanding of the geological processes that create them.

In the 1700s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau celebrated the Alps as the quintessence of the triumph of nature over the ""horrors"" of civilization. Now available in English, History of the Alps, 1500-1900: Environment, Development, and Society provides a precise history of one of the greatest mountain range systems in the world. Jon Mathieu's work disproves a number of commonly held notions about the Alps, positioning them as neither an inversion of lowland society nor a world apart with respect to Europe. Mathieu's broad historical portrait addresses both the economic and sociopolitical - exploring the relationship between population levels, development, and the Alpine environment, as well as the complex links between agrarian structure, society, and the development of modern civilization. More detailed analysis examines the relationship between various agrarian structures and shifting political configurations, several aspects of family history between the late Middle Ages and the turn of the twentieth century, and exploration of the Savoy, Grisons, and Carinthia regions.

This book is unique in providing a global overview of alpine (high mountain) habitats that occur above the natural (cold-limited) tree line, describing the factors that have shaped them over both ecological and evolutionary timescales. The broad geographic coverage helps synthesize common features whilst revealing differences in the world's major alpine systems from the Arctic to the Tropics. The words "barren" and "wasteland" have often been applied to describe landscapes beyond the tree line. However, a closer look reveals a large diversity of habitats, assemblages and individual taxa in the alpine zone, largely connected to topographic diversity within individual alpine regions.
The book considers habitat-forming factors (landforms, energy and climate, hydrology, soils, and vegetation) individually, as well as their composite impacts on habitat characteristics. Evolution and population processes are examined in the context of the responsiveness/resilience of alpine habitats to global change. Finally, a critical assessment fo the potential impacts of climate change, atmospheric pollutants and land use is made and related to the management and conservation options available for these unique habitats.
Interest in mountains continues to grow as their resource importance is increasingly recognized. This accessible text is suitable for both senior undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in ecology and environmental sciences as well as the many professional ecologists and conservation biologists requiring a concise, authoritative overview of the topic.
Each of the books in the Oxford Biology of Habitats Series introduces a different habitat, and gives an integrated overview of the design, physiology, ecology, and behaviour of the organisms found there. The practical aspects of working within each habitat, the sorts of studies that are possible, and habitat biodiversity and conservation status are all explored.

This is a sumptuous celebration of the mountains of Wales. Scaling verbal and visual heights, it combines pithy writing and striking photography as ten well-known authors explore and explain the appeal of their favourite Welsh hill or peak. Some of these are well established landmarks on the tourist and mountaineering maps of Wales, others are more remote and private. Some are dramatic, brooding presences, dominating their landscape. Others are more unassuming. But, north or south, east or west, each is a place in the heart as much as a geographical feature. Ray Wood is world-renowned as a mountaineering photographer and his images give this collection its stunning visual integrity and impact. Complementing the authors' revelations, the photography allows us to climb each mountain - without safety harness and crampon, without fear of vertigo - leaving us with a breathtaking, not a breathless, experience.

Why do road cyclists go to the mountains? Many books tell you where the mountains are, or how long and how high. None of them ask 'Why?' After all, cycling up a mountain is hard - so hard that, to many non-cyclists, it can seem absurd. But, for some, climbing a mountain gracefully (and beating your competitors up the slope) represents the pinnacle of cycling achievement. The mountains are where legends are forged and cycling's greats make their names. Why are Europe's mountain ranges professional cycling's Wembley Stadium or its Colosseum? Why do amateurs also make a pilgrimage to these high, remote roads and what do we see and feel when we do? Why are the roads there in the first place? Higher Calling explores the central place of mountains in the folklore of road cycling. Blending adventure and travel writing with the rich narrative of pro racing, Max Leonard takes the reader from the battles that created the Alpine roads to the shepherds tending their flocks on the peaks, and to a Grand Tour climax on the 'highest road in Europe'. And he tells stories of courage and sacrifice, war and love, obsession and elephants along the way.

A nature book unlike any other, Jordan Fisher Smith's startling account of fourteen years as a park ranger thoroughly dispels our idealized visions of life in the great outdoors. Instead of scout troops and placid birdwatchers, Smith's beat -- a stretch of land that has been officially condemned to be flooded -- brings him into contact with drug users tweaked out to the point of violence, obsessed miners, and other dangerous creatures. In unflinchingly honest prose, he reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands.

Listen for the calls of nesting ravens and warblers, watch the growth of wild geranium and black cohosh, and savor the first autumn blush in the tupelo trees. Revel, as did Frank Lloyd Wright, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt--among generations of other amateur naturalists--in the remarkable natural, historical, and geological treasures of Sugarloaf, the Maryland Piedmont's only mountain.

A favored destination of nearly one-quarter million visitors each year, some 35 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., and 50 miles west of Baltimore, Sugarloaf is a National Natural Landmark and privately owned park that is open to the public year-round. In this natural history and guidebook, Melanie Choukas-Bradley presents a fascinating blend of local, natural, and historical detail that transports the reader simultaneously onto the slopes of today's mountain and into the region's past. Discover why prominent architects and real estate barons have found the land so compelling, why preservationists and botanists strive to protect the natural habitat of so many native species, and why families return again and again to hike, study flora and fauna, and picnic at Sugarloaf.

Choukas-Bradley lists practical information on how and when you might best enjoy a visit to the trails, wildflowers, and seasonal variations of the land. Her text is beautifully complemented by Tina Thieme Brown's pen-and-ink illustrations.

In The Granite Landscape Tom Wessels synthesizes history, geology, biology, and personal narrative to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these high, wild placesthe granite summit balds of North America. He explores the unique and fragile ecosystem that is common to exposed granite expanses from Acadia to Yosemitehow it evolved slowly over millennia, and how it is threatened today by foot traffic and overuse. Wessels' wonderfully informative and accessible text combine with his dramatic photographs and Brian Cohen's beautifully detailed illustrations to bring the denizens of the granite bald to life. The mountains they celebrate include: Acadia National Park in Maine; the White Mountains of New Hampshire; the Adirondacks of New York; the Wind River Range of Wyoming; the Beartooths of Montana; the Enchantments of Washington; and Yosemite National Park in California. 18 photographs, 30 illustrations, 1 map, glossary, index.

Mt. Holyoke, which overlooks the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, has been a tourist destination and an inspiration for artists and writers for almost two centuries. The view from its summit attracted the Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole among many others, including literary visitors such as Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1836, Cole created the most famous painting associated with the mountain, based on sketches he made during his visit to the site. The Oxbow, which is a centerpiece of this book and the accompanying exhibition, shows a thunderstorm sweeping across the sky above the mountaintop in contrast to the gardenlike pastoral scene in the valley below. It has been described as the most important American landscape painting of the nineteenth century. Frequent flooding, changing settlement patterns, and industrialization have all had a role in altering the view from the summit. The Oxbow became a closed loop bisected by a highway, and marinas punctuate the Connecticut River. From Cole's time to our own, artists including Edward Corbett, Stephen Hannock, Alfred Leslie, and Elizabeth Meyersohn have observed and recorded these alterations. Color plates of their paintings and photographs, reproduced in the book, allow us to track changes to the landscape and to Cole's influence. Contemporary artists both challenge and pay homage to his vision of the scene, even as their images are used to underline the need to preserve the mountain's natural beauty and cultural significance.

A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements. It delves into the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986 to reveal its inner workings. Belinda Bozzoli's aim is to examine how the residents of Alexandra, a poverty-stricken segregated township in Johannesburg, manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time, and power in their sequestered world. She explains how they used political theater to convey, stage, and dramatize their struggle and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones. It is an important study of collective action that will be of great interest to sociologists and to scholars of Africa, particularly to those interested in the antiapartheid struggle.

Mountains rise like islands from deserts and grasslands along the U.S.-Mexican border. The stunningly varied borderlands offer a laboratory for studying historical trends and ecological cycles, as well as a refuge in which to experience natural history firsthand. In this engaging personal narrative, biologist Fred Gehlbach describes the stability and changes of the past century in the Borderlands' climate, landforms, and natural communities and in its distinctive plants and vertebrates. Historical sketches, maps, and striking photographs richly amplify the text, and a preface updates developments in the region since the book's original publication in 1981.

In Water Brings No Harm, Matthew V. Bender explores the history of community water management on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Kilimanjaro's Chagga-speaking peoples have long managed water by employing diverse knowledge: hydrological, technological, social, cultural, and political. Since the 1850s, they have encountered groups from beyond the mountain--colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, the independent Tanzanian state, development agencies, and climate scientists--who have understood water differently. Drawing on the concept of waterscapes--a term that describes how people "see" water, and how physical water resources intersect with their own beliefs, needs, and expectations--Bender argues that water conflicts should be understood as struggles between competing forms of knowledge. Water Brings No Harm encourages readers to think about the origins and interpretation of knowledge and development in Africa and the global south. It also speaks to the current global water crisis, proposing a new model for approaching sustainable water development worldwide.

'Magnificent ... this book is unlikely to be surpassed' Telegraph This is the first major history of the Himalaya: an epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world's highest mountains. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 DUFF COOPER PRIZE An epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world's highest mountains: here Jesuit missionaries exchanged technologies with Tibetan Lamas, Mongol Khans employed Nepali craftsmen, Armenian merchants exchanged musk and gold with Mughals. Featuring scholars and tyrants, bandits and CIA agents, go-betweens and revolutionaries, Himalaya is a panoramic, character-driven history on the grandest but also the most human scale, by far the most comprehensive yet written, encompassing geology and genetics, botany and art, and bursting with stories of courage and resourcefulness. 'Magisterial' The Times 'His observations are sharp...his writing glows' New York Review of Books SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOARDMAN TASKER AWARD FOR MOUNTAIN LITERATURE

Cycling fans obsess about climbs and big mountains. They love reading about their tests and tribulations and they love to ride them - a cricket lover can never bat at Lord's, or a football supporter score at Wembley, but any rider can take on the challenge of an iconic mountain. This is Geraint Thomas's inside guide to 25 of the greatest cycling climbs in the world. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

Outwardly, 'Britain's most experienced teenage Alpinist' is a brave young mountaineer. But he's not experienced at all, at least not in the way he really wants to be. Behind his death-defying climbs there lurks a great deal of fear - fear of the opposite sex, fear of failure, fear of not being 'man enough'. He seeks manhood in the mountains, yet he believes he will only truly gain it by losing something. Harrowing escapades in Scotland, the Alps and Alaska are interspersed by excruciating sexual encounters and unsettling hitch-hiking rides. When the mountains fail him, he seeks meaning with a religious cult in Colorado. Eventually he succeeds in his quest, only to find that he's lost more than he bargained for. Virgin on Insanity by Steve Bell is a coming-of-age story of high adventure, youthful insecurity and immature love. The situations might be extreme, but the deeper issues will be familiar to many.