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First published more than a century ago, The Biography of a Grizzly
recounts the life of a fictitious bear named Wahb who lived and
died in the Greater Yellowstone region. This new edition combines
Ernest Thompson Seton's classic tale and original illustrations
with historical and scientific context for Wahb's story, providing
a thorough understanding of the setting, cultural connections,
biology, and ecology of Seton's best-known book. By the time The
Biography of a Grizzly was published in 1900, grizzly bears had
been hunted out of much of their historical range in North America.
The characterization of Wahb, along with Seton's other
anthropomorphic tales of American wildlife, helped to change public
perceptions and promote conservation. As editors Jeremy M. Johnston
and Charles R. Preston remind us, however, Seton's approach to
writing about animals put him at the center of the ""Nature-Faker""
controversy of the early twentieth century, when John Burroughs and
Theodore Roosevelt, among others, denounced sentimental
representations of wildlife. The editors address conservation
scientists' continuing concerns about inaccurate depictions of
nature in popular culture. Despite its anthropomorphism, Seton's
paradoxical book imparts a good deal of insightful and accurate
natural history, even as its exaggerations shaped
early-twentieth-century public opinion on conservation in often
counterproductive ways. By complicating Seton's enthralling tale
with scientific observations of grizzly behavior in the wild,
Johnston and Preston evaluate the story's accuracy and bring the
story of Yellowstone grizzlies into the present day. Preserving the
1900 edition's original design and illustrations, Wahb brings new
understanding to an American classic, updating the book for current
and future generations.
Naturalist John James Audubon found the Great Plains and their
wildlife so riveting when he visited the region in 1834 that he
broke off a letter to his wife because he was too excited to write.
In the almost two hundred years since then, the Wyoming landscape,
deemed the ""Italy of America"" by landscape painter Albert
Bierstadt, has retained its glory if not its place in the
imagination of the American public. This book reminds us of the
remarkable bounty contained in the wild beauty and rich history of
the Wyoming grasslands - even as these riches are under threat from
both human and natural forces. This landscape is now captured in
all its spectacular diversity in the photography of Michael P.
Berman and William S. Sutton, two of the modern American West's
most accomplished and well-known landscape photographers. Essays by
Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston provide a contextual
framework for the images. Goodyear introduces us to the imagery of
the American West and explains the place of Berman's and Sutton's
work within that tradition, and Preston focuses on the natural
history of the grasslands, illuminating the area's ecological
diversity and changes through the seasons and over the years. In
2012 Berman and Sutton launched their massive Wyoming Grasslands
Photographic Project, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy,
Wyoming Chapter, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Working
in the tradition of late-nineteenth-century explorers and
photographers of the American West, Berman and Sutton shot more
than 50,000 digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red
Desert of southwestern Wyoming to the Thunder Basin National
Grassland of the state's northeastern corner. The best of their
extraordinarily sensitive, revealing, and powerful images appear in
these pages, documenting the sweep and the seasons of the Wyoming
landscape. In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by
environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers
dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of Audubon
and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still holds and
demands our attention.
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