Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources-especially water-in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras-a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

Heading west on I-70 through Kansas, travelers can experience surprising changes as eastern deciduous forests give way first to tallgrass, then shortgrass prairie interspersed with canyonlands. But beyond the highway there's even more to discover: picturesque farms, river valleys, and gypsum bluffs that make the Sunflower State a natural wonderland boasting expansive beauty and rich biological diversity.

This book testifies to Kansas's natural abundance through spectacular color photography and sumptuous prose. Sponsored by the Kansas Land Trust, The Nature of Kansas Lands focuses on the world of nature that awaits us just beyond our fences: waterways, woodlands, grasslands, farmlands, and high plains. It's been carefully crafted to encourage residents and visitors alike to explore backcountry roads, learn more about native flora and wildlife, and generally open their eyes to the state's wild beauty and ecological complexity.

Turn the pages of this book and you'll immediately be struck by 46 stunning color landscapes by Edward Robison, capturing scenes as serene as a wetlands fog or a night star hanging over the prairie--or as dramatic as a threatening storm. Meanwhile, more than two dozen wildlife close-ups by Kyle Gerstner bring you face-to-face with prairie chickens and bison, red-tailed hawks and collared lizards.

Seventeen evocative essays by Elizabeth Schultz lead you on forays into Kansas's diverse landscapes, interpreting not only the nature of the land but also the nature found on it. Sidebars by biologist Kelly Kindscher complement Schultz's impressionism with a bevy of facts about wildlife and weather, forests and farming.

This gorgeous book reveals a side of life in Kansas that beckons us to explore, enjoy, and learn more about the state's rich natural heritage.

If you want to grasp the rich complexity of the past, observes environmental historian Donald Worster, you could do worse than spend time on the prairie. Seen from high above, it is an orderly grid of farmland; closer to ground level, it reveals the industriousness of humanity in the making and remaking of the land.

Considered by many to be lacking in inspiration, the prairie is shown by photographer Terry Evans to be a land of varied textures. Evans seeks to have us pay attention to the ways we perceive both the natural and the cultural in this underappreciated landscape, and in this stunning collection of photographs she reads the land for the stories it has to tell.

Widely known for her spectacular photographs of pristine prairie, Evans here works at low altitudes to focus on the land as an inhabited place. These fifty black-and-white images document specific locations and disclose some of the contradictions and mysteries about how we live on the prairie. Through her lens we view the site of an ancient Indian village, targets on the Smoky Hill Weapons Range, and old country cemeteries; observe the startling contours of plowed fields and sandpits; and witness the tranquility of deer grazing on new winter wheat. All of these images help us to understand the layers of life on the prairie and the complex interweaving of nature and man.

"Outdoor pictures are supposed to be scenes of picturesque beauty," Worster writes in his accompanying essay, "and the prairies have seldom met that ideal for most people. Only a few artists have tried to figure out how to get its tangled, intricate weave into a revealing frame." Terry Evans has met that challenge, staking out a middle ground between the extremes of wilderness and grid to show us that the prairie is more than a commodity to be subdivided and sold. She brings to "The Inhabited Prairie" a keen sense of understanding combined with deep artistic vision, opening our eyes to a prairie we live with but perhaps seldom see.

The scientific, political, and economic policy debates about the global environmental crisis have tended to ignore its historical, ethical, religious, and aesthetic dimensions. This book redresses that omission by highlighting these humanistic components that are integral to the fabric of our ecological understanding and, consequentially, essential to a broad, multidisciplinary approach to environmental studies and public policy initiatives.

In this slim volume, seven world-class scholars discuss the wide range of perspectives that the fields of literature, history, religion, philosophy, environmental ethics, and anthropology bring to the natural environment and our place in it. The preface summarizes the development of the religion and ecology movement; the editor s critical introduction highlights the essays major themes. Bringing insights from the humanities to bear on ecological concerns, this volume will appeal to a wide audience in the humanities and environmental studies, policy makers, and the general public. The book represents a continuation of the Center for the Study of World Religions highly regarded Religions of the World and Ecology series.

Is Italy il bel paese-the beautiful country-where tourists spend their vacations looking for art, history, and scenery? Or is it a land whose beauty has been cursed by humanity\u2019s greed and nature\u2019s cruelty? The answer is largely a matter of narrative and the narrator\u2019s vision of Italy. The fifteen essays in Nature and History in Modern Italy investigate that nation\u2019s long experience in managing domesticated rather than wild natures and offer insight into these conflicting visions. Italians shaped their land in the most literal sense, producing the landscape, sculpting its heritage, embedding memory in nature, and rendering the two different visions inseparable. The interplay of Italy\u2019s rich human history and its dramatic natural diversity is a subject with broad appeal to a wide range of readers.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing."
In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship."
For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

What comes to mind when we think of the Old West? Often, our conceptions are accompanied by as much mythology and mystique as fact or truth. What are the differences in how the Canadian and American Wests are perceived? Did they develop differently or are they just perceived differently? How do our conceptions influence our perceptions? This reader explores the problems, importance, and results of comparing the Canadian and American Wests, critically examining how we conceptualize the history and development of the West and how that influences our perceptions. One West, Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison is an excellent introduction to this burgeoning area of study as it endeavours to engage the imaginations of those who are new to the subject. With Contributions By: Gerald Friesen C.L. Higham Michel Hogue Beth LaDow Sheila McManus Peter S. Morris Molly P. Rozum Elliott West Donald Worster

If the word "hero" still belonged in the historian's lexicon, it would certainly be applied to John Wesley Powell. Intrepid explorer, careful scientist, talented writer, and dedicated conservationist, Powell led the expedition that put the Colorado River on American maps and revealed the Grand Canyon to the world. Now comes the first biography of this towering figure in almost fifty years--a book that captures his life in all its heroism, idealism, and ambivalent, ambiguous humanity. In A River Running West, Donald Worster, one of our leading Western historians, tells the story of Powell's great adventures and describes his historical significance with compelling clarity and skill. Worster paints a vivid portrait of how this man emerged from the early nineteenth-century world of immigrants, fervent religion, and rough-and-tumble rural culture, and barely survived the Civil War battle at Shiloh. The heart of Worster's biography is Powell's epic journey down the Colorado in 1869, a tale of harrowing experiences, lethal accidents, and breathtaking discoveries. After years in the region collecting rocks and fossils and learning to speak the local Native American languages, Powell returned to Washington as an eloquent advocate for the West, one of America's first and most influential conservationists. But in the end, he fell victim to a clique of Western politicians who pushed for unfettered economic development, relegating the aging explorer to a quiet life of anthropological contemplation. John Wesley Powell embodied the energy, optimism, and westward impulse of the young United States. A River Running West is a gorgeously written, magisterial account of this great American explorer and environmental pioneer, a true story of undaunted courage in the American West.

Hailed as "one of the most eminent environmental historians of the West" by Alan Brinkley in The New York Times Book Review, Donald Worster has been a leader in reshaping the study of American history. Winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl, Worster has helped bring humanity's interaction with nature to the forefront of historical thinking. Now, in The Wealth of Nature, he offers a series of thoughtful, eloquent essays which lay out his views on environmental history, tying the study of the past to today's agenda for change.
The Wealth of Nature captures the fruit of what Worster calls "my own intellectual turning to the land." History, he writes, represents a dialogue between humanity and nature--though it is usually reported as if it were simple dictation. Worster takes as his point of departure the approach expressed early on by Aldo Leopold, who stresses the importance of nature in determining human history; Leopold pointed out that the spread of bluegrass in Kentucky, for instance, created new pastures and fed the rush of American settlers across the Appalachians, which affected the contest between Britain, France, and the U.S. for control of the area. Worster's own work offers an even more subtly textured understanding, noting in this example, for instance, that bluegrass itself was an import from the Old World which supplanted native vegetation--a form of "environmental imperialism." He ranges across such areas as agriculture, water development, and other questions, examining them as environmental issues, showing how they have affected--and continue to affect--human settlement. Environmental history, he argues, is not simply the history of rural and wilderness areas; cities clearly have a tremendous impact on the land, on which they depend for their existence. He argues for a comprehensive approach to understanding our past as well as our present in environmental terms.
"Nostalgia runs all through this society," Worster writes, "fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation." These reflective and engaging essays capture the fascination of environmental history--and the beauty of nature lost or endangered--underscoring the importance of intelligent action in the present.

Eleven eloquent essays that convey the power of the new western history. Provides an introduction to the changing traditions of western historical writing, and then demonstrates his (Worster's) own approach through fascinating case studies. An environmental historian, Worster writes compellingly of the changing relationship between the land, native Americans, and the descendants of Europe.

The West remains unsettled--by cultural habits, intellectual debate, and ecological conditions. In these four essays, which were presented as the 1992 Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture, Donald Worster incisively discusses the role of the natural environment in the making of the West--and often in its unmaking and remaking. His subjects are four linked topics: the legacy of John Wesley Powell to western resource management; the domination of water policy by state, science, and capital since the mid-nineteenth century; the fate of wildlife in the push to settle the West; and the threat of global warming to the Great Plains. The landscape of the West has for too long been an obstacle to be overcome. But in Worster's view it is in seeing how people have dealt with and, all too often, mishandled nature that gives urgency to better understanding the region's ecological history. Worster argues for a new relationship of western people to their surroundings based on benefits to a community rather than on gains to individuals.

Since 1492, when Columbus "discovered" America, the world has been moving toward an increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and consequently greater resource demands, and an increasingly precarious state of the biosphere. These developments play a major part in both modern history and in daily life. Understanding their interrelationships and development is crucial to the future of humanity and of the Earth, and is the unifying theme of this collection of readings.

Since 1492, when Columbus "discovered" America, the world has been moving toward an increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and consequently greater resource demands, and an increasingly precarious state of the biosphere. These developments play a major part in both modern history and in daily life. Understanding their interrelationships and development is crucial to the future of humanity and of the Earth, and is the unifying theme of this collection of readings.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing."
In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship."
For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

"I was supposed to be taking pictures to show that this was a great country and I was finding out it really was. . . . I didn't know it at the time, but I was having a last look at America as it used to be."--John Vachon Kansans of the 1930s and 1940s lived through more sweeping changes than any other generation past or present. Destructive forces of nature, an economy gone awry, and a devastating--and ironically, economically renewing--war left the world irrevocably altered. In this captivating collection, some of America's best-known documentary photographers provide a valuable glimpse into that tumultuous time. Constance Schulz has brought together a diverse array of photographs from three extensive documentary projects: the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. The result is a unique visual record of American life by photographers Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Edwin and Louise Rosskam, and Charles Rotkin. Collectively, their work has immortalized the faces and emotions of FSA-aided farmers and the harsh lives of coal miners, dust-bowl debris and tumbleweeds, a failed bank and a thriving stockyard, locomotives and Mexican-American railroad workers, oil derricks, wheat country, black cavalry troops, and 4-H Club fairs. In his enlightening introduction, environmental historian Donald Worster provides historical context for the images. Examining state, national, and international events from 1930 to 1950, he explores the agricultural, business, social, political, and environmental climates as well as the composition of the state's population and its inevitable shift away from rural life toward urbanization and industrialization. Schulz also supplies fundamental information on the photographers and the photographic projects. Originally created as a means to promote government and business programs, the FSA, OWI, and Standard Oil photographs--most never before published--are an excellent source for individuals and communities searching for a visual record of their local heritage during two of the most crucial decades in American history.

Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past. It traces the origins of the concept, discusses the thinkers who have shaped it, and shows how it in turn has shaped the modern perception of our place in nature. The book includes portraits of Linnaeus, Gilbert White, Darwin, Thoreau, and such key twentieth-century ecologists as Rachel Carson, Frederic Clements, Aldo Leopold, James Lovelock, and Eugene Odum. It concludes with a new Part VI, which looks at the directions ecology has taken most recently.