Here are 100 books that The Size of the Risk fans have personally recommended if you like
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By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
This is an engrossing tour of public lands from Terry Tempest Williams, a poet and essayist who is an American treasure. From this beautiful and vivid book, I realized spiritual connections between human beings and nature, between past and future, between the soul and the earth.
America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.
From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that…
I started studying public lands by accident in the 1990s for a class project before I really knew what they even were. Since then, I've published hundreds of thousands of words about them, including my latest book Making America’s Public Landswhere I’ve brought together much of what I’ve learned. I’m convinced the national forests, parks, rangelands, and refuges are among the most interesting and important experiments in democracy we have. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying the public lands, I've appreciated hiking, sleeping, teaching, and noticing things in them even more.
Whose lands are these? Jacqueline Keeler squarely addresses the nature of American lands in her investigative and personal account of two 2016 standoffs: the Bundy family’s (and allies’) takeover at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s (and allies’) protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. For each standoff, Keeler shows how competing stories animated the actors in their understanding of past and future, as well as the reactions to them. Her account powerfully forced me to reckon with the sacredness of land in the traditions of myriad Americans. Standoff brings intellectual enrichment and moral outrage in equal measure; that’s hard to beat!
Native young people and elders pray in sweat lodges at the Océti Sakówin camp, the North Dakota landscape outside blanketed in snow. In Oregon, white men and women in army surplus and western gear, some draped in the American flag, gather in the buildings of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. The world witnessed two standoffs in 2016: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's protest against an oil pipeline in North Dakota and the armed takeover of Oregon's Malheur Wildlife Refuge led by the Bundy family. These events unfolded in vastly different…
I started studying public lands by accident in the 1990s for a class project before I really knew what they even were. Since then, I've published hundreds of thousands of words about them, including my latest book Making America’s Public Landswhere I’ve brought together much of what I’ve learned. I’m convinced the national forests, parks, rangelands, and refuges are among the most interesting and important experiments in democracy we have. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying the public lands, I've appreciated hiking, sleeping, teaching, and noticing things in them even more.
What was it like to work as a forester with the US Forest Service was young? This is a memoir by Elers Koch who worked as a federal forester from 1903 to 1943 in the Northern Rockies. Forty Years a Forester gives an inside account of how rangers built the national forest system in its earliest years, which is fascinating enough. But what makes Koch even more interesting is how he bucked conventional wisdom on quandaries like forest fires (with which he had ample firsthand experience and shared here) and wilderness long before views like his became common. Government bureaucrats rarely write good memoirs, but this one invites you in and provides real insight—and even some inspiration.
Elers Koch, a key figure in the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, was among the first American-trained silviculturists, a pioneering forest manager, and a master firefighter. By horse and on foot, he helped establish the boundaries of most of our national forests in the West, designed new fire-control strategies and equipment, and served during the formative years of the agency. Forty Years a Forester, Koch's entertaining and illuminating memoir, reveals one remarkable man's contributions to the incipient science of forest management and his role in building the human relationships and policies that helped make the U.S. Forest Service,…
I started studying public lands by accident in the 1990s for a class project before I really knew what they even were. Since then, I've published hundreds of thousands of words about them, including my latest book Making America’s Public Landswhere I’ve brought together much of what I’ve learned. I’m convinced the national forests, parks, rangelands, and refuges are among the most interesting and important experiments in democracy we have. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying the public lands, I've appreciated hiking, sleeping, teaching, and noticing things in them even more.
This classic furnishes the best foundation for understanding land, water, and wildlife issues in the American West—and that necessarily means the public lands. Charles Wilkinson tacks from the past to the present, from law to history to ecology, effortlessly. What makes Crossing the Next Meridianso valuable is Wilkinson showing how nineteenth-century laws—the “lords of yesterday” in his apt phrasing—continued to guide the policy and politics around public lands and resources through the twentieth century. Packed with scholarship, legal reasoning, and on-the-ground reporting, Crossing the Next Meridian laid out clearly why the West I have lived in my whole life looks the way it does. Whenever I have a question about the history or law, this is my first stop. (I would love for him to issue an updated edition.)
In Crossing the Next Meridian, Charles F. Wilkinson, an expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws explains some of the core problems facing the American West now and in the years to come. He examines the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation and argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat desertification and environmental decline, and to heal splintered communities.
Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences of the laws, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of the laws and regulations that…
I produced dozens of hours of film and television, including for Al Jazeera’s Emmy, Peabody, and DuPont-award-winning program Faultlines; as well as short and long-form documentaries for Democracy Now and teleSUR, and reporting in The New York Times and Washington Post. I’ve written two books based on my journalism, No More Heroes: Grassroots Responses to the Savior Mentality and Floodlines: Community and Resistance From Katrina to the Jena Six. I produced the independent feature film Chocolate Babies, which was recently added to the Criterion Collection. My latest film is Powerlands.
The best book I’ve ever read about organizing. Max Rameau is a visionary organizer who, in the midst of the housing crisis of 2008, began seizing empty houses and helping homeless people move in. In this book, he goes into deep detail on a previous campaign to reclaim land and turn it into housing, explaining both the successes and failures, as well as the strategy and ideas behind the tactics. Read this to learn the fundamentals of how to plan, organize and win.
On October 23, 2006, a group of activists brought land struggle to the US. After seizing public land in Liberty City, FL, the Umoja Village Shantytown was born.
I’ve been a biblical scholar for over 35 years and have spent a lot of time reading and writing academic volumes, analyzing arguments, and teaching diverse audiences. However, some of my formative experiences were as a child on my grandparents’ North Carolina farm, to which I still feel an almost elemental connection. Perhaps that farm (and my vegetable gardening) first sparked my interest in the environment. My interest turned to advocacy through research, which set me on the path to grasping the urgency of the climate crisis and my conviction that everything must reflect this reality. I’ve poured over the scientific reports (such as by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and read lots of nonfiction.
Davis beautifully shows how understanding the agrarian background of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament helps us recognize the radicality (and modern relevancy) of its vision for Earth. I was especially taken by her chapter on the Book of Leviticus, which usually gets “reduced” to a debate about same-gender-loving relationships.
In Davis’s hands, Leviticus’s guidelines about land and human bodies become amazingly applicable to modern ethics of eating and land use in an era of climate crisis. It really helped me appreciate that the habits we develop (even if they are experienced as rules) can actually change our minds and hearts.
This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to…
Home food production & self-sufficiency was Joann Grohman’s lifelong enthusiasm. With a young, hungry family of eight children, she started milking cows by hand and did so until she was almost 90 years old. She simply could not imagine life without a family cow, a remarkable animal that makes grass into nutritious milk and cream that can feed people, pigs, and chickens, as well as provide manure to grow vegetables. When asked if having a cow means feeling stuck on the farm, she countered that a cow supports a beautiful life that can be found in no other way.
This book has had a huge impact in the UK, kickstarting a revolution in land management. Ms. Tree's husband inherited a very large estate in southern England, and they tried hard to continue farming in the usual way, raising grain. After a series of failures, economic and otherwise, they finally decided that something radically different would have to be tried and took on the challenge of allowing their land to revert to nature.
The book has been described as 'thrilling, inspiring, and deeply moving,' and it's all of that and a real page-turner.
'A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation's salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope' - Chris Packham
In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.
Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize.
I worked in Indonesia much of the time between 1979 and 2009, with people living in forests. As an anthropologist, my work was initially ethnographic in nature, later linking such insights to policies relating to forests and people – as I worked at the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor (1995 – the present). Although later in my career, I worked in forests all over the tropics, my real love remains with Indonesia, where I worked the longest and learned the most. My most recent research was in 2019, when I returned to the first community I studied ethnographically in 1979-80.
Tania Li shows the impacts of the capitalist process of a highland group’s attempts to adopt commodity production of cacao in central Sulawesi, building on her two decades of ethnographic research there. The book shows how, in this process, relations among people and with their environment change as the forest disappears and land ownership and wealth become more inequitable – not particularly pretty. It taught me how the Sulawesi situation differs from the Bornean situation I know so well.
Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Tania Murray Li offers an intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while others lost their land and struggled to sustain their families. Yet the winners and losers in this transition were not strangers-they were kin and neighbors. Li's richly peopled account takes the reader into the highlanders' world, exploring the dilemmas they faced as sharp inequalities emerged among them.
When I studied urban economics at Princeton in the 1970s, theoretical models of urban form were all the rage. Political barriers to urban development such as zoning were dismissed as irrelevant. But as I read more about it, zoning appeared to be the foremost concern of both developers and community members. My service on the Hanover, New Hampshire zoning board made me appreciate why homeowners are so concerned about what happens in their neighborhood. NIMBYs—neighbors who cry “not in my backyard”—are not evil people; they are worried “homevoters” (owners who vote to protect their homes) who cannot diversify their oversized investment. Zoning reforms won’t succeed without addressing their anxieties.
Hirt’s title might make you think it is just about the United States, but her well-written book is one of the rare instances of an insightful comparison of zoning policies in the other high-income nations of the world. Zoning actually started in Germany in the late nineteenth century and was imported to the US at the beginning of the twentieth. It was seriously modified on our shores. Rather than orchestrating the orderly development of mixed-use neighborhoods, Americans isolated the single-family, owner-occupied house on a zoning pedestal that it rarely enjoys in other countries.
Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and-perhaps most noticeably-a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA, Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences.
Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly…
I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
Is a picture worth a thousand words? Urbanist Dolores Hayden sure thinks so, providing a cheeky, even snarky, guide to the worst aspects of the contemporary suburban landscape.
Brightly lit aerial photographs (many are from the American Southwest) show big box interchanges, lollipop subdivisions, tower farms for the electronic world, and all the other ways in which sprawl chews up the American land. Leaf through the pages, then you get to choose: Do you weep or do you scream in outrage?
A Field Guide to Sprawl was selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discover magazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define.…
