Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
When Muir made his second great canoe trip in Alaska, in 1880, one of his canoe-mates, a Presbyterian missionary, brought along a little terrier named Stickeen. At first, Muir didn’t like the dog. But later, the two spent a cold, wet day exploring a massive glacier, and barely survived. Muir called it the greatest of his many adventure stories. The illustrations in this book are exaggerated, but stunning. You can almost feel the cold, and the elation man and dog feel at the end as they become fast friends.
First published as "An Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier" in 1897 in "The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine" and then expanded into a book and published in 1909, "Stickeen" by American naturalist John Muir is one of literature's most enduring dog stories. Based on a trip he took to Alaska in 1880 with a dog Stickeen and their trek out on a glacier, this short memoir is one of Muir's best-known publications whose enduring appeal has resulted in numerous adaptations and retellings. This thrilling and heart-warming tale follows Muir as he sets out to explore a glacier with the…
Since my late teens, I have traveled extensively in wilderness areas across the United States and Alaska, as well as in Canada, Switzerland, and Patagonia. Backpacking, technical mountain climbing, and canoeing have led me to appreciate wilderness for its own sake and to become a fierce advocate for its protection. Since moving to Seattle in 1982, I have hiked extensively in the western mountains and experienced a profound sense of peace and wonder in the wild. The listed books have deepened my appreciation of the wild's intrinsic value. I have tried to convey this appreciation to my readers in my three novels set in the American West.
In John McPhee’s classic defense of environmental sanity and wilderness protection, the archdruid is David Brower, in his day among the planet’s most fervent environmentalists and defenders of nature.
Charles Fraser, a resort developer, labeled Brower a “druid”: i.e., “ a religious figure who sacrifices people and worships trees,” and I know of no other book that so starkly contrasts the urge to develop everything—even the Grand Canyon!—with the counter urge to preserve as much as possible of the wild before it is all gone.
I deeply appreciate McPhee’s format: a series of dialogues in which Brower and his three opponents extol their arguments fully and then engage in rigorous debate about their wildly contrasting values.
The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.
History is my passion as well as my profession. I love a good story! When I was teaching courses in environmental history and women’s history, I kept noticing the intriguing intersections, which inspired me to write Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers. Most of my work focuses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1877-1920) and includes two award-winning biographies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Belle La Follette Progressive Era Reformer. I’m also the co-editor of A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and have written dozens of op-eds and give public talks (some of which can be found in the C-SPAN online library and on YouTube).
Adam Rome examines an underappreciated topic in environmental history: the environmental costs of the ever-growing American suburbs. Mass migration to the suburbs coincided with the rise of the environmental movement. That convergence was followed by political controversy, and ultimately codes, regulations, and guidelines. Rome is a great storyteller who reveals important shifts in growth management and environmental policy.
The concern today about suburban sprawl is not new. In the decades after World War II, the spread of tract-house construction changed the nature of millions of acres of land, and a variety of Americans began to protest against the environmental costs of suburban development. By the mid-1960s, indeed, many of the critics were attempting to institutionalize an urban land ethic. The Bulldozer in the Countryside was the first scholarly work to analyze the successes and failures of the varied efforts to address the environmental consequences of suburban growth from 1945 to 1970. For scholars and students of American history,…
We grew up, brothers, in Cleveland’s Ohio antipode – Cincinnati – and so we knew Cleveland mostly in contrast to our home. Despite the many differences, both cities experienced the urban crisis. Richard, a journalist, was drawn to the story of Cleveland’s frequently burning river. How did the Cuyahoga become a poster child for the environmental movement? And David, an environmental historian, was drawn to Carl Stokes, a Black man with the skills to become mayor of a predominantly white city in 1968. How did he propose to solve the many problems running through the urban environment? We both wanted to know what Cleveland’s changing relationship with its river could tell us about environmental politics.
Of all the changes in environmental politics since the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, perhaps the most perplexing – and disappointing – is the Republican turn away from environmental protection. From the Reagan Administration through the Trump regime, the Republican Party has staked the claim not just to passivity toward environmental regulation but has engaged in an all-out assault on government protection of the human and nonhuman environment. Turner and Isenberg make sense of this policy turn, emphasizing the roles of libertarian ideologues, multinational corporations with a stake in the status quo, and rural Americans who tired of federal intrusions in their lives and livelihoods. As aspects of the urban crisis have eased, and specific places like the Cuyahoga River have improved, environmental activists would do well to figure out how to make environmental protection bipartisan once again.
Not long ago, Republicans could take pride in their party's tradition of environmental leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a "hoax" and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened?
In The Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg show that the party's transformation began in the late 1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and anti-federalist…
We grew up, brothers, in Cleveland’s Ohio antipode – Cincinnati – and so we knew Cleveland mostly in contrast to our home. Despite the many differences, both cities experienced the urban crisis. Richard, a journalist, was drawn to the story of Cleveland’s frequently burning river. How did the Cuyahoga become a poster child for the environmental movement? And David, an environmental historian, was drawn to Carl Stokes, a Black man with the skills to become mayor of a predominantly white city in 1968. How did he propose to solve the many problems running through the urban environment? We both wanted to know what Cleveland’s changing relationship with its river could tell us about environmental politics.
The subtitle to Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands is Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City, and it’s Sullivan’s adventures exploring the vast New Jersey wetlands that make the book so entertaining. But Sullivan is right to use the word “wilderness” to describe the 32 square miles of swamp, landfills, and rusting industrial debris along the Hackensack River where it flows into Newark Bay just five miles from the Empire State Building in New York City. Like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, the Meadowlands have been abused and degraded for centuries but also show the resilience of nature and how people’s attitudes toward it have changed. “Now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-bill grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs,” Sullivan writes, “even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.” Sullivan’s loving description…
Imagine a grungy north Jersey version of John McPhee's classic The Pine Barrens and you'll get some idea of the idiosyncratic, fact-filled, and highly original work that is Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. Just five miles west of New York City, this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station--and maybe, just ,maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa. Robert Sullivan proves himself to be this fragile yet amazingly resilient region's…
I am an engaged scholar fighting racism. As a person of color, an Asian American raised in Chinatown and a low-income Black neighborhood, the fight is personal. My parents and those before them suffered from and struggled against discriminatory immigration laws that fractured and separated family members. My research and publications as a university professor are tools for exposing and redressing racial injustices, producing and sharing knowledge that leads to reconciliation and restorative justice.
Schlosberg covers the environment as an important sphere for societal inequalities, including those along racial lines.
People of color bear a disproportionate share of air, water, and land pollution and risk being left behind as the United States transitions to renewable energy in response to climate change.
Much of the inequality is anchored in stratified places. The author not only summarizes the existing literature on this, but also provides a very useful overview of the major justice paradigms as it applies to the environment.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in environmental politics, environmental movements, and justice theory.
The basic task of this book is to explore what, exactly, is meant by 'justice' in definitions of environmental and ecological justice. It examines how the term is used in both self-described environmental justice movements and in theories of environmental and ecological justice. The central argument is that a theory and practice of environmental justice necessarily includes distributive conceptions of justice, but must also embrace notions of justice based in recognition, capabilities, and participation. Throughout, the goal is the development of a broad, multi-faceted, yet…
Books—broadly defined as any kind of written or printed document—are the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, “Books last forever.” The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
Before it launched the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring (1962) had to run a formidable publication gantlet. Rachel Carson challenged the prevailing scientific consensus about pesticides, a subject most magazines wouldn't touch for fear of losing ads. The chemical industry threatened legal action and mounted a PR campaign against Carson. But she had several strong cards to play.
She was already a best-selling author. She was firmly backed by her editor, Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin, then an independent family firm with a tradition of publishing nature writers. The book was serialized in the New Yorker, and President Kennedy plugged it at a press conference. On CBS, Eric Sevareid gave Carson equal time with an industry spokesman, though some corporations pulled their commercials. As Brooks predicted, "A future social historian will be writing his Ph.D. thesis on the career of Silent Spring—just you wait!"
In 1962 the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring sparked widespread public debate on the issue of pesticide abuse and environmental degradation. The discussion permeated the entire print and electronic media system of mid-twentieth-century America. Although Carson's text was serialized in the New Yorker, it made a significant difference that it was also published as a book. With clarity and precision, Priscilla Coit Murphy explores the importance of the book form for the author, her editors and publishers, her detractors, the media, and the public at large. Murphy reviews the publishing history of the Houghton Mifflin edition and the prior…
Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
Born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin, Muir had many profound childhood experiences that shaped his radicalism, including his ability to see America through a different lens that gave him impartiality but also compassion. In short, Muir’s ability to question everything, even our modern notions of progress and what makes us happy, stems from his childhood and early manhood, which this book explores in perfect detail.
As a founder of the Sierra Club and a promoter of the national parks, as a passionate nature writer and as a principle figure of the environmental movement, John Muir stands as a powerful symbol of connection with the natural world. But how did Muir's relationships with nature begin? In this book, Steven J. Holmes offers an interpretation of Muir's formative years, one that reveals the agony as well as the of his earliest experiences of nature. From his childhood in Scotland and Wisconsin through young adulthood in the Midwest and Canada, Muir struggled - often without success - to…
Kim Heacox has written 15 books, five of them published by National Geographic. He has twice won the National Outdoor Book Award (for his memoir, The Only Kayak, and his novel, Jimmy Bluefeather), and twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for excellence in travel journalism. He’s featured on Ken Burns’ film, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, and he’s spoken about John Muir on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska (next to Glacier Bay Nat’l Park), a small town of 500 people reachable only by boat or plane.
It won the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Wolfe interviewed many people who knew Muir, and rendered an account that can never be repeated. This was the first book about Muir to explore not only his life as a naturalist and activist, but also his role as a son, father and husband, as well as an inventor, farmer and lobbyist. The text is buoyant and breezy.
Working closely with Muir's family and with his papers, Linnie Marsh Wolfe was able to create a full portrait of her subject, not only as America's firebrand conservationist and founder of the national park system, but also as husband, father, and friend. All readers who have admired Muir's ruggedly individualistic lifestyle, and those who wish a greater appreciation for the history of environmental preservation in America, will be enthralled and enlightened by this splendid biography.
A decade ago, we were living in Washington, D.C., wrapped up as journalists in the daily news cycle. We began camping to get out of the city and quickly became fascinated with birds. We’ve been writing about birds ever since, on our website, FlyingLessons.US: What we’re learning from the birds,” and now with a book about the extraordinary work across the hemisphere to save birds. There’s a storehouse of books, articles and guides on birdwatching, but very little on what’s happening to bird populations overall. We believe the story of birds is one of the best ways to open a window on the environmental issues that are among the pivotal topics of our time.
This book on how Rachel Carson researched and wrote Silent Spring is a compelling back story of how she uncovered the evidence of the impacts of pesticides and nearly singlehandedly ignited the environmental movement.
Silent Spring remains an important book to read and understand the relationship between birds and the altered environment that is undoing so many species.
We list this biography by Linda Leer because it captures what Carson was up against in her pursuit. That includes an enormously difficult scientific study, vicious personal opposition from the pharmaceutical companies that ridiculed and vilified her, and Carson’s own deteriorating health that took her life shortly after the book was published.
It’s a stirring story we shouldn’t forget more than half a century later.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, did more than any other single publication to alert the world to the hazards of environmental poisoning and to inspire a powerful social movement that would alter the course of American history. This definitive, sweeping biography shows the origins of Carson's fierce dedication to natural science--and tells the dramatic story of how Carson, already a famous nature writer, became a brillant if reluctant reformer. Drawing on unprecendented access to sources and interviews, Lear masterfully explores the roots of Carson's powerful connection to the natural world, crafting a " fine portrait of the environmentalist…
