Discovering The Unknown Landscape
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| Author | : Douglas E. Booth |
| Publisher | : Rowman & Littlefield |
| Total Pages | : 292 |
| Release | : 2004 |
| Genre | : Business & Economics |
| ISBN | : 9780742527188 |
This accessible and provocative book explores whether getting 'unhooked' from economic growth to meet the needs of the environment is possible. Although giving the environment priority over growth may seem radical, the author argues that it can be accomplished using marketable emissions allowances, transferable development rights, and other tools popular with conventional economists. It can also be achieved by creating more interesting and environmentally friendly urban landscapes less beholden to the automobile. The key problem will be ensuring that everyone who wants employment can find it. This will require a transition to a shorter workweek, the wistful goal of many a harried worker. More leisure, a higher-quality environment, and more attractive cities and towns are the potential rewards of a less consumption-oriented society. Yet how can the power of special interests be overcome in the name of environmental conservation? This is the author's critical final question as he offers a clear path to a sustainable economic and environmental future.
| Author | : Tim Palmer |
| Publisher | : Island Press |
| Total Pages | : 358 |
| Release | : 1999-09 |
| Genre | : Nature |
| ISBN | : 9781610910538 |
From the cliffs of Big Sur to the dunes at Cape Hatteras, from the bogs of the Boundary Waters to the deserts of the Rio Grande, the landscape of America has shaped us into the people we are. Not only is it central to ecological health and essential to the economy, it has helped form our culture and serves as a basis of national pride. The heart of America lies in the rock and soil, the mountains and the plains that surround us.In this illuminating portrait of America at the threshold of the new millennium, author Tim Palmer explores and assesses the landscape of the United States -- both timeless wonders of natural beauty and lost places scarred by human exploitation. He takes the reader on an informative and inspirational tour of our most vital landscapes, including mountains, forests, grasslands, deserts, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and seashores. He introduces us to the basic geography and ecological value of each landscape, describes historical patterns of land use, considers the most serious threats, and discusses what is being done to protect the landscape for future generations. Throughout, he instills a deeper understanding of the importance of the land, a sense of outrage at the damage that has been done, and a feeling of hope that those working to correct past abuses will succeed.Weaving together geographical, historical, and ecological information and insights, Palmer draws on thirty years of professional experience as a writer, photographer, conservationist, planner, landscape architect, and veteran traveler to present a fresh look at the past, present, and future of our land.Resounding in its account of these landscapes, compelling in the force of its information and the hope of its timely message, The Heart of America offers a fascinating measure of the land around us and a unique look at the place we call home.
| Author | : J. L. Anderson |
| Publisher | : Northern Illinois University Press |
| Total Pages | : 338 |
| Release | : 2014-02-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 150175131X |
J.L. Anderson seeks to change the belief that the Midwest lacks the kind of geographic coherence, historical issues, and cultural touchstones that have informed regional identity in the American South, West, and Northeast. The goal of this illuminating volume is to demonstrate uniqueness in a region that has always been amorphous and is increasingly so. Midwesterners are a dynamic people who shaped the physical and social landscapes of the great midsection of the nation, and they are presented as such in this volume that offers a general yet informed overview of the region after World War II. The contributors—most of whom are Midwesterners by birth or residence—seek to better understand a particular piece of rural America, a place too often caricatured, misunderstood, and ignored. However, the rural landscape has experienced agricultural diversity and major shifts in land use. Farmers in the region have successfully raised new commodities from dairy and cherries to mint and sugar beets. The region has also been a place where community leaders fought to improve their economic and social well-being, women redefined their roles on the farm, and minorities asserted their own version of the American Dream. The rural Midwest is a regional melting pot, and contributors to this volume do not set out to sing its praises or, by contrast, assume the position of Midwestern modesty and self-deprecation. The essays herein rewrite the narrative of rural decline and crisis, and show through solid research and impeccable scholarship that rural Midwesterners have confronted and created challenges uniquely their own.
| Author | : Nancy Langston |
| Publisher | : University of Washington Press |
| Total Pages | : 269 |
| Release | : 2009-11-23 |
| Genre | : Technology & Engineering |
| ISBN | : 0295989831 |
Water and land interrelate in surprising and ambiguous ways, and riparian zones, where land and water meet, have effects far outside their boundaries. Using the Malheur Basin in southeastern Oregon as a case study, this intriguing and nuanced book explores the ways people have envisioned boundaries between water and land, the ways they have altered these places, and the often unintended results. The Malheur Basin, once home to the largest cattle empires in the world, experienced unintended widespread environmental degradation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After establishment in 1908 of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a protected breeding ground for migratory birds, and its expansion in the 1930s and 1940s, the area experienced equally extreme intended modifications aimed at restoring riparian habitat. Refuge managers ditched wetlands, channelized rivers, applied Agent Orange and rotenone to waterways, killed beaver, and cut down willows. Where Land and Water Meet examines the reasoning behind and effects of these interventions, gleaning lessons from their successes and failures. Although remote and specific, the Malheur Basin has myriad ecological and political connections to much larger places. This detailed look at one tangled history of riparian restoration shows how—through appreciation of the complexity of environmental and social influences on land use, and through effective handling of conflict—people can learn to practice a style of pragmatic adaptive resource management that avoids rigid adherence to single agendas and fosters improved relationships with the land.
| Author | : Martin Reuss |
| Publisher | : University of Virginia Press |
| Total Pages | : 329 |
| Release | : 2010-08-06 |
| Genre | : Nature |
| ISBN | : 0813929881 |
This compelling new book challenges the view that a clear and unwavering boundary exists between nature and technology. Rejecting this dichotomy, the contributors show how the history of each can be united in a constantly shifting panorama where definitions of "nature" and "technology" alter and overlap.
| Author | : Christof Mauch |
| Publisher | : Berghahn Books |
| Total Pages | : 144 |
| Release | : 2004-10 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1571814388 |
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Germany is a key test case for the burgeoning field of environmental history; in no other country has the landscape been so thoroughly politicized throughout its past as in Germany,and in no other country have ideas of 'nature' figured so centrally in notions of national identity. The essays collected in this volume — the first collection on the subject in either English or German — place discussions of nature and the human relationship with nature in their political co texts. Taken together, they trace the gradual shift from a confident belief in humanity ’s ability to tame and manipulate the natural realm to the Umweltbewußtsein driving the contemporary conservation movement. Nature in German History also documents efforts to reshape the natural realm in keeping with ideological beliefs — such as the Romantic exultation of 'the wild' and the Nazis' attempts to eliminate 'foreign' flora and fauna — as well as the ways in which political issues have repeatedly been transformed into discussions of the environment in Germany.
| Author | : SueEllen Campbell |
| Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
| Total Pages | : 334 |
| Release | : 2011-07-23 |
| Genre | : Nature |
| ISBN | : 0520269268 |
This book examines mirages and satellite images, swamp-dwelling heroes and Tibetan nomads, cave paintings and popular movies, investigating how we live with the great shaping forces of nature--from fire to changing climates and the intricacies of adaptation. The book illuminates subjects as diverse as the literary life of hollow Earth theories, the links between the Little Ice Age and Frankenstein's monster, and the spiritual allure of deserts and their scarce waters.
| Author | : Kylie Carman-Brown |
| Publisher | : ANU Press |
| Total Pages | : 331 |
| Release | : 2019-10-18 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1760462853 |
Water reflects culture. This book is a detailed analysis of hydrological change in Australia’s largest inland waterway in Australia, the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, in the first 70 years of white settlement. Following air, water is our primal need. Unlike many histories, this book looks at the entire hydrological cycle in one place, rather than focusing on one bit. Deftly weaving threads from history, hydrology and psychology into one, Following the Water explores not just what settlers did to the waterscape, but probes their motivation for doing so. By combining unlikely elements together such as swamp drainage, water proofing techniques and temperance lobbying, the book reveals a web of perceptions about how water ‘should be’. With this laid clear, we can ask how different we are from our colonial forebears.
| Author | : Craig E. Colten |
| Publisher | : LSU Press |
| Total Pages | : 333 |
| Release | : 2014-10-13 |
| Genre | : Nature |
| ISBN | : 0807156523 |
Water has dominated images of the South throughout history, from Hernando de Soto's 1541 crossing of the Mississippi to tragic scenes of flooding throughout the Gulf South after Hurricane Katrina. But these images tell only half the story: as urban, industrial, and population growth create unprecedented demands on water in the South, the problems of pollution and water shortages grow ever more urgent. In Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance, Craig E. Colten addresses how the South -- in an environment fraught with uncertainty -- can navigate the twin risks of too much water and not enough. From the arrival of the first European settlers, the South's inhabitants have pursued a course of maximum exploitation and control of the area's plentiful waters, investing widely in wetland drainage and massive flood-control projects. Disputes over southern waterways go back nearly as far: obstruction of fish migration by mill dams prompted new policies to protect aquatic life as early as the colonial era. Colten argues that such conflicts, which have heightened dramatically since the explosive urbanization of the mid-twentieth century, will only become more frequent and intense, making the shift toward sustainable use a national imperative. In tracing the evolving uses and abuses of southern waters, Colten offers crucial insights into the complex historical geography of water throughout the region. A masterful analysis of the ways in which past generations harnessed and consumed water, Southern Waters also stands as a guide to adapting our water usage to cope with the looming shortage of this once-abundant resource.
| Author | : Craig Pittman |
| Publisher | : University Press of Florida |
| Total Pages | : 499 |
| Release | : 2010-05-25 |
| Genre | : Nature |
| ISBN | : 0813037433 |
Florida possesses more wetlands than any other state except Alaska, yet since 1990 more than 84,000 acres have been lost to development despite presidential pledges to protect them. How and why the state's wetlands are continuing to disappear is the subject of Paving Paradise. Journalists Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite spent nearly four years investigating the political expedience, corruption, and negligence on the part of federal and state agencies that led to a failure to enforce regulations on developers. They traveled throughout the state, interviewed hundreds of people, dug through thousands of documents, and analyzed satellite imagery to identify former wetlands that were now houses, stores, and parking lots. Exposing the unseen environmental consequences of rampant sprawl, Pittman and Waite explain how wetland protection creates the illusion of environmental protection while doing little to stem the tide of destruction.
