True Gardens of the Gods

True Gardens of the Gods
Author: Ian Tyrrell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0520920856

One of the most critical environmental challenges facing both Californians and Australians in the 1860s involved the aftermath of the gold rushes. Settlers on both continents faced the disruptive impacts of mining, grazing, and agriculture; in response to these challenges, environmental reformers attempted to remake the natural environment into an idealized garden landscape. As this cutting-edge history shows, an important result of this nineteenth-century effort to "renovate" nature was a far-reaching exchange of ideas between the United States—especially in California—and Australia. Ian Tyrrell demonstrates how Californians and Australians shared plants, insects, personnel, technology, and dreams, creating a system of environmental exchange that transcended national and natural boundaries. True Gardens of the Gods traces a new nineteenth-century environmental sensibility that emerged from the collision of European expansion with these frontier environments. Tyrrell traces historical ideas and personalities, provides in-depth discussions of introduced plants species (such as the eucalyptus and Monterey Pine), looks at a number of scientific programs of the time, and measures the impact of race, class, and gender on environmental policy. The book represents a new trend toward studying American history from a transnational perspective, focusing especially on a comparison of American history with the history of similar settler societies. Through the use of original research and an innovative methodology, this book offers a new look at the history of environmentalism on a regional and global scale.

Garden of the World

Garden of the World
Author: Cecilia M. Tsu
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199734771

Garden of the World examines how overlapping waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants fundamentally altered the agricultural economy and landscape of the Santa Clara Valley as well as white residents' ideas about race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer.

Squatter's Republic

Squatter's Republic
Author: Tamara Venit Shelton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2013-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520289099

Who should have the right to own land, and how much of it? A Squatter's Republic follows the rise and fall of the land question in the Gilded AgeÑand the rise and fall of a particularly nineteenth-century vision of landed independence. More specifically, the author considers the land question through the anti-monopolist reform movements it inspired in late nineteenth-century California. The Golden State was a squatter's republicÑa society of white men who claimed no more land than they could use, and who promised to uphold agrarian republican ideals and resist monopoly, the nemesis of democracy. Their opposition to land monopoly became entwined with public discourse on Mexican land rights, industrial labor relations, immigration from China, and the rise of railroad and other corporate monopolies.

Down to Earth

Down to Earth
Author: Ted Steinberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2002-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198032102

In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of our nation--a history that, for the first time, places the environment at the very center of our story. Written with exceptional clarity, Down to Earth re-envisions the story of America "from the ground up." It reveals how focusing on plants, animals, climate, and other ecological factors can radically change the way that we think about the past. Examining such familiar topics as colonization, the industrial revolution, slavery, the Civil War, and the emergence of modern-day consumer culture, Steinberg recounts how the natural world influenced the course of human history. From the colonists' attempts to impose order on the land to modern efforts to sell the wilderness as a consumer good, the author reminds readers that many critical episodes in our history were, in fact, environmental events. He highlights the ways in which we have attempted to reshape and control nature, from Thomas Jefferson's surveying plan, which divided the national landscape into a grid, to the transformation of animals, crops, and even water into commodities. The text is ideal for courses in environmental history, environmental studies, urban studies, economic history, and American history. Passionately argued and thought-provoking, Down to Earth retells our nation's history with nature in the foreground--a perspective that will challenge our view of everything from Jamestown to Disney World.

The Arid Lands

The Arid Lands
Author: Diana K. Davis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-03-25
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0262034522

An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world's magnificent drylands.

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species
Author: Peter Coates
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007-01-09
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0520933257

Sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, humans have transported plants and animals to new habitats around the world. Arriving in ever-increasing numbers to American soil, recent invaders have competed with, preyed on, hybridized with, and carried diseases to native species, transforming our ecosystems and creating anxiety among environmentalists and the general public. But is American anxiety over this crisis of ecological identity a recent phenomenon? Charting shifting attitudes to alien species since the 1850s, Peter Coates brings to light the rich cultural and historical aspects of this story by situating the history of immigrant flora and fauna within the wider context of human immigration. Through an illuminating series of particular invasions, including the English sparrow and the eucalyptus tree, what he finds is that we have always perceived plants and animals in relation to ourselves and the polities to which we belong. Setting the saga of human relations with the environment in the broad context of scientific, social, and cultural history, this thought-provoking book demonstrates how profoundly notions of nationality and debates over race and immigration have shaped American understandings of the natural world.

Dust of Gods

Dust of Gods
Author: Alexander Pullar
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1543488633

Dust of Gods is not a book for the professional, the archaeologist, or the historian; they can read their own books. It has been written for the enthusiastic nonacademic. Its for the serious novice, who may wish to ramble through our past, where often history and religion merge into one. Hopefully, a more meaningful perspective may be cast upon ones understanding of mankinds complex roots, how we arrived at our present state, and where our journey may yet take us. From an agglomeration of uncertainties, this book attempts to lift the shroud of mystery and free the truth behind mankinds success.

FACING TRUTH - "The Tale of Two Gardens"

FACING TRUTH -
Author: Patrick J. Tabor
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1300841222

This Book is based on the premise that the Bible is the objective Truth about created reality. Like a young child looking into a kaleidoscope, the picture of Christianity that we see in the world today is fragmented into an endless number of pieces and we struggle to put together a clear picture that makes sense. 2000 years of Church History, layers of Pagan Beliefs and Humanistic Philosophy have distorted and blurred the Bibles picture of the "Faith" that was taught by Jesus and the Apostles. In addition to that our innate resistance to "The Truth" is our biggest obstacle to embracing what is true about God, our selves and the Created Reality we live in and that makes coming to believe the Biblical Worldview at best very challenging. It is my hope that this book will help you establish an authentic Biblical Faith and bring the distorted, fragmented, kaleidoscopic picture of Christianity in the world today back into focus, as you continue your journey toward the gloriously wonderful "Eternal Kingdom of God."

Antipodean America

Antipodean America
Author: Paul Giles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199301565

A sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history, Antipodean America identifies the surprising affinites between Australian and American literature.

Natural States

Natural States
Author: Richard W. Judd
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2010-09-30
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1136524584

Richard Judd and Christopher Beach define the environmental imagination as the attempt to secure 'a sense of freedom, permanence, and authenticity through communion with nature.' The desire for this connection is based on ideals about nature, wilderness, and the livable landscape that are personal, variable, and often contradictory. Judd and Beach are interested in the public expression of these ideals in post-World War II environmental politics. Arguing that the best way to study the relationship between popular values and politics is through local and regional records, they focus on Maine and Oregon, states both rich in natural beauty and environmentalist traditions, but distinct in their postwar economic growth. Natural States reconstructs the environmental imagination from public commentary, legislative records, and other documents. Judd and Beach trace important divisions within the environmental movement, noting that they were balanced by a consistent, civic-minded vision of environmental goods shared by all. They demonstrate how tensions from competing ideals sustained the movement, contributed to its successes, but also limited its achievements. In the process, they offer insight into the character of the broader environmental movement as it emerged from the interplay of local, state, and national politics. The study ends in the 1970s when spectacular legislative achievements at the national level were masking a decline in mainstream civic engagement in state politics. The authors note the rise of the private ecotopia and the increasing complexity in the way Americans viewed their connections with the natural world. Yet, today, despite wide variations in beliefs and lifestyles, a majority of Americans still consider themselves to be environmentalists. In Natural States, environmental politics emerges less as a conflict between people who do and do not value nature, and more as a debate about the way people define and then chose to live with nature. In their attempt to place the passion for nature within a changing political and cultural context, Judd and Beach shed light on the ways that ideals unify and divide the environmental movement and act as the source of its enduring popularity.