An early observer remarked that it was doubtful that organic life was anywhere more exquisitely adjusted to its environment "than in the marshes of the ocean shore." Yet through most of American history, coastal wetlands have been viewed as noxious regions, some good for recreation but most fit only for dredging and reclamation. Recently, however, ecologists have recognized the diversity and biotic fecundity of the nation's tidelands.
Joseph Siry carefully traces the interplay among scientific knowledge, popular values, legal frameworks, and public policy in the development of a wetlands...

The federal government holds a vast domain of American land. Does it hold these acres in trust for future generations and for the planet itself? Or does it hold them as a resource for economic development and growth? Indeed, should it hold them at all? These questions became a focal point for New Right politics in the 1980 presidential election that brought Ronald Reagan into the White House. The Sagebrush Rebellion and the New Right attempted to convince the public that environmentalism threatened the nation's wellbeing. Environmentalists sought new ground for fighting back.
In this...

Seventy-five years ago the growing city of Los Angeles, amid considerable conflict, appropriated water from a rural area 250 miles away. Still unresolved, the controversy surrounding the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Aqueduct has long since moved from the personal, even violent level fictionalized in the movie "Chinatown" to the dry realm of court proceedings, injunctions, and environmental impact reports. But water remains a problem in California, and the questions raised by these events--the rights of a rural area versus a growing metropolitan area, environmental issues, and levels of government...

For years the logging industry and the rich timberlands of the East and West coasts have evoked images of Jigger Jones and Paul Bunyan, lusty lumbermen of folk history. Behind these myths, however, lie the realities of ruthless competition, heedless exploitation of forestlands, and massive overproduction that once threatened to destroy the lumber industry.
William G. Robbins reveals a sharply revisionist view of the lumber industry in the first half of the twentieth century, a period of drastic growth and change. He offers a unique national perspective on the dominant figures in...

The story of Rijnland, a small strip of coastal lowland in the western Netherlands, is part of the legendary Dutch struggle against encroaching water. Rijnland was for centuries a stretch of uninhabited peat bogs and sand dunes. The reclamation and colonization processes that eventually transformed these remote marshes into a commercialized agricultural center form the heart of this book, which chronicles events from A.D. 950 to 1350. Unlike most studies of the European Middle Ages, this work focuses on how people of earlier times dealt with their physical environment. Combining historical...