Yet, as Theodore Steinberg demonstrates in this compelling, witty look at Americans' attempts to master the environment, nature continually turns these efforts into folly. In a rich, narrative style recalling the work of John McPhee, Steinberg tours America to explore some of the more unusual dilemmas that have arisen in our...

A great deal of arrogance surrounds this late-twentieth-century attitude toward the environment, and a great deal of history as well. What started as a research paper at Brandeis University expanded into a book that explores the role of the Industrial Revolution in this aggressive stance toward the natural world. The transformation of nature is at least as old as our presence as a species on this planet. But the advent of the industrial age marked a shift in humankind's relations with the earth. Steinberg concerns himself mainly with describing this shift as it was felt in New England, to...

A "fascinating, encyclopedic history...of greater New York City through an ecological lens" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)--the sweeping story of one of the most man-made spots on earth.

Gotham Unbound recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation's population. Ted Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to vivid, rich life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of...