Kategoria BISAC: Nature >> Essays

This volume of seven essays and a late lecture by Henry David Thoreau makes available important material written both before and after "Walden." First appearing in the 1840s through the 1860s, the essays were written during a time of great change in Thoreau's environs, as the Massachusetts of his childhood became increasingly urbanized and industrialized.

William Rossi's introduction puts the essays in the context of Thoreau's other major works, both chronologically and intellectually. Rossi also shows how these writings relate to Thoreau's life and career as both writer and naturalist:...

Geography, politics, and other factors have allowed Cuba to preserve the region's most pristine coast and offshore marine environment. "Deep Cuba" recounts Bill Belleville's month-long journey around the island in the company of American and Cuban marine biologists and a Discovery Channel film crew. It was the first, and so far only, United States submersible research expedition in Cuban waters. From coral reefs to mangrove swamps to a submerged volcanic mountain, the voyagers encountered sublimely wild places unseen before by anyone from the United States--or even by many...

Consider just two of the countless facts about the damage we have done to the Everglades: Half of its original 14,000-square-mile expanse is gone, and saving what is left will cost at least $8.4 billion. Alluding to destruction on a scale we can barely grasp, figures like these can at once stir and immobilize us. In "Liquid Land," Ted Levin guides us past the dire headlines and into the magnificent swamp itself, where we come face-to-face with the plants, animals, and landscapes that remain and that will survive only if we protect them.

Levin has traveled extensively through the...

A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, "Coming into Contact" collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the...

David Rothenberg is one of our most eloquent observers of the interplay between nature, culture, and technology. These nineteen pieces exemplify what has been called Rothenberg's "amiable" mix of interests, styles, and approaches.

In settings that range from wildest Norway to his own front porch in upstate New York, Rothenberg discusses the Hudson River School of painters, the hazy provenance of Chief Seattle's famous speech, ecoterrorism, suburbia, the World Wide Web, and much more. He asks if we can save a place less obtrusively than by turning it into a park. He muses on the plight of...

Through the pages of Environmental History Review, now Environmental History, an entire discipline has been created and defined over time through the publication of the finest scholarship by humanists, social and natural scientists, and other professionals concerned with the complex relationship between people and our global environment. Out of the Woods gathers together the best of this scholarship.

Covering a broad array of topics and reflecting the continuing diversity within the field of environmental history, Out of the Woods begins with three...

This anthology collects fourteen essays on the environmental history of the American West, exploring diverse approaches to environmental history, the western environment before Anglo-American settlement, the radical environmental transformations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rise of the environmental movement after World War II. The contributions analyze variables of place, process, race, class, gender, and culture. This anthology is ideal for courses on environmental and western history.

In addition to the volume editor, contributors include Dan Flores, Robert...

In 1953, birding guru Roger Tory Peterson and noted British naturalist James Fisher set out on what became a legendary journey-a one hundred day trek over 30,000 miles around North America. They traveled from Newfoundland to Florida, deep into the heart of Mexico, through the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and into Alaska's Pribilof Islands. Two years later, Wild America, their classic account of the trip, was published.

On the eve of that book's fiftieth anniversary, naturalist Scott Weidensaul retraces Peterson and Fisher's steps to tell the story of wild America today....

"Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult," observes John Hay, naturalist, essayist, sage, and inveterate walker of byways. This collection from the 50-year long career of America's preeminent nature writer illustrates the full range of Hay's work. An elegant and lyrical stylist, he is, in Merrill's words, "the nature writer's writer, an illustrator of the Emersonian notion that 'the world is emblematic.'"

And so Hay reveals the ubiquitous but often unnoticed emblems all...