When George Bristol first saw the mountains surrounding East Glacier, Montana, in the early summer of 1961, he was, in his own words, awed to his depths. Thus began a love affair with nature and public parks that has endured for more than fifty years. This same love affair would lead Bristol to become a crusader for America’s national parks and, later, to be largely credited for the rescue of the ailing public park system in his home state. In On Politics and Parks, Bristol tells his own story in lively prose that includes many intriguing peeks at behind-the-scenes events in Washington, Austin, and elsewhere. Beginning with his upbringing by a widowed young mother with a passion for music and literature, he narrates the converging of influences that led him to an influential political career, including active involvement in national campaigns for Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Lloyd Bentsen, and Jimmy Carter. After working for the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Bristol was asked to join President Clinton’s administration. However, what he really wanted was a place on the board of the National Park Foundation (NPF). With decades-old images of Glacier still burning brightly in his memory, he helped spearhead efforts to elevate the image of the National Park Service and helped establish a highly successful fundraising strategy for the NPF, giving both organizations greater national awareness and stature. Having acquired a well-earned reputation for fundraising and effective advocacy, Bristol soon began to do for his home state what he had done for the NPF: solidify support and funding for the Texas park system. Over ten years and five legislative sessions, Bristol, through the Texas Coalition for Conservation, the nonprofit organization he founded, fought for the full claim of Texas state parks to the sporting goods tax. Utilizing his many contacts, his well-honed political sense, and his dogged patience, he forged an alliance that would win the day for everyone who loves the state’s public lands. In 2007, in the last bill passed on the last day of the session, the Texas legislature nearly doubled the operating budget for parks. On Politics and Parks is at once a lesson in conservation history and a captivating personal memoir that will inform, entertain, and inspire all those who share Bristol’s love for the unspoiled beauty of the outdoors and his commitment to preserve that beauty for future generations. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Using the experience of the Parks in Peril program -- a wide-ranging project instituted by The Nature Conservancy and its partner organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean to foster better park management -- this book presents a broad analysis of current trends in park management and the implications for biodiversity conservation. It examines the context of current park management and challenges many commonly held views from social, political, and ecological perspectives. The book argues that: biodiversity conservation is inherently political sustainable use has limitations as a primary tool for biodiversity conservation effective park protection requires understanding the social context at varying scales of analysis actions to protect parks need a level of conceptual rigor that has been absent from recent programs built around slogans and stereotypesNine case studies highlight the interaction of ecosystems, local peoples, and policy in park management, and describe the context of field-based conservation from the perspective of those actually implementing the programs. Parks in Peril builds from the case studies and specific park-level concerns to a synthesis of findings from the sites. The editors draw on the case studies to challenge popular conceptions about parks and describe future directions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation.Throughout, contributors argue that protected areas are extremely important for the protection of biodiversity, yet such areas cannot be expected to serve as the sole means of biodiversity conservation. Requiring them to carry the entire burden of conservation is a recipe for ecological and social disaster.

Galen Cranz surveys the rise of the park system from 1850 to the present through 4 stages - the pleasure ground, the reform park, the recreation facility and the open space system.

Class Politics The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (2e) is a response to histories of Composition Studies that focused on scholarly articles and university programs as the generative source for the field. Such histories, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s divorced the field from activist politics—washing out such work in the name of disciplinary identity. Class Politics shows the importance of political mass movements in the formation of Composition Studies—particularly Civil Rights and Black Power. Class Politics also critiques how the field appropriates these movements. The book traces a pathway from social movement, to progressive academic groups, to their work in professional organizations, to the formation of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Stephen Parks then shows how the SRTOL was attacked and politically neutralized by conservative forces in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing for a return to politics to reanimate it’s importance—and the importance of politics in the field. “Stephen Parks restores politics to the history of Composition Studies.” —Richard Ohmann

Exclusive online content, photos, and more, available here Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that parks are the best uses of land and are good for everyone. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as “natural oases,” and urban parks as “pure nature” in the midst of the city — but that’s absurd. Parks are as “natural” as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday. Furthermore, parks are not private property, but while they are called ‘public’, they are highly regulated spaces that normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks — as they are currently constituted — are colonial enterprises. On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park — Vancouver’s Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park — as a way to interrogate the politics of land. The authors grapple with the fact that they are uninvited guests on the occupied and traditional territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (səliľwətaʔɬ) nations. But Bocce Ball Park is also a wonderful place in many ways, with a startling plurality of users and sovereignties, and all kinds of overlapping activities and all kinds of overlapping people co-existing more-or-less peaceably. It is a living exhibition of the possibilities of sharing land and perhaps offers some clues to a decolonial horizon. The book is a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.