What can photographs reveal about Canada’s nuclear footprint? The Bomb in the Wilderness contends that photography is central to how we interpret and remember nuclear activities. The impact and global reach of Canada’s nuclear programs have been felt ever since the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But do photographs alert viewers to nuclear threat, numb them to its dangers, or actually do both? John O’Brian’s wide-ranging and personal account of the nuclear era presents and discusses over a hundred photographs, ranging from military images to the atomic ephemera of consumer culture. His fascinating analysis ensures that we do not look away.

The Apostle Islands are a solitary place of natural beauty, with red sandstone cliffs, secluded beaches, and a rich and unique forest surrounded by the cold, blue waters of Lake Superior. But this seemingly pristine wilderness has been shaped and reshaped by humans. The people who lived and worked in the Apostles built homes, cleared fields, and cut timber in the island forests. The consequences of human choices made more than a century ago can still be read in today’s wild landscapes. A Storied Wilderness traces the complex history of human interaction with the Apostle Islands. In the 1930s, resource extraction made it seem like the islands’ natural beauty had been lost forever. But as the island forests regenerated, the ways that people used and valued the islands changed - human and natural processes together led to the rewilding of the Apostles. In 1970, the Apostles were included in the national park system and ultimately designated as the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness. How should we understand and value wild places with human pasts? James Feldman argues convincingly that such places provide the opportunity to rethink the human place in nature. The Apostle Islands are an ideal setting for telling the national story of how we came to equate human activity with the loss of wilderness characteristics, when in reality all of our cherished wild places are the products of the complicated interactions between human and natural history. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frECwkA6oHs

From Denali's majestic slopes to the Great Swamp of central New Jersey, protected wilderness areas make up nearly twenty percent of the parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and other public lands that cover a full fourth of the nation's territory. But wilderness is not only a place. It is also one of the most powerful and troublesome ideas in American environmental thought, representing everything from sublime beauty and patriotic inspiration to a countercultural ideal and an overextension of government authority. The Promise of Wilderness examines how the idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. Wilderness preservation has engaged diverse groups of citizens, from hunters and ranchers to wildlife enthusiasts and hikers, as political advocates who have leveraged the resources of local and national groups toward a common goal. Turner demonstrates how these efforts have contributed to major shifts in modern American environmental politics, which have emerged not just in reaction to a new generation of environmental concerns, such as environmental justice and climate change, but also in response to changed debates over old conservation issues, such as public lands management. He also shows how battles over wilderness protection have influenced American politics more broadly, fueling disputes over the proper role of government, individual rights, and the interests of rural communities; giving rise to radical environmentalism; and playing an important role in the resurgence of the conservative movement, especially in the American West. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsq-6LAeYKk

Harvey details the first major clash between conservationists and developers after World War II, the successful fight to prevent the building of Echo Park Dam. The dam on the Green River was intended to create a recreational lake in northwest Colorado and generate hydroelectric power, but would have flooded picturesque Echo Park Valley and threatened Dinosaur National Monument, straddling the Utah-Colorado border near Wyoming.

"The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form. . . . Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory."—The Rumpus "There was a time some of us believed poetry and poets could save the world; CAConrad never stopped believing it."—The Huffington Post From "M.I.A. ESCALATOR": The ultrasound machine gives the parents the ability to talk to the unborn by their gender, taking the intersexed nine-month conversation away from the child. The opportunities limit us in our new world. Encourage parents to not know, encourage parents to allow anticipation on either end. Escalators are a nice ride, slowly rising and falling, writing while riding, notes for the poem, meeting new people at either end, "Excuse me, EXCUSE ME. . . ." My escalator notes became a poem. CAConrad's ECODEVIANCE contains twenty-three new (Soma)tic writing exercises and their resulting poems, in which he pushes his political and ecological efforts even further. These exercises, unorthodox steps in the writing process, work to break the reader and writer out of the quotidian and into a more politically and physically aware present. In performing these rituals, CAConrad looks through a sharper lens and confirms the necessity of poetry and politics. CAConrad is the author of several books of poetry and essays. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programs brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places while accommodating, and often encouraging, automobile-based tourism. By 1935, the founders of the Wilderness Society had become convinced of the impossibility of doing both. In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders--Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Each man brought a different background and perspective to the advocacy for wilderness preservation, yet each was spurred by a fear of what growing numbers of automobiles, aggressive road building, and the meteoric increase in Americans turning to nature for their leisure would do to the country’s wild places. As Sutter discovered, the founders of the Wilderness Society were "driven wild"--pushed by a rapidly changing country to construct a new preservationist ideal. Sutter demonstrates that the birth of the movement to protect wilderness areas reflected a growing belief among an important group of conservationists that the modern forces of capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, and mass consumer culture were gradually eroding not just the ecology of North America, but crucial American values as well. For them, wilderness stood for something deeply sacred that was in danger of being lost, so that the movement to protect it was about saving not just wild nature, but ourselves as well.

Howard Zahniser (1906–1964), executive secretary of The Wilderness Society and editor of The Living Wilderness from 1945 to 1964, is arguably the person most responsible for drafting and promoting the Wilderness Act in 1964. The act, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System, was the culmination of Zahniser’s years of tenacious lobbying and his work with conservationists across the nation. In 1964, fifty-four wilderness areas in thirteen states were part of the system; today the number has grown to 757 areas, protecting more than a hundred million acres in forty-four states and Puerto Rico. Zahniser’s passion for wild places and his arguments for their preservation were communicated through radio addresses, magazine articles, speeches, and congressional testimony. An eloquent and often poetic writer, he seized every opportunity to make the case for the value of wilderness to people, communities, and the nation. Despite his unquestioned importance and the power of his prose, the best of Zahniser's wilderness writings have never before been gathered in a single volume. This indispensable collection makes available in one place essays and other writings that played a vital role in persuading Congress and the American people that wilderness in the United States deserved permanent protection.