Landscapes of Promise
Title | Landscapes of Promise PDF eBook |
Author | William G. Robbins |
Publisher | University of Washington Press |
Pages | 427 |
Release | 2009-11-23 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0295989696 |
Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning. Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual burning of grasslands and light-burning of understory forest debris. Early Euro-American settlers who thought they were taming a virgin wilderness were merely imposing a new set of alterations on an already modified landscape. Beginning with the first 18th-century traders on the Pacific Coast, alterations to Oregon's landscape were closely linked to the interests of global market forces. Robbins uses period speeches and publications to document the increasing commodification of the landscape and its products. "Environment melts before the man who is in earnest," wrote one Oregon booster in 1905, reflecting prevailing ways of thinking. In an impressive synthesis of primary sources and historical analysis, Robbins traces the transformation of the Oregon landscape and the evolution of our attitudes toward the natural world.
Landscapes of Conflict
Title | Landscapes of Conflict PDF eBook |
Author | William G. Robbins |
Publisher | University of Washington Press |
Pages | 458 |
Release | 2009-11-23 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0295989882 |
Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportunity in abundance. With the passing of time, however, Oregon’s citizens — rural and urban — would find themselves entangled in issues that they had little experience in resolving. The same trees that provided income to timber corporations, small mill owners, loggers, and many small towns in Oregon, also provided a dramatic landscape and a home to creatures at risk. The rivers whose harnessing created power for industries that helped sustain Oregon’s growth — and were dumping grounds for municipal and industrial wastes — also provided passageways to spawning grounds for fish, domestic water sources, and recreational space for everyday Oregonians. The story of Oregon’s accommodation to these divergent interests is a divisive story between those interested in economic growth and perceived stability and citizens concerned with exercising good stewardship towards the state’s natural resources and preserving the state’s livability. In his second volume of Oregon’s environmental history, William Robbins addresses efforts by individuals and groups within and outside the state to resolve these conflicts. Among the people who have had roles in this process, journalists and politicians Richard Neuberger and Tom McCall left substantial legacies and demonstrated the ambiguities inherent in the issues they confronted.
Environmental Issues in Pacific Northwest Forest Management
Title | Environmental Issues in Pacific Northwest Forest Management PDF eBook |
Author | National Research Council |
Publisher | National Academies Press |
Pages | 280 |
Release | 2000-08-14 |
Genre | Technology & Engineering |
ISBN | 0309053285 |
People are demanding more of the goods, services, and amenities provided by the forests of the Pacific Northwest, but the finiteness of the supply has become clear. This issue involves complex questions of biology, economics, social values, community life, and federal intervention. Forests of the Pacific Northwest explains that economic and aesthetic benefits can be sustained through new approaches to management, proposes general goals for forest management, and discusses strategies for achieving them. Recommendations address restoration of damaged areas, management for multiple uses, dispute resolution, and federal authority. The volume explores the market role of Pacific Northwest wood products and looks at the implications if other regions should be expected to make up for reduced timber harvests. The book also reviews the health of the forested ecosystems of the region, evaluating the effects of past forest use patterns and management practices. It discusses the biological importance, social significance, and management of old-growth as well as late-succession forests. This volume will be of interest to public officials, policymakers, the forest products industry, environmental advocates, researchers, and concerned residents.
Yosemite
Title | Yosemite PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | 36 |
Release | 1993 |
Genre | Yosemite National Park (Calif.) |
ISBN | 9780811802772 |
Fixing Landscape
Title | Fixing Landscape PDF eBook |
Author | Corey Byrnes |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 345 |
Release | 2019-01-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0231547129 |
In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.
Landscapes of the Spirit
Title | Landscapes of the Spirit PDF eBook |
Author | William Neill |
Publisher | Bulfinch Press |
Pages | 119 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Photography |
ISBN | 9780821223383 |
A brilliant photographic account of the wonders of nature details the splendor, magic, and subtle, spiritual beauty of earthly creations and features sections accompanied by literary samplings from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and other notable writers.
Keeping the Promise
Title | Keeping the Promise PDF eBook |
Author | Tami Lehman-Wilzig |
Publisher | Kar-Ben Publishing |
Pages | 46 |
Release | 2004-01-01 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 9781580131179 |
A small Torah scroll passes from a Dutch rabbi, to a Bar Mitzvah boy during the Holocaust, to the first Israeli astronaut.