Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Din�) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s – when hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed – was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood for...
George Perkins Marsh (1801�1882) was the first to reveal the menace of environmental misuse, to explain its causes, and to prescribe reforms. David Lowenthal here offers fresh insights, from new sources, into Marsh�s career and shows his relevance today, in a book which has its roots in but wholly supersedes Lowenthal�s earlier biography George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (1958). Marsh�s devotion to the repair of nature, to the concerns of...
In On the Road Again, William Wyckoff explores Montana�s changing physical and cultural landscape by pairing photographs taken by state highway engineers in the 1920s and 1930s with photographs taken at the same sites today. The older photographs, preserved in the archives of the Montana Historical Society, were intended to document the expenditure of federal highway funds. Because it is nearly impossible to photograph a road without also photographing the landscape through which that...
In the years following World War II, the world�s biggest dam was almost built in Hells Canyon on the Snake River in Idaho. Karl Boyd Brooks tells the story of the dam controversy, which became a referendum not only on public-power expansion but also on the environmental implications of the New Deal�s natural resources and economic policy.Private-power critics of the Hells Canyon High Dam posed difficult questions about the implications of damming rivers to create power and...
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...
Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile, channeled Korea’s forest resources into...