Bøger i American Land & Life Series serien

The contributors to this work address how the environmentalist Henry David Thoreau and his successors attempted to cope with the epistemological split between the perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature. They discuss the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place.

Travelling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden - himself a most careful listener and reader - asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings?

In the hot summer of 2004, the author floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. This first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones.

The river, like a keen memory, carries a record of the past. The author has spent forty years in the basin of the Upper Iowa River. In this book, he tells the story of the Upper Iowa as it flows through land and people, holding true to Aldo Leopold's conception of land as a community in which water, people, and soil play interactive parts.

The life of Grove Karl Gilbert, first chief geologist of the US Geological Survey, spanned the heroic age of American geology during the time that this young earth science was being intellectually and institutionally defined. This biography reveals that few other scientists can match Gilbert's range of talents.

How do you thank the person who gave you a vantage from which to see the world? The opening question of this volume of essays reflects its central theme: the connections between fathers, fathering and nature. It offers personal stories of the important roles of fathers and nature.

Resource protection and public recreation policies have always been subject to the shifting winds of management philosophy governing both national and state parks. Somewhere in the balance, however, parks and preserves have endured as unique places of mind as well as matter. Places of Quiet Beauty allows us to see parks and preserves, forests and wildlife refuges - all those special places that the term "park" conjures up - as measures of our own commitment to caring for the environment. In this broad-ranging book, historian Rebecca Conard examines the complexity of American environmentalism in the twentieth century as manifest in Iowa's state parks and preserves.

What connections can be drawn between oral history and the shopping mall? Gospel music and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant? William Carlos Williams's Paterson and the Manhattan Project's secret cities? The answers lie in this insightful collection of essays that read and illuminate the American landscape. Through literature and folklore, music and oral history, autobiography, architecture, and photography, eleven leading writers and thinkers explore the dialectic between space and place in modern American life. The result is an eloquent and provocative reminder of the environmental context of events - the deceptively simple fact that events "take place".