Author: David Louter
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029598984X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
In his engaging book Windshield Wilderness, David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in the form of cars and roads, leaving an enduring legacy of knowing nature through machines. With a lively style and striking illustrations, Louter traces the history of Washington State�s national parks -- Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades -- to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places. Windshield Wilderness explores what few histories of national parks address: what it means to view parks from the road and through a windshield. Building upon recent interpretations of wilderness as a cultural construct rather than as a pure state of nature, the story of autos in parks presents the preservation of wilderness as a dynamic and nuanced process.Windshield Wilderness illuminates the difficulty of separating human-modified landscapes from natural ones, encouraging us to recognize our connections with nature in national parks.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cultural property
Languages : en
Pages : 620
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Book Description
Author: O. Alan Weltzien
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803290403
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Over the past 150 years, people have flocked to the Pacific Northwest in increasing numbers, in part due to the region's beauty and one of its most exceptional features: volcanoes. This segment of the Pacific Ring of Fire has shaped not only the physical landscape of the region but also the psychological landscape, and with it the narratives we compose about ourselves. Exceptional Mountains is a cultural history of the Northwest volcanoes and the environmental impact of outdoor recreation in this region. It probes the relationship between these volcanoes and regional identity, particularly in the era of mass mountaineering and population growth in the Northwest. O. Alan Weltzien demonstrates how mountaineering is but one conspicuous example of the outdoor recreation industry's unrestricted and problematic growth. He explores the implications of our assumptions that there are no limits to our outdoor recreation habits and that access to the highest mountains should include amenities for affluent consumers. Each chapter probes the mountain-based regional ethos and the concomitant sense of privilege and entitlement from different vantages to illuminate the consumerist mind-set as a reductive--and deeply problematic--version of experience and identity in and around some of the nation's most striking mountains.
Author: Andrew C. Isenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190673486
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 800
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Book Description
The field of environmental history emerged just decades ago but has established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history, one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the sciences. With the current trend towards internationalizing history, environmental history is perhaps the quintessential approach to studying subjects outside the nation-state model, with pollution, global warming, and other issues affecting the earth not stopping at national borders. With 25 essays, this Handbook is global in scope and innovative in organization, looking at the field thematically through such categories as climate, disease, oceans, the body, energy, consumerism, and international relations.
Author: Evan Berry
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520961145
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Devoted to Nature explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement’s religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement’s orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans’ passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.
Author: Peter N. Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135922659
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Understanding how rhetoric, and environmental rhetoric in particular, informs and is informed by local and global ecologies contributes to our conversations about sustainability and resilience — the preservation and conservation of the earth and the future of human society. This book explores some of the complex relationships, collaborations, compromises, and contradictions between human endeavor and situated discourses, identities and landscapes, social justice and natural resources, movement and geographies, unpacking and grappling with the complexities of rhetoric of presence. Making a significant contribution to exploring the complex discursive constructions of environmental rhetorics and place-based rhetorics, this collection considers discourses, actions, and adaptations concerning environmental regulations and development, sustainability, exploitation, and conservation of energy resources. Essays visit arguments on cultural values, social justice, environmental advocacy, and identity as political constructions of rhetorical place and space. Rural and urban case studies contribute to discussions of the ethics and identities of environment, and the rhetorics of environmental cartography and glocalization. Contributors represent a range of specialization across a variety of scholarly research in such fields as communication studies, rhetorical theory, social/cultural geography, technical/professional communication, cartography, anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature/ecocriticism, literacy studies, digital rhetoric/media studies, and discourse analysis. Thus, this book goes beyond the assumption that rhetorics are situated, and challenges us to consider not only how and why they are situated, but what we mean when we theorize notions of situated, place-based rhetorics.
Author: Alan Bewell
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142142097X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Ultimately, Natures in Translation demonstrates that—far from being separate from the dominant concerns of British imperial culture—nature was integrally bound up with the business of empire.
Author: Adam M. Sowards
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1851099093
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
The most up-to-date and insightful overview available on the environmental history of the West Coast of the United States, a region of extraordinary physical beauty distinguished by its inhabitants' efforts to both sustain and exploit their natural resources. * Over 20 primary sources, revealing cultural understandings of nature and ecological consequences of human action, as well as highlighting controversies concerning environmental change along the U.S. Pacific Coast * An up-to-date bibliography of research and publications on the environmental history of the region
Author: Dawn E. Duensing
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824854675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Hawai‘i's Scenic Roads examines a century of overland transportation from the Kingdom's first constitutional government until World War II, discovering how roads in the world's most isolated archipelago rivaled those on the U.S. mainland. Building Hawai‘i's roads was no easy feat, as engineers confronted a unique combination of circumstances: extreme isolation, mountainous topography, torrential rains, deserts, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and on Haleakalā, freezing temperatures. By investigating the politics and social processes that facilitated road projects, this study explains that foreign settlers wanted roads to "civilize" the Hawaiians and promote western economic development, specifically agriculture. Once sugar became the dominant driver in the economy, civic and political leaders turned their attention to constructing scenic roads. Viewed as "commercial enterprises," scenic byways became an essential factor in establishing tourism as Hawai‘i's "third crop" after sugar and pineapple. These thoroughfares also served as playgrounds for the islands' elite residents and wealthy visitors who could afford the luxury of carriage driving, and after 1900, motorcars. Duensing's provocative analysis of the 1924 Hawai‘i Bill of Rights reveals that roads played a critical role in redefining the Territory of Hawai‘i's status within the United States. Politicians and civic leaders focused on highway funding to argue that Hawai‘i was an "integral part of the Union," thus entitled to be treated as if it were a state. By accepting this "Bill of Rights," Congress confirmed the territory's claim to access federal programs, especially highway aid. Washington's subsequent involvement in Hawaii increased, as did the islands' dependence on the national government. Federal money helped the territory weather the Great Depression as it became enmeshed in New Deal programs and philosophy. Although primarily an economic protest, the Hawai‘i Bill of Rights was a crucial stepping stone on the path to eventual statehood in 1959. The core of this book is the intriguing tales of road projects that established the islands' most renowned scenic drives, including the Pali Highway, byways around Kīlauea Volcano, Haleakalā Highway, and the Hāna Belt Road. The author's unique approach provides a fascinating perspective for understanding Hawai‘i's social dynamics, as well as its political, environmental, and economic history.
Author: Laurent Tissot
Publisher: Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses
ISBN: 294048970X
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
For decades scholars in diverse fields have examined problems in the history of mobility. Their diversity was their strength but also their limitation, as disciplinary boundaries impeded the exchange of ideas that lets scholarship flourish. Since 2003 the International Association for the History of Traffic, Transport and Mobility (T2M) has served as a free-trade zone, fostering a new interdisciplinary vitality in a now-flourishing field. Now, with the publication of its first yearbook, T2M has surveyed these gains in the form of a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of research in the field. Here, twenty-seven scholars in the history of mobility, from sixteen countries and five continents, present synopses of recent research. Besides reviews of research in thirteen countries, contributions also include thematic reviews relating mobility to the environment, automobile fetishism, race, gender, and other transnational themes. All in all, more than sixty scholars within and beyond T2M cooperated in this project, making it a truly collective work.
