Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States. The city’s expansion—at the rate of one acre per hour—comes at the expense of its Sonoran Desert environment. For some residents, the American Dream has become a nightmare.In this provocative book, Janine Schipper examines the cultural forces that contribute to suburban sprawl in the United States. Focusing on the Phoenix area, she examines sustainable development in Cave Creek, various master-planned suburbs, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation to explore suburbanization and ecological destruction.
In Silver Fox of the Rockies, Daniel Tyler tells Carpenter’s story and that of the great interstate water compacts he helped create. Those compacts, produced in the early twentieth century, have guided not only agricultural use but urban growth and development throughout much of the American West to this day.
Richly illustrated, Big Dams of the New Deal Era offers a compelling account of how major dams in the New Deal era restructured the landscape—both politically and physically—and why American society in the 1930s embraced them wholeheartedly.
In The Size of the Risk, Leisl Carr Childers shows how different constituencies worked to fill the presumed “empty space” of the Great Basin with a variety of land-use regimes that overlapped, conflicted, and ultimately harmed the environment and the people who depended on the region for their livelihoods. She looks at the conflicts that arose from the intersection of an ever-increasing number of activities, such as nuclear testing and wild horse preservation, and how Great Basin residents have navigated these conflicts.
Between 1896 and 1919, air pollution from large-scale copper smelting in northern California’s Shasta County severely damaged crops and timber in a 1,000-square-mile region, completely devastating a core area of 200 square miles. The poisons from these smelters created the nation’s largest man-made desert—a shocking contrast to the beauty of the surrounding Cascades and Trinity Alps. Offering the drama and pathos of a David-and-Goliath tale in which Goliath wins and strides on, Murder of a Landscape makes compelling reading for anyone interested in the industrial, political, and environmental history of the American West.
True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers
Edited by Laura Pritchett
Never mind the Ph.D. and middle-class trappings—Laura Pritchett is a Dumpster diver and proud of it. Ever since she was old enough to navigate the contents of a metal bin, she has reveled in the treasures found in other people’s cast-offs. Brimming with practical and creative new ways to think about recycling, this collection invites you to dive in and find your own way of going green.
In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and on the generations of people who have transformed them both. Dreyfus examines the ways that San Franciscans remade the landscape to fit their needs, and how their actions reflected and affected their ideas about nature, from the destruction of wetlands and forests to the creation of Golden Gate and Yosemite parks, the Sierra Club, and later, the birth of the modern environmental movement.
Peril, Hope, Sweat, and Downright Nonchalance in Dry Wheat Country
by Steve Turner
Adams County, Washington, is home to farmlands on the Columbia Plateau that produce more crops than might be expected of its semiarid soils. But while unique in its geography and history, it also faces many of the problems confronting farmers throughout rural America. Seasoned journalist Steve Turner, having spent time in Adams County as a young harvest hand, returned to the region to portray farm life and history in a land where change is a subtle but powerful constant.
How an Hispano community maintained its identity over four centuries Located in Albuquerque’s south valley, Atrisco is a vibrant community that predates the city, harking back...
This compelling saga recounts the human effort to capture the power of the wind for electricity--from the first European windmills, to nineteenth century experiments in rural electrification,...
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