The natural world has been my solace and passion for my entire life. I also suffer from an insatiable curiosity as to how it came to be. While I am fascinated by natural history, my deficient math and analytical skills precluded a career in science, and so I turned to environmental history to explore how humans and nature have interacted over time.
I wrote
When Money Grew on Trees: A. B. Hammond and the Age of the Timber Baron
This short book completely changed how I think about nature and our place in it. This book provides a new framework for thinking about how modern Americans might be able to work with the natural world instead of against it. I also loved the concise but thought-provoking insights that Richard White provides.
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with the river has been central to Pacific Northwesterners' competing ways of life. It is in this way that White comes to view the…
I love the grand sweep of the history of humans in North America. It strethes all the way from the Pleistocene to the 21st century. Dan Flores provides a thought-provoking assessment of the complex relationship Americans have with wild animals and puts this into the larger framework of environmental history.
In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness.
Distinguished author Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America-a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Tim Egan is a great storyteller, and this book is a captivating account of the 1910 forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. I know of these places and have seen the burned trees that are still standing. I love how the book keeps returning to Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men - college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps - to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic…
While I’ve always known about John Muir, this book explores how he was a product of his evangelical Christian upbringing, and while Muir rejected much of that, he channeled his religious fervor into protecting nature. This is something that I never really thought about—how our background culture can have such a profound influence.
Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards, yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This really reshaped my thinking about Wilderness. I’d always thought that the main idea of Wilderness was to preserve a pristine environment, but Paul Sutter shows that the origins of the Wilderness movement were focused on getting away from cars—that the wilderness movement was more about providing a place to escape from modernity than preserving the ecosystem.
In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programs brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places…
By his death in 1934, Andrew Benoni Hammond had built an empire of wood that stretched from Puget Sound to Arizona—and, in the process, had reshaped the American West and the nation’s way of doing business. This book follows Hammond from the rough-and-tumble world of frontier Montana to the redwood forests of Northern California—from lowly lumberjack to unrivaled timber baron.
In revealing Hammond’s instrumental role in converting the nation’s public domain into private wealth, this book shows how the struggle over natural resources gave rise to the two most pervasive forces in modern American life: the federal government and the modern corporation.
