As a child, I enjoyed a special relationship with an oak tree in my backyard. My father indulged my love of nature with backpacking trips in the mountains of California. In my teens, he published my booklet on edible wild plants. My maternal grandmother encouraged my interest in Indigenous uses of plants with books, field trips, and stories from her anthropology studies at UC Berkeley. My mother cultivated my creativity with ferocious intensity and supported my desire to earn a Ph.D. I landed my dream job at an alternative, interdisciplinary, small, public liberal arts college and have taught botany there for nearly 30 years. I love teaching plant-centric environmental history.
Langston tells a complex story about how the U.S. Forest Service, early in its history, demonized fire and developed a national policy of fire suppression, which has had profoundly negative ecological consequences, particularly in the West.
This case study centered on yellow pine forests illustrates how a poor understanding of forest history and ecology can result in management approaches that squander valuable timber resources.
Across the inland West, forests that once seemed like paradise have turned into an ecological nightmare. Fires, insect epidemics, and disease now threaten millions of acres of once-bountiful forests. Yet no one can agree what went wrong. Was it too much management-or not enough-that forced the forests of the inland West to the verge of collapse? Is the solution more logging, or no logging at all? In this gripping work of scientific and historical detection, Nancy Langston unravels the disturbing history of what went wrong with the western forests, despite the best intentions of those involved.
Jennifer L. Anderson provides a good reminder in this bookthat consumers often enjoy goods without a full picture of the environmental and social costs of bringing them to the marketplace. Early American consumption of mahogany furnishings contributed to Indigenous dispossession of land, the enslavement of Africans, and tropical deforestation.
Early Americans, with the means, sought out beautiful furniture made from old-growth mahogany trees to assert their class privilege. Anderson uses material culture to illuminate the effects of consumer culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her global perspective provides valuable insights into the impacts overseas of chasing after luxuries at any cost.
In the mid-eighteenth century, colonial Americans became enamored with the rich colors and silky surface of mahogany. This exotic wood, imported from the West Indies and Central America, quickly displaced local furniture woods as the height of fashion. Over the next century, consumer demand for mahogany set in motion elaborate schemes to secure the trees and transform their rough-hewn logs into exquisite objects. But beneath the polished gleam of this furniture lies a darker, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation.
Mahogany traces the path of this wood through many hands, from source to sale: from the enslaved African woodcutters,…
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…
In this book, I love how Douglas Cazaux Sackman uses image analysis to develop his arguments about gender, race, and class in this historical account of California's iconic citrus tree.
He favors factual history inclusive of multiple perspectives and experiences including those of people often marginalized or disappeared entirely in master narratives. I value authors who challenge simplistic accounts of the past.
This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export - the orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange industry. "Orange Empire" brings together for the first time the full story of the orange industry - how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of…
Jonathan E. Robins illustrates how a tree that provides vegetable oil aided colonialism and the rise of a global food system built on the exploitation of people and places. To weave an engaging narrative, he draws evidence from multiple disciplines, including agricultural science, economic botany, environmental history, and gender studies.
Backed by the evidence, his conclusion is compelling that trying to catalyze sustainable and socially just practices through responsible consumerism is a flawed strategy by itself. I appreciate how he tackles a complex history from a global perspective and addresses environmental justice concerns in a historically grounded way.
Oil palms are ubiquitous--grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil…
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…
Michael Williams’ nearly 600-page tome is a classic must-read for anyone seriously wanting to learn about American forest history. It's richly illustrated with 159 figures and plates, plus numerous tables.
I love how he uses historic photos and illustrations in addition to quantitative data to build a grounded understanding of Americans’ shifting relations with trees. The book spans roughly 400 years, with an emphasis on the 1800s and early 1900s.
I enjoyed learning about a wide variety of trees that have played important roles in U.S. history. I also appreciated how Williams explores the cultural influences on people’s attitudes and behaviors towards forests, including religion.
When Europeans first reached the land that would become the United States they were staggered by the breadth and density of the forest they found. The existence of that forest, and the effort either to use or subdue it, have been constant themes in American history, literature, economics, and geography up to the meaning of the forest in American history and culture, he describes and analyzes the clearing and use of the forest from pre-European times to the present, and he traces the subsequent regrowth of the forest since the middle of the twentieth century. Dr Williams begins by exploring…
My book focuses on a hardwood species native to California and southwestern Oregon. Perceptions of the tree range from treasured food plants to cash crops to trash trees. Tanoak acorns are used by Indigenous peoples as an important food source. From the mid-1800s, tanneries coveted tanoak bark to produce heavy leather until depleting the resource. Beginning in the 1950s, tanoak became a weed targeted with herbicides by foresters.
The book examines the cultural, ecological, economic, and political factors that have influenced the use and abuse of this magnificent tree. It puts the current sudden oak death crisis into historical context and celebrates the reintroduction of low-intensity burning to reduce conifer competition and wildfire risks.
