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1. | | Title: A river and its city: the nature of landscape in New OrleansAuthor: Kelman, Ari 1968- Published: University of California Press, 2003 Subjects: History | United States History | Environmental Studies | Technology and SocietyPublisher's Description: This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant - culturally and spatially - from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history. [brief]Similar Items | 2. | | Title: Environment and experience: settlement culture in nineteenth-century Oregon Author: Boag, Peter G Published: University of California Press, 1992 Subjects: History | United States History | Californian and Western History | Environmental StudiesPublisher's Description: The pioneer battling with a hostile environment - whether it be arid land, drought, dust storms, dense forests, or harsh winters - is a staple of western American history. In this innovative, multi-disciplinary work, Peter Boag takes issue with the image of the settler against the frontier, arguing that settlers viewed their new surroundings positively and attempted to create communities in harmony with the landscape. Using Oregon's Calapooia Valley as a case study, Boag presents a history of both land and people that shows the process of change as settlers populated the land and turned it to their own uses.By combining local sources, ranging from letters and diaries to early maps and local histories, and drawing upon the methods of geography, natural history, and literary analysis, Boag has created a richly detailed grass-roots portrait of a frontier community. Most significantly, he analyzes the connections among environmental, cultural, and social changes in ways that illuminate the frontier experience throughout the American west. [brief]Similar Items | 3. | | Title: Slide Mountain, or, The folly of owning nature Author: Steinberg, Theodore 1961- Published: University of California Press, 1995 Subjects: Law | Environmental Studies | United States History | American StudiesPublisher's Description: The drive to own the natural world in twentieth-century America seems virtually limitless. Signs of this national penchant for possessing nature are everywhere - from suburban picket fences to elaborate schemes to own underground water, clouds, even the ocean floor.Yet, as Theodore Steinberg demonstrates in this compelling, witty look at Americans' attempts to master the environment, nature continually turns these efforts into folly. In a rich, narrative style recalling the work of John McPhee, Steinberg tours America to explore some of the more unusual dilemmas that have arisen in our struggle to possess nature.Beginning along the Missouri River, Steinberg recounts the battle for three thousand acres of land the river carved from a Nebraska Indian reservation and deposited in Iowa. Then he travels to Louisiana, where an army of lawyers butted heads over whether Six Mile Lake was actually a lake or a stream. He continues to Arizona to investigate who owned the underground, then to Pennsylvania's Blue Ridge Mountains to see who claimed the clouds. He ends in crowded New York City with Donald Trump's struggle for air rights.Americans' obsession with owning nature was immortalized by Mark Twain in the tale of Slide Mountain, where a landslide-prone Nevada peak turned the American dream of real estate into dust. In relating these modern-day "Slide Mountain" stories, Steinberg illuminates what it means to live in a culture of property where everything must have an owner. [brief]Similar Items | 4. | | Title: Battling the inland sea: American political culture, public policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 1850-1986Author: Kelley, Robert Lloyd 1925- Published: University of California Press, 1998 Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | PoliticsPublisher's Description: In its natural condition the Sacramento Valley was a flood-ravaged region where an inland sea a hundred miles long regularly formed during the rainy season, to drain slowly away by the summer months. Today the Valley is marvelously productive, with a great capital city at its center, but only after a seventy-year struggle to devise and build an intricate thousand miles of levees and drains. Robert Kelley sets that battle within the encompassing national political culture, which produced, through the Republican and Democratic parties, widely diverging ideas about how best to reclaim the Valley from flood. He draws on approaches developed in the field of policy analysis to examine the relationship between American political culture and environmental policy-making. We find that the prolonged controversy over the Sacramento Valley illuminates American decision-making, then and now. [brief]Similar Items | 5. | | Title: Balancing water: restoring the Klamath BasinAuthor: Blake, Tupper Ansel Published: University of California Press, 2000 Subjects: Environmental Studies | Photography | WaterPublisher's Description: The Klamath Basin is a land of teeming wildlife, expansive marshes, blue-ribbon trout streams, tremendous stretches of forests, and large ranches in southern Oregon and northern California. Known to waterfowl, songbirds, and shorebirds, the Klamath Basin's marshlands are a mecca for birds along the Pacific Flyway. This gorgeously illustrated book is a paean to the beauty of the Klamath Basin and at the same time a sophisticated environmental case study of an endangered region whose story parallels that of watershed development throughout the west. A collaboration between two photographers and a writer, Balancing Water tells the story in words and pictures of the complex relationship between the human and natural history of this region. Spectacular images by Tupper Ansel Blake depict resident species of the area, migratory birds, and dramatic landscapes. Madeleine Graham Blake has contributed portraits of local residents, while archival photographs document the history of the area. William Kittredge's essay on the conjunction of conflicting interests in this wildlands paradise is by turns lyrically personal and brimming with historical and scientific facts. He traces the water flowing through the Klamath Basin, the human history of the watershed, and the land-use conflicts that all touch on the availability of water. Ranchers, loggers, town settlers, Native Americans, tourists, and environmentalists are all represented in the narrative, and their diverse perspectives form a complicated web like that of the interactions among organisms in the ecosystem. Kittredge finds hope in the endangered Klamath Basin, both in successful restoration projects recently begun there, and in the community involvement he sees as necessary for watershed restoration and biodiversity preservation. Emphasizing that we must take care of both human economies and the natural environment, he shows how the two are ultimately interconnected. The Klamath Basin can be a model for watershed restoration elsewhere in the west, as we search for creative ways of solving our intertwined ecological and social problems. [brief]Similar Items | 6. | | Title: Translating property: the Maxwell Land Grant and the conflict over land in the American West, 1840-1900Author: Montoya, María E 1964- Published: University of California Press, 2002 Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Law | Latino Studies | California and the West | California and the WestPublisher's Description: Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The Southwest has been and continues to be the scene of a collision between land regimes with radically different cultural conceptions of the land's purpose. We meet Jicarilla Apaches, whose identity is rooted in a sense of place; Mexican governors and hacienda patrons seeking status as New World feudal magnates; "rings" of greedy territorial politicians on the make; women finding their own way in a man's world; Anglo homesteaders looking for a place to settle in the American West; and Dutch investors in search of gargantuan returns on their capital. The European and American newcomers all "mistranslated" the prior property regimes into new rules, to their own advantage and the disadvantage of those who had lived on the land before them. Their efforts to control the Maxwell Land Grant by wrapping it in their own particular myths of law and custom inevitably led to conflict and even violence as cultures and legal regimes clashed. [brief]Similar Items | 7. | | Title: Entangled edens: visions of the AmazonAuthor: Slater, Candace Published: University of California Press, 2001 Subjects: Environmental Studies | Literature | Folklore and Mythology | Natural History | Latin American Studies | History of SciencePublisher's Description: Candace Slater takes us on a journey into the Amazon that will forever change our ideas about one of the most written-about, filmed, and fought-over areas in the world. In this book she deftly traces a rich and marvelous legacy of stories and images of the Amazon that reflects the influence of widely different groups of people--conquistadors, corporate executives, subsistence farmers --over the centuries. A careful, passionate consideration of one of the most powerful environmental icons of our time, Entangled Edens makes clear that we cannot defend the Amazon's dazzling array of plants and animals without comprehending its equally astonishing human and cultural diversity. Early explorers describe encounters with fearsome warrior women and tell of golden cities complete with twenty-four-carat kings. Contemporary miners talk about a living, breathing gold. TV documentaries decry deforestation and mercury poisoning. How do these disparate visions of the Amazon relate to one another? As she fits the pieces of the puzzle together, Slater shows how today's widespread portrayal of the region as a fragile rain forest on the brink of annihilation is every bit as likely as earlier depictions to obscure important aspects of this immense and complicated region. In this book, Slater draws on her fifteen years of experience collecting stories and oral histories among many different groups of people in the Amazon. Throughout Entangled Edens, the voices of contemporary Amazonians mingle with the analyses of such writers as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt, and nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Slater convinces us that these stories and ideas, together with an understanding of their origins and ongoing impact, are as critical as scientific analyses in the fight to preserve the rain forest. [brief]Similar Items | 8. | | Title: Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: an exploration of the comparative method Author: Gregor, Thomas Published: University of California Press, 2001 Subjects: Anthropology | Gender Studies | GeographyPublisher's Description: One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male-female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation. The contributors to this innovative volume illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia the authors expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new and rewarding directions. [brief]Similar Items | 9. | | Title: Public lands and political meaning: ranchers, the government, and the property between themAuthor: Merrill, Karen R Published: University of California Press, 2002 Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | United States History | LawPublisher's Description: The history of the American West is a history of struggles over land, and none has inspired so much passion and misunderstanding as the conflict between ranchers and the federal government over public grazing lands. Drawing upon neglected sources from organized ranchers, this is the first book to provide a historically based explanation for why the relationship between ranchers and the federal government became so embattled long before modern environmentalists became involved in the issue. Reconstructing the increasingly contested interpretations of the meaning of public land administration, Public Lands and Political Meaning traces the history of the political dynamics between ranchers and federal land agencies, giving us a new look at the relations of power that made the modern West. Although a majority of organized ranchers supported government control of the range at the turn of the century, by midcentury these same organizations often used a virulently antifederal discourse that fueled many a political fight in Washington and that still runs deep in American politics today. In analyzing this shift, Merrill shows how profoundly people's ideas about property wove their way into the political language of the debates surrounding public range policy. As she unravels the meaning of this language, Merrill demonstrates that different ideas about property played a crucial role in perpetuating antagonism on both sides of the fence. In addition to illuminating the origins of the "sagebrush rebellions" in the American West, this book also persuasively argues that political historians must pay more attention to public land management issues as a way of understanding tensions in American state-building. [brief]Similar Items | 10. | | Title: Land, labor and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 1882-1914Author: Shafir, Gershon Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Labor StudiesPublisher's Description: Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but t . . . [more]Similar Items | 11. | | | 12. | | Title: Pollution in a promised land: an environmental history of Israel Author: Tal, Alon 1960- Published: University of California Press, 2002 Subjects: EcologyEvolutionEnvironment | Jewish Studies | Ecology | Geography | ConservationPublisher's Description: Virtually undeveloped one hundred years ago, Israel, the promised "land of milk and honey," is in ecological disarray. In this gripping book, Alon Tal provides--for the first time ever--a history of environmentalism in Israel, interviewing hundreds of experts and activists who have made it their mission to keep the country's remarkable development sustainable amid a century of political and cultural turmoil. The modern Zionist vision began as a quest to redeem a land that bore the cumulative effects of two thousand years of foreign domination and neglect. Since then, Israel has suffered from its success. A tenfold increase in population and standard of living has polluted the air. The deserts have bloomed but groundwater has become contaminated. Urban sprawl threatens to pave over much of the country's breathtaking landscape. Yet there is hope. Tal's account considers the ecological and tactical lessons that emerge from dozens of cases of environmental mishaps, from habitat loss to river reclamation. Pollution in a Promised Land argues that the priorities and strategies of Israeli environmental advocates must address issues beyond traditional green agendas. [brief]Similar Items | 13. | | Title: The promise of the land: the inheritance of the land of Canaan by the Israelites Author: Weinfeld, Moshe Published: University of California Press, 1993 Subjects: Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern StudiesPublisher's Description: The settlement of the Land of Canaan by the Israelite tribes is a central theme in the Bible which is immensely relevant to the Middle East today.Moshe Weinfeld synthesizes the biblical material on this theme, approaching his subject from three viewpoints: historical, using the Bible as a source; literary-comparatist, comparing Patriarchal stories of settlement with Greek and Roman foundation myths; exegetical, explaining that in Judaism land is a gift from God. He emphasizes the ethical weight of God's Promise of the Land, how failure to achieve it was seen as a reflection of sin and lack of faith, thus illustrating the importance of biblical tradition to one of the most troubled issues of modern history. [brief]Similar Items | 14. | | Title: This land is our land: immigrants and power in MiamiAuthor: Stepick, Alex Published: University of California Press, 2003 Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Sociology | Urban Studies | ImmigrationPublisher's Description: For those opposed to immigration, Miami is a nightmare. Miami is the de facto capital of Latin America; it is a city where immigrants dominate, Spanish is ubiquitous, and Denny's is an ethnic restaurant. Are Miami's immigrants representative of a trend that is undermining American culture and identity? Drawing from in-depth fieldwork in the city and looking closely at recent events such as the Elián González case, This Land Is Our Land examines interactions between immigrants and established Americans in Miami to address fundamental questions of American identity and multiculturalism. Rather than focusing on questions of assimilation, as many other studies have, this book concentrates on interethnic relations to provide an entirely new perspective on the changes wrought by immigration in the United States. A balanced analysis of Miami's evolution over the last forty years, This Land Is Our Land is also a powerful demonstration that immigration in America is not simply an "us versus them" phenomenon. [brief]Similar Items | 15. | | | 16. | | Title: Western times and water wars: state, culture, and rebellion in CaliforniaAuthor: Walton, John 1937- Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: History | Politics | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History | Social Theory | Environmental StudiesPublisher's Description: Western Times and Water Wars chronicles more than a hundred years of tumultuous events in the history of California's Owens Valley. From the pioneer conquest of the native inhabitants to the infamous destruction of the valley's agrarian economy by water-hungry Los Angeles, this legendary setting is . . . [more]Similar Items | 17. | | Title: Hazardous metropolis: flooding and urban ecology in Los AngelesAuthor: Orsi, Jared 1970- Published: University of California Press, 2004 Subjects: History | California and the West | Urban Studies | Water | Urban StudiesPublisher's Description: Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history - the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood control basins, and nearly 500 miles of paved river channels, Southern Californians have discovered that technologically engineered solutions to flooding are just as disaster-prone as natural waterways. Jared Orsi's lively history unravels the strange and often hazardous ways that engineering, politics, and nature have come together in Los Angeles to determine the flow of water. He advances a new paradigm - the urban ecosystem - for understanding the city's complex and unpredictable waterways and other issues that are sure to play a large role in future planning. As he traces the flow of water from sky to sea, Orsi brings together many disparate and intriguing pieces of the story, including local and national politics, the little-known San Gabriel Dam fiasco, the phenomenal growth of Los Angeles, and, finally, the influence of environmentalism. Orsi provocatively widens his vision toward other cities for which Los Angeles may offer a lesson - both of things gone wrong and a glimpse of how they might be improved. [brief]Similar Items | 18. | | Title: Law and disorder on the Narova River: the Kreenholm strike of 1872Author: Zelnik, Reginald E Published: University of California Press, 1995 Subjects: History | Labor Studies | European History | European StudiesPublisher's Description: Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode - a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant - to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century. [brief]Similar Items | 19. | | Title: Intimate enemies: Jews and Arabs in a shared landAuthor: Benvenisti, Meron 1934- Published: University of California Press, 1995 Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Jewish Studies | Middle Eastern HistoryPublisher's Description: As Israelis and Palestinians negotiate separation and division of their land, Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, maintains that any expectations for "peaceful partition" are doomed. In his brave and controversial new book, he raises the possibility of a confederation of Israel/Palestine, the only solution that he feels will bring lasting peace.The seven million people in the territory between Jordan and the Mediterranean are mutually dependent regarding employment, water, land use, ecology, transportation, and all other spheres of human activity. Each side, Benvenisti says, must accept the reality that two national entities are living within one geopolitical entity - their conflict is intercommunal and will not be resolved by population transfers or land partition.A geographer and historian by training, a man passionately rooted in his homeland, Benvenisti skillfully conveys the perspective of both Israeli and Palestinian communities. He recognizes the great political and ideological resistance to a confederation, but argues that there are Israeli Jews and Palestinians who can envision an undivided land, where attachment to a common homeland is stronger than militant tribalism and segregation in national ghettos. Acknowledging that equal coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian may yet be an impossible dream, he insists that such a dream deserves a place in the current negotiations."Meron Benvenisti is the Middle East expert to whom Middle East experts go for advice . . . the most oft-quoted and oft-damned analyst in Israel." - from the Foreword by Thomas L. Friedman [brief]Similar Items | 20. | | Title: Fighting women: anger and aggression in Aboriginal Australia Author: Burbank, Victoria Katherine Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: Anthropology | Women's Studies | PsychologyPublisher's Description: Fighting is common among contemporary Aboriginal women in Mangrove, Australia - women fight with men and with other women. Victoria Burbank's depiction of these women offers a powerful new perspective that can be applied to domestic violence in Western settings.Noting that Aboriginal women not only talk without shame about their emotions of anger but also express them in acts of aggression and defense, Burbank emphasizes the positive social and cultural implications of women's refusal to be victims. She explores questions of hierarchy and the expression of emotions, as well as women's roles in domestic violence. Human aggression can be experienced and expressed in different ways, she says, and is not necessarily always "wrong." Timely and controversial, Fighting Women will stimulate discussion of aggression and gender relations and will enlarge the debate on the victimization of women and children everywhere. [brief]Similar Items |
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