"Focusing on the saddening, maddening example of Glen Canyon, Jared Farmer traces the history of exploration and development in the Four Corners region, discusses the role of tourism in changing the face of the West, and shows how the "invention" of Lake Powell has served multiple needs. He also seeks to identify the point at which change becomes loss: How do people deal with losing places they love? How are we to remember or restore lost places?"--BOOK JACKET.

A history of the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and social imbalances that resulted from it.

This book presents a critical history of the intersections between American environmental literature and ecological restoration policy and practice. Through a storying—restorying—restoring framework, this book explores how entanglements between writers and places have produced literary interventions in restoration politics. The book considers the ways literary landscapes are politicized by writers themselves, and by conservationists, activists, policymakers, and others, in defense of U.S. public lands and the idea of wilderness. The book profiles five environmental writers and examines how their writings on nature, wildness, wilderness, conservation, preservation, and restoration have variously inspired and been translated into ecological restoration programs and campaigns by environmental organizations. The featured authors are Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) at Walden Pond, John Muir (1838–1914) in Yosemite National Park, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) at his family’s Wisconsin sand farm, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890–1998) in the Everglades, and Edward Abbey (1927–1989) in Glen Canyon. This book combines environmental history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics in a commentary on considering (and developing) environmental literature’s place in conversations on restoration ecology, ecological restoration, and rewilding.

The engineering ideas behind key twentieth-century technical innovations, from great dams and highways to the jet engine, the transistor, the microchip, and the computer. Technology is essential to modern life, yet few of us are technology-literate enough to know much about the engineering that underpins it. In this book, David P. Billington, Jr., offers accessible accounts of the key twentieth-century engineering innovations that brought us into the twenty-first century. Billington examines a series of engineering advances--from Hoover Dam and jet engines to the transistor, the microchip, the computer, and the internet--and explains how they came about and how they work.

This original and insightful book explores and examines the impact that building mega-dams has on the human rights of those living in surrounding areas, and in particular those of indigenous peoples who are often most affected. Compiling case studies from around the world, Itzchak Kornfeld provides clear examples of how human rights violations are perpetrated and compounded, with chapters examining historical, recent and ongoing dam projects.

How conflicting ideas of nature threaten to fracture America's identity. Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: American invest much of their national identity in sites of natural beauty. And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science, religion, identity, and politics. Creationists believe that the Biblical flood carved landscapes less than 10,000 years ago; environmentalists protest pipelines; Western states argue that the federal government's land policies throttle free enterprise; Native Americans demand protection for sacred sites. In this book, David Nye looks at Americans' irreconcilably conflicting ideas about nature. A landscape is conflicted when different groups have different uses for the same location—for example, when some want to open mining sites that others want to preserve or when suburban development impinges on agriculture. Some landscapes are so degraded from careless use that they become toxic “anti-landscapes.” Nye traces these conflicts to clashing conceptions of nature—ranging from pastoral to Native American to military–industrial—that cannot be averaged into a compromise. Nye argues that today’s environmental crisis is rooted in these conflicting ideas about land. Depending on your politics, global warming is either an inconvenient truth or fake news. America’s contradictory conceptions of nature are at the heart of a broken national consensus.

"The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park, author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom. Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries"--

This book inquires into the relations between society and its natural environment by examining the historical discourse around several cases of state building in the American West: the construction of three high dams from 1928 to 1963.

A Bibliography covering one half century of Southwest literature; a sequel to Farquhar's "The Books of the Colorado River & the Grand Canyon."