In his engaging book Windshield Wilderness, David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in the form of cars and roads, leaving an enduring legacy of knowing nature through machines. With a lively style and striking illustrations, Louter traces the history of Washington State’s national parks -- Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades -- to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places. Windshield Wilderness explores what few histories of national parks address: what it means to view parks from the road and through a windshield. Building upon recent interpretations of wilderness as a cultural construct rather than as a pure state of nature, the story of autos in parks presents the preservation of wilderness as a dynamic and nuanced process.Windshield Wilderness illuminates the difficulty of separating human-modified landscapes from natural ones, encouraging us to recognize our connections with nature in national parks.

The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.

Situated among the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, Miners Ridge contains vast quantities of copper. Kennecott Copper Corporation’s plan to develop an open-pit mine there was, when announced in 1966, the first test of the mining provision of the Wilderness Act passed by Congress in 1964. The battle over the proposed “Open Pit, Big Enough to Be Seen from the Moon,” as activists called it, drew the attention of both local and national conservationists, who vowed to stop the desecration of one of the West’s most scenic places. Kennecott Copper had the full force of the law and mining industry behind it in asserting its extractive rights. Meanwhile the U.S. Forest Service was determined to defend its authority to manage wilderness. An Open Pit Visible from the Moon tells the story of this historic struggle to define the contours of the Wilderness Act—its possibilities and limits. Combining rigorous analysis and deft storytelling, Adam M. Sowards re-creates the contest between Kennecott and its shareholders on one hand and activists on the other, intent on maintaining wilderness as a place immune to the calculus of profit. A host of actors cross these pages—from cabinet secretaries and a Supreme Court justice to local doctors and college students—all contributing to a drama that made Miners Ridge a cause célèbre for the nation’s wilderness movement. As locals testified at public hearings and writers penned profiles in the nation’s magazines and newspapers, the volatile political economy of copper proved equally influential in frustrating Kennecott’s plans. No law or court ruling could keep Kennecott from mining copper, but the pit was never dug. Identifying the contingent factors and forces that converged and coalesced in this case, Sowards’s narrative recalls a critical moment in the struggle over the nation’s wild places, even as it puts the unpredictability of history on full display.

Jasper National Park is an international travel destination, world heritage site, and icon of Canadian identity. Although national parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, we are only beginning to understand how their visual imagery has shaped and continues to inform our perception of the natural world, ecological issues, and ourselves. In Manufacturing National Park Nature, J. Keri Cronin draws on visual images such as postcards and tourist snapshots to show that popular forms of picturing nature can have ecological implications that extend far beyond the frame of the image. Adopting an ecocritical approach to visual culture, she reveals that packaging Jasper as a series of breathtaking vistas and adorable-looking animals masks the real threats to the park’s ecosystems. In telling the story of how various groups have used photography to shape our ideas about nature, this book sets the stage for a re-examination of protection policies and acknowledgment of environmental damage in national parks.

Drawing boundaries around wilderness areas often serves a double purpose: protection of the land within the boundary and release of the land outside the boundary to resource extraction and other development. In Drawing Lines in the Forest, Kevin R. Marsh discusses the roles played by various groups—the Forest Service, the timber industry, recreationists, and environmentalists—in arriving at these boundaries. He shows that pragmatic, rather than ideological, goals were often paramount, with all sides benefiting. After World War II, representatives of both logging and recreation use sought to draw boundaries that would serve to guarantee access to specific areas of public lands. The logging industry wanted to secure a guaranteed supply of timber, as an era of stewardship of the nation's public forests gave way to an emphasis on rapid extraction of timber resources. This spawned a grassroots preservationist movement that ultimately challenged the managerial power of the Forest Service. The Wilderness Act of 1964 provided an opportunity for groups on all sides to participate openly and effectively in the political process of defining wilderness boundaries. The often contentious debates over the creation of wilderness areas in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington represent the most significant stages in the national history of wilderness conservation since World War II: Three Sisters, North Cascades and Glacier Peak, Mount Jefferson, Alpine Lakes, French Pete, and the state-wide wilderness acts of 1984.

Understanding the dynamics of British colonialism and the enormous ecological transformations that took place through the mobilization and globalized management of natures. For many critics, Romanticism is synonymous with nature writing, for representations of the natural world appear during this period with a freshness, concreteness, depth, and intensity that have rarely been equaled. Why did nature matter so much to writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And how did it play such an important role in their understanding of themselves and the world? In Natures in Translation, Alan Bewell argues that there is no Nature in the singular, only natures that have undergone transformation through time and across space. He examines how writers—as disparate as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White, William Bartram, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and Mary Shelley—understood a world in which natures were traveling and resettling the globe like never before. Bewell presents British natural history as a translational activity aimed at globalizing local natures by making them mobile, exchangeable, comparable, and representable. Bewell explores how colonial writers, in the period leading up to the formulation of evolutionary theory, responded to a world in which new natures were coming into being while others disappeared. For some of these writers, colonial natural history held the promise of ushering in a “cosmopolitan” nature in which every species, through trade and exchange, might become a true “citizen of the world.” Others struggled with the question of how to live after the natures they depended upon were gone. Ultimately, Natures in Translation demonstrates that—far from being separate from the dominant concerns of British imperial culture—nature was integrally bound up with the business of empire.

Over the past 150 years, people have flocked to the Pacific Northwest in increasing numbers, in part due to the region's beauty and one of its most exceptional features: volcanoes. This segment of the Pacific Ring of Fire has shaped not only the physical landscape of the region but also the psychological landscape, and with it the narratives we compose about ourselves. Exceptional Mountains is a cultural history of the Northwest volcanoes and the environmental impact of outdoor recreation in this region. It probes the relationship between these volcanoes and regional identity, particularly in the era of mass mountaineering and population growth in the Northwest. O. Alan Weltzien demonstrates how mountaineering is but one conspicuous example of the outdoor recreation industry's unrestricted and problematic growth. He explores the implications of our assumptions that there are no limits to our outdoor recreation habits and that access to the highest mountains should include amenities for affluent consumers. Each chapter probes the mountain-based regional ethos and the concomitant sense of privilege and entitlement from different vantages to illuminate the consumerist mind-set as a reductive--and deeply problematic--version of experience and identity in and around some of the nation's most striking mountains.

Remote, rugged, and spectacularly majestic, with stunning alpine meadows and jagged peaks that soar beyond ten thousand feet, North Cascades National Park is one of the Pacific Northwest’s crown jewels. Now, in the first full-length account, Lauren Danner chronicles its creation--just in time for the park’s fiftieth anniversary in 2018. The North Cascades range benefited from geographic isolation that shielded its mountains from extensive resource extraction and development. Efforts to establish a park began as early as 1892, but gained traction after World War II as economic affluence sparked national interest in wilderness preservation and growing concerns about the impact of harvesting timber to meet escalating postwar housing demands. As the environmental movement matured, a 1950s Glacier Peak study mobilized conservationists to seek establishment of a national park that prioritized wilderness. Concerned about the National Park Service’s policy favoring development for tourism and the United States Forest Service’s policy promoting logging in the national forests, conservationists leveraged a changing political environment and the evolving environmental values of the natural resource agencies to achieve the goal of permanent wilderness protection. Their grassroots activism became increasingly sophisticated, eventually leading to the compromise that resulted in the 1968 creation of Washington’s magnificent third national park.

Saving Spaces offers an historical overview of the struggle to conserve both individual parcels of land and entire landscapes from destruction in the United States. John Sprinkle, Jr. identifies the ways in which the identification, evaluation, and stewardship of selected buildings and landscapes reflect contemporary American cultural values. Detailed case studies bring the text to life, highlighting various conservation strategies and suggesting the opportunities, challenges, and consequences of each. Balancing close analyses with a broader introduction to some of the key issues of the field, Saving Spaces is ideal for students and instructors of historic preservation.