Weyerhaeuser environmental book

"Telling a multispecies history of Central Park from the 1850s until the 1970s, Dawn Day Biehler illuminates the vibrant lives of humans and animals in the park, showcasing stories of decorative sheep, nesting swans, capering monkeys, and escaped bison as well as New Yorkers' attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and animals and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a...

"Today, Japan defends its controversial whaling expeditions by invoking tradition--but what was the historical reality? In examining the techniques and impacts of whaling during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), Jakobina Arch shows that the organized, shore-based whaling that first developed during these years bore little resemblance to modern Japanese whaling. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from whaling ledgers to recipe books and gravestones...

"Communist agriculture-from the perspective of the pig. In Communist Pigs, Thomas Fleischman traces the rise and fall of the German Democratic Republic from the perspective of one animal, Sus scrofa, or the pig. His goal is to offer a deeper understanding of the development of industrial agriculture in the twentieth century by looking at how the transformation from farm to factory occurred on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. The pig occupied...

From deserts to ghost towns, from national forests to California bungalows, many of the features of the western American landscape are well known to residents and travelers alike. But in How to Read the American West, William Wyckoff introduces readers anew to these familiar landscapes. A geographer and an accomplished photographer, Wyckoff offers a fresh perspective on the natural and human history of the American West and encourages readers to discover...

"Measured from the arrival of European colonists to the present day, perhaps no landscape on the planet has changed more radically than the tallgrass prairie peninsula. Better known today for fields of corn and soybeans that stretch across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, this bioregion was once of the most dynamic ecologies on the continent, a mosaic of forests, wetlands, savannahs, and prairies. It was also a once a major cultural borderland, where...

Why do so many Americans drive for miles each autumn to buy a vegetable that they are unlikely to eat? While most people around the world eat pumpkin throughout the year, North Americans reserve it for holiday pies and other desserts that celebrate the harvest season and the rural past. They decorate their houses with pumpkins every autumn and welcome Halloween trick-or-treaters with elaborately carved jack-o'-lanterns. Towns hold annual pumpkin festivals...

"What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth. Melanie Kiechle examines nuisance complaints, medical writings, domestic advice, and myriad discussions of what constituted fresh air, and argues that nineteenth-century...

"Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city of Seattle from its founding amid existing Indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed...

In The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred.