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Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199782245
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
A definitive biography traces the life of John Muir from his boyhood in Scotland up to his death on the eve of World War I and offers important insights into the passionate nature of America's first great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club.
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199782245
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
A definitive biography traces the life of John Muir from his boyhood in Scotland up to his death on the eve of World War I and offers important insights into the passionate nature of America's first great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club.
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199721733
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing." In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship." For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.
Author: Michelle Benjamin
Publisher: Greystone Books
ISBN: 1926685059
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
David Suzuki's lifelong work as an environmentalist, naturalist, and scientist have influenced countless others in their fight to save the planet, 20 such devotees of them have contributed to this inspiring collection. These journalists, scientists, writers and environmentalists have taken their enthusiasm for Suzuki's philosophy and funneled it into their own personal recollections, manifestos, and essays: Rick Bass describes his love for the Yaak Valley in Montana; Richard Mabey takes readers to a moonlit May evening in Suffolk; David Helvarg tells us of a stirring seaside memory from his childhood. No matter what journey these writers take us on, the unifying theme of their work is always the same: a deep and abiding love of nature — inspired and shared by David Suzuki.
Author: Rochelle Johnson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 660
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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.
Author: Keith Stewart Thomson
Publisher: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
ISBN: 9781882886265
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Thomas Jefferson recorded weather observations, experimented with plant species, kept a pet mockingbird, and turned the entry hall at Monticello into a veritable natural history museum with elk and moose antlers, a grizzly bear claw, and the fossilized jaws of a mastodon. Jefferson wrote with lyrical flair about the landscapes of his mountaintop home, as he did in a 1786 letter to his friend Maria Cosway: How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! Jefferson's deep interest in the natural world -- from the flora and fauna of Albemarle County to the exotic specimens gathered by Lewis and Clark on their trek to the Pacific -- and how it shaped his life as a philosopher, farmer, and Founding Father is the subject of A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History. --from publisher description.
Author: J. Drew Lanham
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571318755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic
Author: Tim Burt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108625878
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
Notwithstanding the importance of modern technology, fieldwork remains vital, not least through helping to inspire and educate the next generation. Fieldwork has the ingredients of intellectual curiosity, passion, rigour and engagement with the outdoor world - to name just a few. You may be simply noting what you see around you, making detailed records, or carrying out an experiment; all of this and much more amounts to fieldwork. Being curious, you think about the world around you, and through patient observation develop and test ideas. Forty contributors capture the excitement and importance of fieldwork through a wide variety of examples, from urban graffiti to the Great Barrier Reef. Outdoor learning is for life: people have the greatest respect and care for their world when they have first-hand experience of it. The Editors are donating all royalties due to them to the environmental charity, The Field Studies Council, to support student fieldwork at the Council's field centres.
Author: Matthew Fox
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1594775192
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
• Matthew Fox's comprehensive translation of Meister Eckhart's sermons is a meeting of true prophets across hundreds of years that results in a spirituality for the new millennium. • A brilliant interpretation of Eckhart's teachings on creation spirituality. Passion for Creation (formerly Breakthrough) is Matthew Fox's comprehensive translation of and original commentary on the critical German and Latin texts of 37 sermons by Meister Eckhart, the noted 14th-century Dominican priest, preacher, and mystic. The goodness of creation, the holiness of all things, the divine blood in each person, the need to let go and let be--these are among Eckhart's themes, themes that the best-selling author Matthew Fox brilliantly interprets and explains for today's reader. Passion for Creation will be embraced by theologians, students, and all seekers of truth. It will be especially welcomed by those interested in creation spirituality, which Eckhart advocated six centuries ago and which Matthew Fox has promoted as a spiritual path for the new millennium. Simply put, this book is a meeting of two prophets across hundreds of years. The outcome of that meeting is a fount of wisdom.
Author: Ali Shokri
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1788035062
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
The Passion of Trees is a collection of photographs taken in Iran and Azerbaijan’s stunning nature. However, this is a collection of nature photographs with a difference. Over the years, Ali has witnessed the beauty of the forests that he has loved since his childhood severely decline. As the number of roads and dams have increased, and more and more of the forests have been destroyed, the situation has become increasingly desperate. “To me, each tree, like a human being, has a tale to tell. When a tree dies, a whole story is interrupted, a destiny is altered for the worse. I feel as if the trees, bundled in the back of trucks, are cursing us with their broken hands, wounded faces and severed roots.” The Passion of Trees is Ali’s stark reminder that the natural world deserves our care. Through his photography, Ali encourages viewers to consider the world around them and to look upon nature with a different perspective, to consider the very real possibility that without swift action, the devastating effects of climate change and the decline of countless animals and plants.
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199844968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
The discovery of the Americas around 1500 AD was an extraordinary watershed in human experience. It gave rise to the modern period of human ecology, a phenomenon global in scope that set in motion profound changes in almost every society on earth. This new period, which saw the depletion of the lands of the New World, proved tragic for some, triumphant for others, and powerfully affecting for all. In this work, acclaimed environmental historian Donald Worster takes a global view in his examination of the ways in which complex issues of worldwide abundance and scarcity have shaped American society and behavior over three centuries. Looking at the limits nature imposes on human ambitions, he questions whether America today is in the midst of a shift from a culture of abundance to a culture of limits-and whether American consumption has become reliant on the global South. Worster engages with key political, economic, and environmental thinkers while presenting his own interpretation of the role of capitalism and government in issues of wealth, abundance, and scarcity. Acknowledging the earth's agency throughout human history, Shrinking the Earth offers a compelling explanation of how we have arrived where we are and a hopeful way forward on a planet that is no longer as large as it once was.
