Slide Mountain

Slide Mountain PDF Author: Theodore Steinberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book 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.

Slide Mountain

Slide Mountain PDF Author: Theodore Steinberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book 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.

Mammalogy

Mammalogy PDF Author: Terry Vaughan
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
ISBN: 0763762997
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 770

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Newly revised and extensively updated, the fifth edition of Mammalogy explains and clarifies the subject of mammalian biology as a unified whole, taking care to discuss the latest and most fascinating discoveries in the field. In recent years we witnessed significant changes in the taxonomy of mammals. The authors kept pace with such changes and revised each chapter to reflect the most current data and statistics available. New pedagogical elements, including chapter outlines, lists of key morphological characteristics, and further reading sections, help readers grasp the most important concepts and explore additional content on their own." --Book Jacket.

Re-Collecting Black Hawk

Re-Collecting Black Hawk PDF Author: Nicholas Brown
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822980398
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper Midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to "Black Hawk," surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre. Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others, such as George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the Midwestern landscape, Re-Collecting Black Hawk envisions new modes of pea

Acts of God

Acts of God PDF Author: Theodore Steinberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195309683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
This revised edition features a new chapter analyzing the failed response to Hurricane Katrina. Steinberg argues that it is wrong to see natural disasters as random outbursts of nature or expressions of divine judgment. He reveals how business and government decisions have paved the way for the greater losses of life and property.

Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics

Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics PDF Author: Anne Wagner
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1802207260
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Get Book Here

Book Description
This comprehensive Research Handbook explores the wide variety of work conducted in legal semiotics to provide a broad understanding of how the law works through signs and symbols. Demonstrating that law is a strategical system of fluctuating signs, contributors critically analyse the ever-evolving conceptualisations of law and legal discourse.

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta PDF Author: Debjani Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores how the British Empire responded to the environmental challenges of the world's largest tidal delta.

The Place with No Edge

The Place with No Edge PDF Author: Adam Mandelman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people’s use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with—rather than independence from—the environment. Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master this landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with—and vulnerable to—it. The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system’s failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming’s rising seas and strengthening storms. The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans’ relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment—whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable —inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.

The Land We Share

The Land We Share PDF Author: Eric T. Freyfogle
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781610912402
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
Is private ownership an inviolate right that individuals can wield as they see fit? Or is it better understood in more collective terms, as an institution that communities reshape over time to promote evolving goals? What should it mean to be a private landowner in an age of sprawling growth and declining biological diversity? These provocative questions lie at the heart of this perceptive and wide-ranging new book by legal scholar and conservationist Eric Freyfogle. Bringing together insights from history, law, philosophy, and ecology, Freyfogle undertakes a fascinating inquiry into the ownership of nature, leading us behind publicized and contentious disputes over open-space regulation, wetlands protection, and wildlife habitat to reveal the foundations of and changing ideas about private ownership in America. Drawing upon ideas from Thomas Jefferson, Henry George, and Aldo Leopold and interweaving engaging accounts of actual disputes over land-use issues, Freyfogle develops a powerful vision of what private ownership in America could mean—an ownership system, fair to owners and taxpayers alike, that fosters healthy land and healthy economies.

Sedimentology and Sedimentary Basins

Sedimentology and Sedimentary Basins PDF Author: Mike R. Leeder
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444348361
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 802

Get Book Here

Book Description
The sedimentary record on Earth stretches back more than 4.3 billion years and is present in more abbreviated forms on companion planets of the Solar System, like Mars and Venus, and doubtless elsewhere. Reading such planetary archives correctly requires intimate knowledge of modern sedimentary processes acting within the framework provided by tectonics, climate and sea or lake level variations. The subject of sedimentology thus encompasses the origins, transport and deposition of mineral sediment on planetary surfaces. The author addresses the principles of the subject from the viewpoint of modern processes, emphasising a general science narrative approach in the main text, with quantitative background derived in enabling ‘cookie’ appendices. The book ends with an innovative chapter dealing with how sedimentology is currently informing a variety of cognate disciplines, from the timing and extent tectonic uplift to variations in palaeoclimate. Each chapter concludes with a detailed guide to key further reading leading to a large bibliography of over 2500 entries. The book is designed to reach an audience of senior undergraduate and graduate students and interested academic and industry professionals.

The Yankee Road: Tracing the Journey of the New England Tribe That Created Modern America

The Yankee Road: Tracing the Journey of the New England Tribe That Created Modern America PDF Author: James D. McNiven
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
ISBN: 162787142X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who is a Yankee and where did the term come from? Though shrouded in myth and routinely used as a substitute for American, the achievements of the Yankees have influenced nearly every facet of our modern way of life. Join author Jim McNiven as he explores the emergence and influence of Yankee culture while traversing an old transcontinental highway reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific -- US 20, which he nicknames "The Yankee Road." The Yankee Road: Tracing the Journey of the New England Tribe that Created Modern America combines fascinating history with a travel narrative, taking the reader on a journey through the places Yankees and their descendants settled as they expanded westward. Using a physical road to connect locations important to the Yankee cultural "road," McNiven takes us on twenty-two side trips into individual stories, introducing readers to the origins of such large-scale and diverse ideas as conservation, public education, telegraphy, mass production, religion, and labor reform. See familiar places and stories in a Yankee light, such as the fight for women's rights in Seneca Falls and Walden Pond that Thoreau made famous. Learn about less familiar venues like Route 128's technology companies that led to the creation of the computer industry (and incidentally, the Internet), and to the Worcester suburb of Shrewsbury, where two old women changed the world by making possible the birth control pill. McNiven's first tour goes as far west as the Pennsylvania-New York border, with more stories to come. As we travel The Yankee Road, we will meet some of the men and women who made these ideas happen. Harry Truman once said, "I like roads. I like to move." This is a road book. Come on along.