Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas
10 best books like Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Donald Worster): Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, The Natural History of Selborne, Wilderness and the American Mind, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1), The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
| Author | Tom Wessels |
| ISBN | 0881504203 |
An intrepid sleuth and articulate tutor, Wessels teaches us to read a landscape the way we might solve a mystery. What exactly is the meaning of all those stone walls in the middle of the forest? Why do beech and birch trees have smooth bark when the bark of all other northern species is rough? How do you tell...
| Author | Tim Flannery |
| ISBN | 0802138888 |
In The Eternal Frontier, world-renowned scientist and historian Tim Flannery tells the unforgettable story of the geological and biological evolution of the North American continent, from the time of the asteroid strike that ended the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, to the present day. Flannery...
| Author | Gilbert White |
| ISBN | 0140431128 |
Gilbert White's classic, best in an illustrated edition like Century (1988), can be read like the Bible, a few paragraphs a day to muse on. Or one sentence: "The language of birds is very ancient and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood."
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| Author | Roderick Nash |
| ISBN | 0300091222 |
Roderick Nash's classic study of America's changing attitudes toward wilderness has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times has listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine has included...
| Author | Mark Elvin |
| ISBN | 0300119933 |
A landmark account of China’s environmental history—by an internationally pre-eminent China specialist
This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic,...
Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1)
| Author | Lewis Mumford |
| ISBN | 0156623412 |
Mumford explains the forces that have shaped technology since prehistoric times and shaped the modern world. He shows how tools developed because of significant parallel inventions in ritual, language, and social organization. “It is a stimulating volume, informed both with an enormous range...
For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances,...
| Author | George Perkins Marsh |
| ISBN | 0295983167 |
As soon as multiplying man had filled the open grounds along the margin of the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and sufficiently peopled the natural meadows and savannas of the interior, where such existed,he could find room for expansion and further growth, only by the removal of a portion of the forest...
| Author | Virginia DeJohn Anderson |
| ISBN | 0195304462 |
When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans--not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestock played...
The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
| Author | Mark Fiege |
| ISBN | 0295991674 |
In the dramatic narratives that comprise 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. Revisiting historical...
| Author | Richard White |
| ISBN | 0809015838 |
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest...
| Author | William Cronon |
| ISBN | 0393315118 |
In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through...
| Author | Shepard Krech III |
| ISBN | 0393321002 |
The idea of the Native American living in perfect harmony with nature is one of the most cherished contemporary myths. But how truthful is this larger-than-life image? According to anthropologist Shepard Krech, the first humans in North America demonstrated all of the intelligence, self-interest,...
| Author | Aldo Leopold |
| ISBN | 0299127648 |
These essays (written between 1904-1947) show how Leopold's concept of soil conservation, game management, forestry, wildlife conservation, and land health changed over the years. I enjoyed that the essays show the growth of his concept of an ecological conscience; taking personal responsibility...
| Author | John Robert McNeill |
| ISBN | 0521452864 |
This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable...
Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature In Modern America
| Author | Jennifer Price |
| ISBN | 0465024866 |
Our Review
Flight Maps
For this unusual foray into nature writing, Jennifer Price doesn't go off into the mountains. She goes where the vast majority of American have their most consistent experiences of Nature -- in their front yards, in the malls, and in front of their television screens....
| Author | Donna J. Haraway |
| ISBN | 0415902940 |
my word: an imaginably sprawling and obsessive account of "what counts" in the material-semiotic field of primatology, a sociobiological myth and meaning lab where power is dreamed into itself and being. donna haraway is trying to unmake power right from its nature-culture divisive fundaments....
| Author | Ted Steinberg |
| ISBN | 0195140109 |
In this ambitious and provocative text, environmental historian Ted Steinberg offers a sweeping history of our nation--a history that, for the first time, places the environment at the very center of our story. Written with exceptional clarity, Down to Earth re-envisions the story of America "from...
| Author | Henry Nash Smith |
| ISBN | 0674939557 |
The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special...
Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
| Author | Harvey Levenstein |
| ISBN | 0520234405 |
Paradox of Plenty was cited in a wide array of awesome environmental and nutritional histories I've read. It came up over and over as a source for all sorts of different things, from synthetic vitamin supplements to cultural divides in eating habits to soil erosion. The literature implied it was a vast,...
| Author | Alfred W. Crosby |
| ISBN | 0521546184 |
People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world--North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain because in many cases they were achieved by using firearms against spears. Alfred Crosby,...
| Author | Patricia Nelson Limerick |
| ISBN | 0393304973 |
The 'settling' of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures–most with happy endings–and a process that came to an end with the 'closing' of the frontier in the 1890s.
But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues,...
