In Aldo Leopold’s Shack: Nina’s Story, Nancy Nye Hunt tells the remarkable tale of the famous Leopold family’s efforts to restore a worn-out farm along the lower Wisconsin River near Baraboo in the 1930s during the Great Depression and into the 1940s. Aldo Leopold, the world-renowned ecologist and conservationist—along with Estella, his wife, and their five children and two dogs, Gus and Flick—spent most weekends and vacations living and working at their Sand County farm that they called the Shack, now a National Historic Landmark that is also listed on both the National and Wisconsin Registers of Historic Places.Told through the eyes of Nina, the eldest daughter, details of life at the Shack unfold seasonally. Along the way, readers learn about the family’s many experiences and adventures: healing the land and converting an old chicken coop into a cabin (the “Shack”); restoring prairies and improving woodlands; planting gardens, collecting firewood, and tending orchards; observing animal tracks, bird migrations, and times when plants bloom; cooking meals over an open fire; singing the family’s old Spanish songs from New Mexico, where Estella was born and raised and had deep Spanish roots, and having great fun walking, swimming, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and playing tracking games.While at the Shack, Aldo and his family also recorded scientific observations in their “Shack journals.” These journals became the basis of Aldo’s 1949 landmark book, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. That book continues to inspire people today with its call for a land ethic in everyday life. Visiting the Shack, as thousands of people from all over the world do every year, is the equivalent of seeking out Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond as a pilgrimage site and source of inspiration.Using interviews with Nina and the Leopold family and relying on the original Shack journals, historic family photographs, and her extensive field experiences over dozens of years, Hunt has captured the spirit of this special place as no other book previously has. Here, readers discover Nina’s story of growing up at the Shack and learn about the family’s favorite recipes and songs as well as genealogical information all that go back centuries. And the blending of Nina’s story with 161 historic and contemporary photographs of life at the Shack, maps, and original pencil drawings of wildlife all provide for a transformative reading experience.First published in 2011 and now presented in an updated and greatly expanded new edition, including 38 new illustrations, 32 additional pages, and a new field trip to the Shack, readers will be able to appreciate and better understand Aldo’s famous concepts—the land ethic and phenology—that continue to influence our lives today. This book is a unique tribute and introduction to one of the world’s greatest conservationists and his family and how one place—the Shack—can help shape the world.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Intersections Series

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay, were collected, recorded, and classified, while books were produced in London and copies distributed and used across Britain, Continental Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Natural history connected a diverse range of individuals, from European landowners to Polynesian priests, incorporating, distributing, synthesizing, and appropriating information collected on a global scale.In Reading the World, Edwin D. Rose positions books, natural history specimens, and people in a close cycle of literary production and consumption. His book reveals new aspects of scientific practice and the specific roles of individuals employed to collect, synthesize, and distribute knowledge—re-evaluating Joseph Banks’s and Daniel Solander’s investigations during James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific. Uncovering the range of skills involved in knowledge production, Rose expands our understanding of natural history as a cyclical process, from the initial collection and identification of specimens to the formal publication of descriptions to the eventual printing of sources.

“Cultivation is just another word for commitment. You think you are just pulling weeds, but what you are really doing is writing a love letter to your patch of earth.” – Thomas RainierThis quote opens Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden, a book that is a love letter from a woman to the garden she spent 40 years creating. Jill Nooney, a psychotherapist and graduate of the Radcliffe Seminars Program in Landscape Design, and her husband Bob Munger, a physician, developed their 30 acres in Lee, New Hampshire into an unforgettable garden.Featuring more than 300 photographs of the garden and Jill’s artful sculptures, water features, and built structures that provide places throughout Bedrock Garden from which to contemplate the complete landscape, the book takes us from the garden’s origins as a private space to its present life as a public garden. The garden has slowly evolved through its creators’ deep love for the land and an indominable urge to experiment.Rich with entertaining anecdotes of realizing improbable, visionary concepts that involved moving boulders, carrying trees and rocks on planes, ferreting out rare plant material, operating all manner of equipment, and managing thousands of visitors, this is a story of love, loss and generosity. The book takes the reader into a landscape that is green and wild, but also filled with a deep sense of peace. Just like visitors to the garden, readers will fall in love with Bedrock.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press's Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series.

As the state’s first bear biologist in the 1970s, Eric Orff began a half century career as a “forest ranger who works with animals,” his stated dream job as a 7-year-old. A respected wildlife biologist, with more than thirty-one years at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and another fifteen years with the National Wildlife Federation, he still publishes a video blog called “What’s Wild in New Hampshire” that regularly receives hundreds of thousands of views each week.Known for his educational programs and political action—If Only Moose Could Vote—Eric has been a literal voice in the wilderness, declaring the threat of climate change to be real, based on what he has seen in the woods. Sharing his knowledge of the changing climate even when his audience didn’t want to believe it.His trademark humor and kind heart, coupled with a solid scientific foundation make him someone people like to listen to when they want to know what’s happening in the woods, rivers, and fields of New England. Wildlife is now more abundant across the region than since colonial times, thanks to Eric and people like him.From stories of rehabbing bats in the laundry room, to riding a whitetail buck who didn’t quite cooperate with a tagging effort, Eric’s stories will make you laugh, and help you connect with the wild nature that lives within us all.

From the Moon to Rhinos is the story of Michele Sofisti, a Geologist who became a valued and itinerant manager—in Ferrari, Omega, Swatch, Gucci—and then actively “returned” to Nature, engaging in the conservation of animal species, forests, and oceans. It is a collection of life experiences, meetings, and emotions laid bare. It is an ongoing journey that aims to sensitize people to believe that a change towards a better interaction between humans and the natural world, which feeds and sustains us, is possible and must be undertaken instantly. This journey symbolically began with the Apollo missions on the Moon—which, for the first time, showed us the uniqueness of our wonderful planet from a new perspective—and ends with Rhinos that are slaughtered for their horn and have unfortunately become a symbol of human ignorance and greed, proving and confirming how the stupidity of a few people in interacting with Nature can be extremely destructive for everyone. The story’s intent—narrated amidst tennis and skiing, Ferraris and wonderful watches—is to convey a final message and spur the reader to act urgently and positively towards our planet, yet not to save it, as planet Earth can go on without us, but to preserve ourselves and our future generations.

We live in the Golden Age of space exploration. Humanity’s achievements include the continued operation of the International Space Station, rapid advancements in reusable rockets, and soon, a return to the Moon. Within our lifetime, we might have human outposts on the lunar surface and flags flying on the plains of Mars. These strides are not just about reaching new frontiers. They have profound implications for life on Earth. The data from climate satellites overhead, innovative materials and recycling systems designed for space habitats, and emerging spacebased energy solutions are essential to addressing Earth’s conservation challenges. Space enables the understanding of Earth as much as Earth enables the exploration of space. This bright tomorrow is not assured, however. Space junk, international conflicts and fiscal calamities loom as threats to all that might be accomplished. For the human adventure to continue beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, the time is now to reconsider the nature of sustainability.Space in Our Hands is a comprehensive exploration of critical and sometimes challenging aspects of our space endeavours, including: the evolution of energy technologies, the feasibility of permanent lunar settlements, the potential for extraterrestrial mining, and the challenges posed by space debris, all within the context of current legal frameworks and international agreements. Leading experts in each field offer insights on the deep connection between Earth and space, underscoring that sustainability—whether on our planet or in the cosmos—is integral to success and vital to our future.

From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, made possible communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into a political present. Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological records and from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts written by Spanish interlocutors enable new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the place of the human in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon and the mountain forests with the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast.PRAISE"In this amply illustrated and beautifully written book, Brosseder scours archaeological and ethnohistorical records to reveal the meanings of birds and their feathers to the Inkas. While fine Andean featherwork has long been admired as craft, Brosseder’s study sheds new light on why birds were so integral to the visual cultures of Andean peoples across both time and space." ~Carolyn Dean, University of California at Santa Cruz

In October 1948, a seemingly average fog descended on the tiny mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania. With a population of fewer than fifteen thousand, the town’s main industry was steel and zinc mills—mills that continually emitted pollutants into the air. The six-day smog event left twenty-one people dead and thousands sick. Even after the fog lifted, hundreds more died or were left with lingering health problems. Donora Death Fog details how six fateful days in Donora led to the nation’s first clean air act in 1955, and how such catastrophes can lead to successful policy change. Andy McPhee tells the very human story behind this ecological disaster: how wealthy industrialists built the mills to supply an ever-growing America; how the town’s residents—millworkers and their families—wilfully ignored the danger of the mills’ emissions; and how the gradual closing of the mills over the years following the tragedy took its toll on the town.

Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises - climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes - means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools - technological and otherwise - and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.

In general, “development” denotes movement or growth toward something better in the future. International development—widespread in the decades following World War II—was an effort at purposeful change in landscapes around the world. Contributors to this volume argue that these projects constituted an effort to transplant modernity, such as knowledge or technology, from places seen as more developed to places perceived as un- or underdeveloped. During its heyday, international development included not just dams, roads, health programs, and agricultural projects but also animal husbandry schemes, urban development, and wildlife protection plans. Projects often succeeded or failed because of existing environmental conditions, and in turn, these programs remade—or tried to remake—the land, water, wildlife, and people around them. From American-directed failures in water engineering in Afghanistan to the impact of livestock epidemics on economic growth in East Africa, the chapters in Transplanting Modernity question how science, technology, and faith in Western notions of progress have influenced the pace, scope, and scale of development.

Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature’s Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.

Popular natural history periodicals in the nineteenth century had an incredible democratizing power. By welcoming contributions from correspondents regardless of their background, they posed a significant threat to those who considered themselves to be gatekeepers of elite science, and who in turn used their own periodicals to shape more exclusive communities. Making Entomologists reassesses the landscape of science participation in the nineteenth century, offering a more nuanced analysis of the supposed amateur-professional divide that resonates with the rise of citizen science today. Matthew Wale reveals how an increase in popular natural history periodicals during the nineteenth century was instrumental in shaping not only the life sciences and the field of entomology but also scientific communities that otherwise could not have existed. These publications enabled many actors - from wealthy gentlemen of science to working-class naturalists - to participate more fully within an extended network of fellow practitioners and, crucially, imagine themselves as part of a wider community. Women were also active participants in these groups, although in far smaller numbers than men. Although periodicals of the nineteenth century have received considerable scholarly attention, this study focuses specifically on the journals and magazines devoted to natural history.

Although a technique for hydraulic fracturing - more commonly known as fracking - was developed and implemented in the 1970s in Texas, fracking of the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania to New York did not begin in earnest until the twenty-first century. Unconventional natural gas production via fracking has ignited debate, challenged regulators, and added to the complexity of twenty-first-century natural resource management. Through a longitudinal study taken from 2000 to 2015, Jonathan M. Fisk, Soren Jordan, and A. J. Good examine how the management of natural resources functions relative to specific regulatory actions including inspections, identifying violations, and the use of specific regulatory tools. Ultimately, they find that factors as disparate as state policy goals, elected officials, the availability of data, inspectors, front-line staff, and the use of technology form a context that, in turn, shapes the use of specific regulatory tools and decisions

The rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century forged a new ecological order in North American and Western European states, radically transforming the environment through science and technology in the name of human progress. Far less known are the dramatic environmental changes experienced by Eastern Europe, in many ways a terra incognita for environmental historians and anthropologists.A New Ecological Order explores, from a historical and ethnographic perspective, the role of state planners, bureaucrats, and experts – engineers, agricultural engineers, geographers, biologists, foresters, and architects – as agents of change in the natural world of Eastern Europe from 1870 to the early 21st century. Contributors consider territories engulfed by empires, from the Habsburg to the Ottoman to tsarist Russia; territories belonging to disintegrating empires; and countries in the Balkan Peninsula, Central and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Together, they follow a rhetoric of 'correcting nature', a desire to exploit the natural environment and put its resources to work for the sake of developing the economies and infrastructures of modern states. They reveal an eagerness among newly established nation-states, after centuries of imperial economic and political impositions, to import scientific knowledge and new technologies from Western Europe that would aid in their economic development, and how those imports and ideas about nature ultimately shaped local projects and policies.