Cronon, William. 1983.
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
New York: Hill & Wang, 241pp. (Cronon's important ecological history is based on the use of narratives of early travelers and naturalists, deeds, surveyors' records, town and court records, archaeological evidence, and modern ecological study of forest stands, tree rings, charcoal deposits, and fossil pollen profiles.)
Knight, Richard L., and Suzanne Riedel, eds. 2002.
Aldo Leopold and the Ecological Conscience.
New York: Oxford University Press, 190pp. (The introductory chapter by Knight and Riedel states that this "collection of essays by ecologists, wildlife biologists, and conservationists documents the legacy of Aldo Leopold and
A Sand County Almanac
to the environmental movement, ecological sciences, and natural resource management.")
Lowenthal, David. 2000.
George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation
. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 605pp. (Chapter 13 Man and Nature:
The Making
and Chapter 14 Man and Nature:
The Meaning
are useful to this unit. Lowenthal writes, "[a]fter a period of relative neglect,
Man and Nature
was resurrected by Americans made newly aware of the perils of floods and soil erosion by Dust Bowl and other disasters of the 1930s.")
Middleton, Susan, and David Liittschwager. 1994.
Witness: Endangered Species of North America
. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 255pp. (The book jacket states of these photographic portraits of endangered species, "[e]ach page reveals the astounding diversity that is still present in our world, and each portrait inspires action to protect these fragile lives that hover above extinction.")
Nash, Roderick, 1982.
Wilderness and the American Mind
(third edition). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 425pp. (Nash writes of Thoreau and wilderness, Marsh and man's alteration of nature, Muir and Hetch Hetchy, Leopold and the ecological conscience and the land ethic, and 'the argument to keep the options of the future open with regard to something [- wilderness -] that, by definition, mankind can never create.")
Orvell, Miles. 2003.
American Photography
. New York: Oxford University Press, 256pp. (Used by seminar leader Alex Nemerov for assigned readings, this current history of American photography includes Chapter 3 Viewing the Landscape.)
Sontag, Susan. 1977.
On Photography
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Picador, 208pp. (Sontag's challenging essays on the multiple meanings and values of photographs have abundant reference to the various ways of representing the natural world.)
Turner, Raymond M., et al. 2003.
The Changing Mile Revisited: An Ecological Study of Vegetation Change with Time in the Lower Mile of an Arid and Semiarid Region
. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 334pp. (This photographic study of the oak woodlands, grasslands, and desert lands of the Sonora Desert (Arizona) uses fixed camera stations to depict one hundred years of ecological change -- from the 1890s to the 1990s -- resulting from changing climate conditions and from human disturbance.)
Walls, Laura Dassow. 1995.
Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science
. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 300pp. (The author's "rereading of Thoreau's career" enables her to recognize that "Thoreau participated in and helped to advance an alternative tradition of romantic science and literature that looked toward ecological approaches to nature . . .")
Worster, Donald. 1994.
Nature's Economy: a History of Ecological Ideas
(second edition). New York: Cambridge University Press, 507pp. (From Gilbert White and the Age of Reason to Edward O. Wilson and the Age of Ecology, Worster's "history of ecological ideas" is the most comprehensive treatment available on the history of ecological science.)
