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A Private Wilderness

Author: Sigurd F. Olson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1452966850

The personal diaries of one of America’s best-loved naturalists, revealing his difficult and inspiring path to finding his voice and becoming a writer Few writers are as renowned for their eloquence about the natural world, its power and fragility, as Sigurd F. Olson (1899–1982). Before he could give expression to The Singing Wilderness, however, he had to find his own voice. It is this struggle, the painstaking and often simply painful process of becoming the writer and conservationist now familiar to us, that Olson documented in the journal entries gathered here. Written mostly during the years from 1930 to 1941, Olson’s journals describe the dreams and frustrations of an aspiring writer honing his skills, pursuing recognition, and facing doubt while following the academic career that allowed him to live and work even as it consumed so much of his time. But even as he speaks with immediacy and intensity about the conditions of his apprenticeship, Olson can be seen developing the singular way of observing and depicting the natural world that would bring him fame—and also, more significantly, alert others to the urgent need to understand and protect that world. Author of Olson’s definitive biography, editor David Backes brings a deep knowledge of the writer to these journals, providing critical context, commentary, and insights along the way. When Olson wrote, in the spring of 1941, “What I am afraid of now is that the world will blow up just as I am getting it organized to suit me,” he could hardly have known how right he would prove to be. It is propitious that at our present moment, when the world seems once more balanced on the precipice, we have the words of Sigurd F. Olson to remind us of what matters—and of the hard work and the wonder that such a reckoning requires.

Reading in the Wilderness

Author: Jessica Brantley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 0226071340

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Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.

Singing Wilderness

Author: Sigurd F. Olson

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2012-05-30

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0307819906

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To do with the calling of loons, with northern lights, and the great silences of land lying northwest of Lake Superior. It is concerned with the simple joys, the timelessness and perspective found in a way of life which is close to the past. I have heard the singing in many places, but I seem to hear it best in the wilderness lake country of the Quetico-Superior, where travel is still by pack and canoe over the ancient trails of the Indians and voyageurs." Thus the author sets the theme and tone of this enthralling book of discovery about one of the few great primitive areas in our country which have withstood the pressures of civilization. Acute natural perceptivity and a profound knowledge of the relationships to be found in nature combine here in vivid evocations of the sights, the sounds, the vast stillnesses, and the events of the wilderness as the seasons succeed each other. But Mr. Olson is not content merely to "describe; he probes for meanings that will lead the reader to a different and more revealing way of looking at the out-of-doors and to a deeper sense of its eternal values. In each of the thirty-four chapters of The Singing Wilderness he has sought to capture an essential quality of our magnificent lake and forest heritage. He shows us what can be read from the rocks of the great Canadian Shield; he offers a delightful essay on the virtues of pine knots as fuel; he writes of the ways of a canoe, of flashing trout in the pools of the Isabella, of tamarack bogs, caribou moss, the flight of wild geese, timber wolves, and the birds of the ski trails. And much more, with something to satisfy every taste for wilderness experience. Superbly illustrated with 38 black-and-white drawings by Francis Lee Jaques, The Singing Wilderness is a book that no lover of nature will want to be without. To anyone who contemplates a vacation in the lake country of northern Minnesota and adjoining Canada, it is the perfect vade mecum.

A Handmade Wilderness

Author: Donald Schueler

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0544002911

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A memoir of an interracial gay couple bringing eighty acres back to life in 1960s Southern Mississippi: “This is no ordinary back-to-the-land book” (Sue Hubbell). In 1968, when Don G. Schueler and Willie Brown bought eighty acres in Mississippi, all they could afford was a piece of “least worst land”—a parcel that had been logged, burned, and ravaged, about twenty-five miles from the Gulf Coast. Moonshiners and poachers tried to scare them off, but the two stuck it out, restoring “The Place,” bringing back the flora and fauna, until they had created a handmade wilderness containing every ecosystem found in the region. This is the true story of their amazing journey. “Schueler and his partner purchased a bruised parcel of rural land, their goal to restore it to an ecologically balanced habitat for indigenous plant species and wildlife. Though his thoroughly engaging chronicle posits the dicey situation of a white man and a black man making a home in rural Mississippi in 1968, Schueler’s account is replete with amusing anecdotes that illuminate a quarter-century of interactions with neighbors vastly different from themselves and the conscientious caretaking efforts they expended. The saga embraces hurricane Camille’s destruction of a newly completed section of their house, and the fortitude that led them to build again, and the acquiring of a bevy of animals in the bargain.” —Booklist

Women and Wilderness

Author: Anne LaBastille

Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780871568281

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Wildlife ecologist Anne LaBastille is a pioneer in the growing movement of women into wilderness-oriented careers. In this groundbreaking book, she documents this phenomenon, profiling fifteen remarkable women ranging in age from twenty-one to seventy whose lives and professions center on the outdoors. Some are field scientists or hold technical jobs--a zoologist, a speleologist (cave explorer), a builder of log houses--others have forged unique, self-reliant lifestyles in wilderness homesteads. These women, LaBastille herself among them, constitute a new and important category of role models for young women. LaBastille also looks at the complex web of social and psychosexual factors that have alienated women from wilderness in the past and shows how feminism and the rise of environmental consciousness have allowed the "wilderness within women" to emerge. Updated with a new Afterword for this edition, Women and Wilderness offers exciting career ideas and inspiration for women everywhere.

A Wilderness Within

Author: David Backes

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9781452903132

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A Healthy Nature Handbook

Author: Justin Pepper

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2021-10-28

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 164283243X

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The Chicago metropolitan area is home to far more protected nature than most people realize. Over half a million acres of protected land known as the Chicago Wilderness are owned and managed by county forest preserve districts and other public and private sector partners. But there’s a critical factor of the Chicago Wilderness conservation effort that makes it unique: a pioneering grassroots volunteer community, thousands strong, has worked for decades alongside agency staff to restore these nearby natural areas, learning how to manage biodiversity in an altered and ever-changing urban context. A Healthy Nature Handbook captures hard-earned ecological wisdom from this community in engaging and highly readable chapters, each including illustrated restoration sequences. Restoration leaders cover large-scale seeding approaches, native seed production, wetland and grassland bird habitat restoration, monitoring, and community building. Contributions from local artists bring the region’s beauty to life with vibrant watercolors, oil paintings, and sketches. A Healthy Nature Handbook is packed with successful approaches to restoring nature and is a testament to both the Chicago region’s surprising natural wealth and the stewards that are committed to its lasting health.

Wilderness and the American Mind

Author: Roderick Frazier Nash

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0300153503

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DIVRoderick Nash’s classic study of changing attitudes toward wilderness during American history, as well as the origins of the environmental and conservation movements, has received wide acclaim since its initial publication in 1967. The Los Angeles Times listed it among the one hundred most influential books published in the last quarter century, Outside Magazine included it in a survey of “books that changed our world,” and it has been called the “Book of Genesis for environmentalists.” For the fifth edition, Nash has written a new preface and epilogue that brings Wilderness and the American Mind into dialogue with contemporary debates about wilderness. Char Miller’s foreword provides a twenty-first-century perspective on how the environmental movement has changed, including the ways in which contemporary scholars are reimagining the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the built environment./div

Billionaire Wilderness

Author: Justin Farrell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0691217122

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"Billionaire Wilderness offers an unprecedented look inside the world of the ultra-wealthy and their relationship to the natural world, showing how the ultra-rich use nature to resolve key predicaments in their lives. Justin Farrell immerses himself in Teton County, Wyoming--both the richest county in the United States and the county with the nation's highest level of income inequality--to investigate interconnected questions about money, nature, and community in the twenty-first century. Farrell draws on three years of in-depth interviews with "ordinary" millionaires and the world's wealthiest billionaires, four years of in-person observation in the community, and original quantitative data to provide comprehensive and unique analytical insight on the ultra-wealthy. He also interviewed low-income workers who could speak to their experiences as employees for and members of the community with these wealthy people. He finds that the wealthy leverage nature to climb even higher on the socioeconomic ladder, and they use their engagement with nature and rural people as a way of creating more virtuous and deserving versions of themselves. Billionaire Wilderness demonstrates that our contemporary understanding of the relationship between the ultra-wealthy and the environment is empirically shallow, and our reliance on reports of national economic trends distances us from the real experiences of these people and their local communities"--

Working Wilderness

Author: Nathan Freeman Sayre

Publisher: Rio Nuevo Pub

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9781887896818

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Which is worse, cows or condos? Can the public lands be "saved" if the private lands are paved? What does the future hold for the West's vaunted open lands, its ever more precious water, and its fire-prone forests? Is ranching a doomed mythas its critics chargeor the key to real conservation? The Western range is America's most legendary landscape. It is also among its most threatened and most fiercely contested. More than 400 million acres of the West are used to raise livestock: half of the land privately owned and half of it public. In recent decades, the private lands have been rapidly converting to residential development, both around booming cities and in remote, scenic, "exurban" areas. The public half of the range has become mired in political battles and lawsuits between environmentalists, ranchers, and public agencies. In Working Wilderness Nathan Sayre examines an unusual alliance that has worked for ten years to answer these questions and preserve the wide open range: The Malpai Borderlands Group. 50 color & b/w photos.