The King’s Green Pad

This summer my family and I traveled to Yellowstone National Park for a short family vacation. We had a wonderful time and visited the obligatory sites/sights: Old Faithful, Mammoth Hotsprings, Canyon Falls, Hayden Valley. My guide during our visit was Paul Schullery’s delightful 1997 book Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness. [...]

As a newcomer to the West, and someone previously resident on topographies that were relatively flat, I have been newly introduced to mountains. Upon arrival in Edmonton, many of my newfound friends and colleagues assured me that whatever anxieties I had about moving West would be assuaged when I got to the mountains. They were [...]

In my last post I made it my task to recommend each month a new or classic work of environmental history. My recommendation this month is an acknowledged classic: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983) by William Cronon, who is professor of history at the [...]

In a provocative 2002 essay, historian Ted Steinberg makes this observation: “For the vast majority of the [historical] profession, nature is little more than a pretty scene or, at most, a preface to the more important social and political story that is about to unfold.” We ignore the woods at our peril, however, and Steinberg [...]