Ronald J. Fahl has compiled a milestone reference work, one that offers historians and other interested scholars for the first time a reliable and comprehensive access to the widely scattered written materials that reveal the history of forestry, forest conservation, and forest industry in the United States and Canada. Sponsored by the Forest History Society and funded in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this volume covers published scholarly books and writings from many sources containing significant historical matter, including lumber trade journals, professional forestry journals, conservation magazines, government publications, state and local histories, autobiographies, and oral history interviews.
"A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country’s history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships. It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.
American Indians and National Forests tells the story of how the U.S. Forest Service and tribal nations dealt with sweeping changes in forest use, ownership, and management over the last century and a half. Indians and U.S. foresters came together over a shared conservation ethic on many cooperative endeavors; yet, they often clashed over how the nation’s forests ought to be valued and cared for on matters ranging from huckleberry picking and vision quests to road building and recreation development. Marginalized in American society and long denied a seat at the table of public land stewardship, American Indian tribes have at last taken their rightful place and are making themselves heard. Weighing indigenous perspectives on the environment is an emerging trend in public land management in the United States and around the world. The Forest Service has been a strong partner in that movement over the past quarter century.
Synthesizes the ecology and natural history of North American freshwater mussels for scientists, natural resource professionals, students and natural history enthusiasts.
The Northwest has been at the forefront of forest management and research in the United States for more than one hundred years. In The U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest, Gerald Williams provides an historical overview of the part the Forest Service has played in managing the Northwest's forests. Emphasizing changes in management policy over the years, Williams discusses the establishment of the national forests in Oregon and Washington, grazing on public land, the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of multiple-use management policies. He draws on extensive documentation of the post-war development boom to explore its effects on forests and Forest Service workers. Discussing such controversial issues as roadless areas and wilderness designation; timber harvesting; forest planning; ecosystems; and spotted owls, Williams demonstrates the impact of 1970s environmental laws on national forest management. The book is rich in photographs, many drawn from the Gerald W. Williams Collection, housed in University Archives at Oregon State University Libraries. Extensive appendices provide detailed data about Pacific Northwest forests. Chronicling a century of the agency's management of almost 25 million acres of national forests and grasslands for the people of the United States, The U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest is a welcome and overdue resource.
