Losing Eden
An Environmental History of the American West
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
American Scientist Recommended Read
Historical narratives often concentrate on wars and politics while omitting the central role and influence of the physical stage on which history is carried out. In Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years.
In this lively narrative Dant discusses the key events and topics in the environmental history of the American West, from the Beringia migration, Columbian Exchange, and federal territorial acquisition to post–World War II expansion, resource exploitation, and current climate change issues. Losing Eden is structured around three important themes: balancing economic success and ecological destruction, creating and protecting public lands, and achieving sustainability.
This revised and updated edition incorporates the latest science and thinking. It also features a new chapter on climate change in the American West, a larger reflection on the region’s multicultural history, updated current events, expanded and diversified suggested readings, along with new maps and illustrations. Cohesive and compelling, Losing Eden recognizes the central role of the natural world in the history of the American West and provides important analysis on the continually evolving relationship between the land and its inhabitants.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Americans have long celebrated progress, material wealth, and technological advancements without considering their true environmental price," according to this edifying environmental history of the Western United States. Dant (Encyclopedia of American National Parks), a history professor at Weber State University, suggests that farming, ranching, and urban growth in the West have tested the region's ecological limits, devastated ecosystems, destroyed Native communities, and expended resources at an unsustainable rate. The author provides an overview of how glacial retreat around 15,000 years ago left the area between the Sierra and Rocky Mountains "arid and austere" and how Indigenous populations altered the landscape west of the Great Plains with controlled burns. However, Dant trains most of her attention on the ways in which European colonizers and their descendants have ravaged Western ecosystems, telling how settlers "depleted the region's big game populations" in the 1800s and caused the 1930s Dust Bowl by replacing "deep-rooted prairie bunchgrasses" with wheat and corn. Descriptions of humans' failure to live in harmony with the land resonate with contemporary concerns about global warming, though Dant's prescription for a more sustainable lifestyle (people should live "within, not in spite of, the carrying capacity of the land") is a bit amorphous. Nonetheless, this is a penetrating take on the complicated ways that humans impact their environs. Photos.
Customer Reviews
An excellent, page-turner that I highly recommend
Dr. Dant's book covers a broad swath of history: from before the first humans set foot in North America through today. Somehow, she manages to summarize the most important events and people in pager-turner like fashion. I couldn't put "Losing Eden" down. I highly recommend it for anyone with a curiosity about the American West, and/or about the United States writ large.