3 results for "Environment"

Yosemite in Time Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers

Rebecca Solnit
Yosemite is a world-famous location that has attracted photographic greats like Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, along with environmentalists, mountaineers, and countless tourists. Yosemite in Time puts this landscape and its history in a new perspective, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe's original photographs and panoramas, together with rephotographs of some of the most enduring images taken at Yosemite. In three essays, noted critic Rebecca Solnit brings in nature, culture, and politics to look through the past to understand the present. As she writes in her introduction, "Yosemite is a singular place onto which are mapped myriad expectations and desires." To track many of those designs, Klett, Solnit, and Wolfe made multiple expeditions over three years. They found the exact points where Muybridge, Weston, and Adams stood to photograph what would become seminal views of a grand landscape; they replicated the exact time of day and year of the earlier photographs in order to get exactly the same angle of light. While Klett and Wolfe brought both precision and invention to their rephotography, Solnit reconstructed the layers of meaning and overlapping ideas entwined with the "steep, intricate, hallowed, scarred landscape of Yosemite." Together, the photographs and essays reconsider the iconic status of Yosemite in America's conception of wilderness, examine how the place was interpreted by early Euro-Americans, and show how our conceptions of landscape have altered and how the landscape has changed--or not--over time. Arresting and incisive, Yosemite in Time explores the environmental and photographic history, science, and politics of a site that has long captured our collective imagination.
Trinity University Press 2005 140 pages

California Jews

Ava F. Kahn,Marc Dollinger
The nation's thirty-first state emerged early as one of its most diverse as people immigrated to the west. California's indigenous tribes were forced off their lands first by Spanish settlers, then by the arrival of gold miners from every corner of the world. Because of its Catholic missionary history, Gold Rush California did not experience a more exclusive eastern-style Protestantism. This permitted more rapid and inclusive acculturation. California Jews, unlike their eastern counterparts whose arrival often followed that of European Protestants, were often among the first settlers to establish a west coast community. Jewish immigrants to California took advantage of its physical environment, ethnic diversity, and cultural distinctiveness to fashion a form of Judaism unique in the American experience. California Jews enjoyed unprecedented access to political power a generation earlier than their New York counterparts. They thrived in the multicultural mix, redefining the classic black-white racial binary by forging relations with a variety of religious and ethnic groups in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Brandeis University Press 2012 196 pages

All Our Relations Native Struggles for Land and Life

Winona LaDuke
Haymarket Books proudly brings back into print Winona LaDuke's seminal work of Native resistance to oppression. This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. Winona LaDuke was named by Time in 1994 as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty. In 1996 and 2000, LaDuke served as Ralph Nader's vice presidential running mate in the Green Party.
Haymarket Books 2016-03 256 pages