United States
£ GBP
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 an important analysis of the continually evolving relationship between the land and its inhabitants.
List of Illustrations
Foreword, by Tom S. Udall
Introduction: The Nature of the West
1. Losing "Eden"
2. The West Transformed
3. Claiming and Taming the Land
4. The Great Barbecue
5. The Pivotal Decade
6. Conservation and Preservation
7. Roll On
8. Booming the West
9. Building Consensus
10. Environmental Backlash and the New West
11. The Last Frontier
Epilogue: Our Lonely Planet
Index
Sara Dant is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of history at Weber State University. She is the coauthor of the two-volume Encyclopedia of American National Parks. Tom S. Udall is a former United States senator and representative of New Mexico who has been a strong advocate for renewable energy, the environment, and conservation efforts.
"This updated and revised edition of the book brings more multicultural history, incorporates current events, and has a new chapter on climate change, along with new maps and illustrations."
– Jaime Herndon, American Scientist
"This is a penetrating take on the complicated ways that humans impact their environs."
– Publishers Weekly
"[Dant] is especially skilled at presenting complex, sometimes controversial topics in an engaging and fun-to-learn manner."
– Ed Roberson, mountainandprairie.com
"Everyone should take a look at Sara Dant's book Losing Eden. It's a history of something bigger than us and an essential read for anyone who cares about the past and future American West."
– Ken Burns, filmmaker
"Sara Dant has created something seemingly unattainable: a one-volume book – full of incisive analysis, wrapped in unforgettable storytelling – that covers the deep environmental history of the American West from twenty-five thousand years ago to today. She delivers an important cautionary tale about the relationship between people and nature, always asking a simple question: 'At what cost?' I learned something on every page."
– Dayton Duncan, author of The National Parks: America's Best Idea
"Sara Dant's Losing Eden is an environmental masterpiece about the American region she holds near and dear to her heart. Whether Dant tackles the problems of aridity, massive wildfires, or climate change, she hits all the right notes [...] This is a brilliant book, learned to its core, that will stand the test of time. Environmental history at its absolute finest. Highly recommended!"
– Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University
"This is environmental history at its best. Losing Eden offers a masterful narrative that explores broad-ranging themes and the historical connections, tensions, and contradictions that have defined the vibrant and diverse peoples and environments of the American West, as well as their relationship to one another."
– Eladio B. Bobadilla, assistant professor of Latinx history at the University of Pittsburgh
"This is history as it should be written, focusing not only on people but also on the natural environment as it changes through time. The result of that complex interaction has been a saga of conflict, hope, failure, conservation, and sustainability. Everyone who lives in the West should know its environmental history, and the rest of the world should know it too because it offers important lessons for humanity. This book is big in scale and rich in detail, yet written with economy and grace, with a scholar's judicious understanding, and with a lover's passion for the place."
– Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance
"In this fresh take on the history of the American West, Sara Dant tells us why 'the West as Eden' has always been a false illusion' and how truth-telling of our past might resolve twenty-first-century issues and even provide hope for our future."
– Rosalyn LaPier, author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet
"Losing Eden is no ordinary book. Dant begins with a simple question: At what environmental cost did Americans develop the largely arid West? In answer, she offers an engaging, provocative interpretation of the region's environmental and Indigenous history, from the primordial past to the present, with an eye toward the future in an era of climate change."
– Marsha Weisiger, author of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
