A collection of short stories, poems, and essays written by women who share the experiences of living in the Southwest.

Introduction: into the wildness / Gavin Van Horn -- Wisdom of the wild. Wildfire news / Gary Snyder ; Conundrum and continuum: one man's wilderness, from a ditch to the dark divide / Robert Michael Pyle ; No word / Enrique Salmón ; The edge of anomaly / Curt Meine ; Order versus wildness / Joel Salatin ; Biomimicry: business from the wild / Margo Farnsworth ; Notes on "up at the basin" / David J. Rothman -- Working wild. Listening to the forest / Jeff Grignon and Robin Wall Kimmerer ; The working wilderness / Courtney White ; The hummingbird and the redcap / Devon G. Peña ; Losing wildness for the sake of wilderness: the removal of Drakes Bay Oyster Company / Laura Alice Watt ; Inhabiting the Alaskan wild / Margot Higgins ; Wilderness in four parts, or why we cannot mention my great-grandfather's name / Aaron Abeyta -- Urban wild. Wild black margins / Mistinguette Smith ; Healing the urban wild / Gavin Van Horn ; Building the civilized wild / Seth Magle ; Cultivating the wild on Chicago's South Side: stories of people and nature at Eden Place Nature Center / Michael Bryson and Michael Howard ; Toward an urban practice of the wild / John Tallmadge -- Planetary wild. The whiskered god of filth / Rob Dunn ; The akiing ethic: seeking ancestral wildness beyond Aldo Leopold's wilderness / John Hausdoerffer ; On the wild edge in Iceland / Brooke Hecht ; The story isn't over / Julianne Lutz Warren ; Cultivating the wild / Vandana Shiva ; Earth island: prelude to a eutopian history / Wes Jackson ; Epilogue: Wild partnership: a conversation with Roderick Frazier Nash / John Hausdoerffer.

Selected as one of The Progressive’s ‘Favourite Books of 2020’ Wildness was once integral to our ancestors' lives as they struggled to survive in an unpredictable environment. Today, most of us live in relative stability insulated from the vicissitudes of nature. Wildness is over, right? Wrong, argues leading environmental scholar Paul Wapner. Wildness may have disappeared from our immediate lives, but it’s been catapulted up to the global level. The planet itself has gone into spasm - calving glaciers, wildfires, heatwaves, mass extinction, and rising oceans all represent the new face of wildness. Rejecting paths offered by geoengineering and de-extinction to bring the Earth under control, Wapner calls instead for ‘rewilding’. This involves relinquishing the desire for comfort at all costs and welcoming greater uncertainty into our own lives. To save ourselves from global ruin, it is time to stop sanitizing and exerting mastery over the world and begin living humbly in it.

David Brower, "the Archdruid," as writer John McPhee called him, shaped the modern environmental movement. He directed or founded organizations including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Earth Island Institute and staffed them with young activists whom he inspired with his passion for the land and whose lives he transformed by his belief in their capacity for greatness. In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Brower's birth, his son Kenneth Brower interviewed nineteen environmental leaders, disciples, and friends about his father's impact on them personally as well as on the larger community. Amid tales of how David Brower pulled them from oblivion, sometimes drank them under the table, and often set them on courses for the rest of their lives, a nuanced portrait emerges not just of a complex man but of a movement still suffused with his spirit. Book jacket.

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.

A classic book of nature photography, this large-format volume is designed to convey the spirit of American nature as so sensitively described by Thoreau. Eliot Porter, one of America's foremost nature photographers, blends short excerpts from Thoreau's Walden and many other works with 72 full-color photographs that perfectly reproduce the writer's sense of quiet drama.

THE OFFICIAL NORTH AMERICAN EDITION "Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue." —The Guardian This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape. Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective. The book is a fictional time capsule curated by Erin, comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of Native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics. "Refreshingly outward-looking in a literary culture that turns ever inward to the self, although it still has profound moments of introspection. Uplifting, with a thirsty curiosity, the writing is playful and exuberant. Riffing on feminist ideas but unlimited in scope, Andrews focuses our attention on our beautiful, doomed planet, and the astonishing things we have yet to discover." —Ruth McKee, The Irish Times

Wouldn’t it be great to be wild? To be so natural and free that we could do whatever we want. But we can’t. If our species went wild the results could be very unpleasant. We might lose control. Our species has allowed itself to become artificial in its efforts to be careful and considerate. But what if we have made a mistake and miss the real value of wildness? In nature, not all animals are evolving, but all of them are wild. Why? Evolution is survival of the wildest, not survival of the fittest. Being wild allows an animal to become efficient in its niche. Wild species flourish in natural diversity and harmony. How do they do it? Our Wild Niche explores what it is to be wild, the obstacles that stand in the way of our being wild, and the human traits that will come forward when we finally do reach our wild niche. It also shows how the wildness links "everything" together into a sensible and complete package that will give new insight into the role of our human emotions, feelings, instincts, adaptations and desires.