DeVoto's West : history, conservation, and the public good / by Bernard DeVoto ; edited by Edward K. Muller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

De Voto, Bernard, 1897-1955.

Contributor:

Muller, Edward K.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Environmental protection--West (U.S.).

Environmental protection.

Conservation of natural resources--West (U.S.).

Conservation of natural resources.

Public lands--West (U.S.).

Public lands.

Common good.

Environmental degradation--West (U.S.).

Environmental degradation.

West (U.S.)--Environmental conditions.

West (U.S.).

West (U.S.)--History.

West (U.S.)--Description and travel.

Physical Description:

xxxv, 275 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press : Ohio University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Social commentator and preeminent Western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. At his death in 1955, DeVoto had won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. But he was most famous for his eloquent writing that advocated conservation of America's prairies, rangeland, forests, mountains, canyons, and deserts.DeVoto's West: Essays on History, Conservation, and the Public Good showcases the complexity, depth, and breadth of DeVoto's thinking. Editor Edward K. Muller introduces these twenty-two essays (many of which originally appeared in Harper's renowned column The Easy Chair) that passionately and coherently advocate federal control for vast tracts of public land. DeVoto addressed many issues, including the plundering of resources by absentee eastern corporations, Westerners? conflicted relationship to exploitation, and the degradation of the national parks. He believed that conservation of natural resources in the West required government control of public lands against livestock associations, timber interests, and their congressional allies who plotted the privatization of the national forests and the extraction of resources in the national parks.DeVoto's West collects the best of DeVoto's conservation pieces for the first time. It will introduce a new generation to prose that has retained its relevance and remains a remarkably current and timely argument for protecting public lands.Bernard DeVoto was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1897. He spent his adult life in the East, first teaching English at Northwestern University, Chicago, then living in New York, and finally settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the subject of anacclaimed biography, The Uneasy Chair, by Wallace Stegner.Edward K. Muller is a professor of history and director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written widely on the historical geography of American cities and is co-editor of The Atlas of Pennsylvania and North-America: the Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (second edition).

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I: DeVoto's West

Footnote on the West

Fossil Remnants of the Frontier

The West: A Plundered Province

The Anxious West

The High Country

Part II: The Western Land Grab, 1940s

The West Against Itself

The Western Land Grab

U.S. Forest Service and the Western Land Grab

Sacred Cows and Public Lands

Statesmen on the Lam

Part III: Desert, Water, and the West

The West

Flood in the Desert

Our Hundred Year Plan

And Fractions Drive Me Mad

Part IV: Protection of the National Parks

Intramural Giveaway

Let's Close the National Parks

Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?

National Park Service

The Western Land Grab, 1950s

One-Way Partnership Derailed

Conservation: Down and on the Way Out

An Old Steal Refurbished

Two-Gun Desmond Is Back

A Bibliography of DeVoto's West

Index.

Notes:

"Published in association with the Center for American Places Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Staunton, Virginia."

"DeVoto's West collects twenty-two of DeVoto's essays on the American West and convervation issues"--Introd.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8040-4014-1

OCLC:

84860227