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"The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is 'wild' dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve"--
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Trials, litigation, Negligence, Nature, Bear attacks, United States. National Park Service, Effect of human beings on, United States, Environmentalism, Environmental conditions, Management, Trials, Violent deaths, National parks and reserves, History, United states, national park service, Nature, effect of human beings on, Trials, united states, National parks and reserves, united states, Yellowstone national park, SCIENCE, NATURE, Ecosystems & Habitats, Wilderness, Environmental Conservation & Protection, EcologyTimes
20th centuryShowing 3 featured editions. View all 3 editions?
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1
Engineering Eden: A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks
Mar 19, 2019, The Experiment
paperback
1615195459 9781615195459
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2
Engineering Eden: A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks
2019, Workman Publishing
in English
1615195602 9781615195602
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3
Engineering Eden: the true story of a violent death, a trial, and the fight over controlling nature
2016, Crown
in English
- First edition.
0307454266 9780307454263
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Book Details
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Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Feedback?December 18, 2022 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
August 25, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
July 19, 2019 | Created by MARC Bot | import new book |