The West remains unsettled, both by cultural habits, intellectual debate, and ecological conditions. In these four essays, comprising the Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture, Donald Worster incisively discusses just how the natural environment has played an active, critical role in the making of the West - and often in its unmaking and remaking.

His subjects are four linked topics: the legacy of John Wesley Powell to western resource management; the domination of water policy by state, science, and capital since the mid-nineteenth century; the fate of wildlife in the push to settle the West; and the threat of global warming to the Great Plains.

The landscape of the West has for too long been seen as a challenge to be overcome. But in Worster's view it is seeing how people have dealt with and, all too often, mishandled nature that gives urgency to better understanding the region's ecological history. Worster argues for a new relationship of western people to their surroundings based on benfits to a community rather than on gains to individuals.