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For Denise Von Glahn, listening is that special quality afforded women who have been fettered for generations by the maxim "be seen and not heard." In Music and the Skillful Listener, Von Glahn explores the relationship between listening and musical composition focusing on nine American women composers inspired by the sounds of the natural world: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle. Von Glahn situates "nature composing" among the larger tradition of nature writing and argues that, like their literary sisters, works of these women express deeply held spiritual and aesthetic beliefs about nature. Drawing on a wealth of archival and original source material, Von Glahn skillfully employs literary and gender studies, ecocriticism and ecomusicology, and the larger world of contemporary musicological thought to tell the stories of nine women composers who seek to understand nature through music.
David Brower (1912–2000) was a central figure in the modern environmental movement. His leadership, vision, and elegant conception of the wilderness forever changed how we approach nature. In many ways, he was a twentieth-century Thoreau. Brower transformed the Sierra Club into a national force that challenged and stopped federally sponsored projects that would have dammed the Grand Canyon and destroyed hundreds of millions of acres of our nation's wilderness. To admirers, he was tireless, passionate, visionary, and unyielding. To opponents and even some supporters, he was contentious and polarizing. As a young man growing up in Berkeley, California, Brower proved himself a fearless climbe...
Book Review
Harvey details the first major clash between conservationists and developers after World War II, the successful fight to prevent the building of Echo Park Dam. The dam on the Green River was intended to create a recreational lake in northwest Colorado and generate hydroelectric power, but would have flooded picturesque Echo Park Valley and threatened Dinosaur National Monument, straddling the Utah-Colorado border near Wyoming.
Spaulding provides a full biography and a critical analysis of the work of the man who introduced the general public to photography as art.
Gould (American history, U. of Texas-Austin) has dusted off, updated, and thinned his 1988 Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment to kick off the new series on the wives of US presidents. He draws on Johnson's White House papers and interviews with her and her close associates to argue that she was one of the most politically active First Ladies though her concern with the environment was overshadowed by protests against the Vietnam War. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Founded by conservationist John Muir in 1892, the Sierra Club grew into the nation's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. It is devoted to the study and protection of eath's scenic and ecological resources.
"American Forests is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explore the impact of forestry on natural and human landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. It has two main goals: to present some of the most compelling arguments that have guided our understanding of the complex and evolving relationship between trees and people in the United States, and to point out those aspects of this tangled interaction that we have yet fully to understand or to articulate."--Preface, ix.