As a law professor, I always regretted one aspect of the severely edited case reports in the textbooks that I taught from. Eager to get to the main point— analyzing the law that would govern the decision—they seemed to give only the most cursory account of the interesting parts of the story: what happened, who made it happen, and whom did it happen to? I worried that students would take on board the implicit message that the people whose lives were entangled in the law didn’t matter much compared to the law’s lofty majesty. This list and my own book represent my protest against this mistaken idea.
Fifty years ago, a federal judge in Washington State issued a decision that upended the fishing economy and culture of the Pacific Northwest. United States v. Washington, which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court, held that treaties between the government and the tribal peoples of that region must be respected and ruled that the tribes had a right to 50% of the annual catch.
Wilkinson, one of the lawyers who advised and represented the tribal peoples, imbues his account of the lawsuit and its aftermath with Indian values and culture. Importantly, this form of storytelling includes numerous oral histories. They could serve the right reader as a sort of spiritual guide to how to behave when you, a peaceful person, find that your rights are being violated with apparent impunity.
'Billy Frank, Jr., has been celebrated as a visionary, but if we go deeper and truer, we learn that he is best understood as a plainspoken bearer of traditions, a messenger, passing along messages from his father, from his grandfather, from those further back, from all Indian people, really. They are messages about the natural world, about societies past, about this society, and about societies to come. When examined rigorously - not out of any romanticism but only out of our own enlightened self-interest - these messages can be of great practical use to us in this and future years'…
By lucky lottery of birth, Missoula, Montana, nestled between forested mountains and sliced through by trout-filled rivers, is where I was born and raised. Public land conservation came into my consciousness naturally as clean, pine-scented air. But when I moved to overcrowded New York City in 2001 to try a career in journalism, homesickness made me begin researching conservation. Why are there public lands in the West? What forces prompted their creation? Who wants public lands, and who opposes them? Can their history teach us about our present and our future? These books began answering my questions.
This is an engrossing tour of public lands from Terry Tempest Williams, a poet and essayist who is an American treasure. From this beautiful and vivid book, I realized spiritual connections between human beings and nature, between past and future, between the soul and the earth.
America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.
From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that…
