One of the great joys of this project has been learning about some of the extraordinary people whose contributions to the environmental conservation movement are underappreciated today, and sometimes even in their own time. Of these, perhaps my favorite characters are Rosalie Edge and Willard G. Van Name. There is a more section on them in the 1916-62 EC History Chapter, and below I provide a link to a contemporaneous magazine profile of Edge. Here I just want to call out

I have described Yosemite NP as being the high temple of the conservation movement. I have certainly written a lot about it throughout the site, particularly in connection with John Muir. But I had never been there. I am so grateful to finally have had the opportunity to visit - Maria and I spent several days there last month on a road/hiking trip through the Sierras. One can know and even write about how vast the park is, but until you are there it is difficult to truly

July 2025 was largely spent with my wife traveling in the Adirondacks and northern New England hiking, camping, backpacking, and...

There are a number of seminal places in the history of the American environmental conservation movement. On the east coast, the...

I highlight here what I consider to be most important, unique and “collectible” books impacting the environmental conservation movement,...

This website and the Collection which it documents naturally focuses on the written word. The importance of images in driving public appreciation for the need for conservation measures is undeniable, however. The purpose of this post is not to get deep into the impact images have had on the EC movement - that topic is discussed in various places on the website and widely discussed elsewhere. Rather, I am trying to coalesce info from across the site into one spot in order t

The history of the early environmental conservation movement in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is, to a meaningful degree, a history of the formation and influence of organizations dedicated in one way or another to promoting outdoor recreation, appreciation and/or conservation.  Any study of the conservation movement of this period is chock-full of references to these groups and the influence of both the groups and their individual members. Many of the auth

The post-Civil War years saw the four multi-year "great surveys" of the western U.S., all sponsored or funded at least to some extent by...

I had the pleasure last week of again attending the John Burroughs Association awards luncheon honoring the best nature writing of 2023. ...

The development of forestry as an independent discipline in the US is intertwined with the early years of the environmental conservation...

One of the joys of this whole project has been learning about so many extraordinary people who had meaningful impacts on our world. I wanted to highlight some of those women or are less known than others - at least to me. This post is essentially a continuation of the post on women of the EC Movement (4/5/23) (and secondarily the posts about Ann LaBastille (7/22/23) and Florence Merriam Bailey (4/16/23)). Some of the women were, in fairness, reasonably prominent in their t

I first read Walden probably 25 years ago - in the late 90’s - before kids. It blew me away. Walden deserves its place at or near the...

I've just finished reading Carol Grant Gould’s outstanding 2004 biography of William Beebe (Island Press) - The Remarkable Life of...

On Saturday Sept. 2, 2023, my wife and I finally visited Woodchuck Lodge, the farmhouse where John Burroughs spent summers during the...

Ann LaBastille's Woodswoman (1976) is a favorite book of mine - one I discovered directly as a result of this project. Yesterday, my...

There is a lot of material on this website - to say the least. A friend suggested that I make some sort of effort to provide readers a...

I just acquired and catalogued a copy of Florence Merriam Bailey's magnum opus Birds of New Mexico (1928), a large, heavy tome that, as...

It is an undeniable fact that the Collection consists disproportionately of works by (white) men. I address this elsewhere - it is a...

I had the privilege of attending the John Burroughs Association (JBA) annual luncheon yesterday (4/3/23), where they confer the...