Environmental Arts and Humanit – Serie

An engaging, well-illustrated natural and cultural history of the oldest living organism—the bristlecone pine. Since Edmund Schulman discovered in 1958 that individual bristlecones live nearly 5,000 years, the trees have been investigated primarily for the elaborate record their rings contain. The trees have been ""read' closely, with major consequences for natural and human history. Historians have read local and global environmental change. Archaeologists have rewritten the history of civilization. Writers have transformed them into figures pertinent to the human dilemmas of time and eternity. A Garden of Bristlecones investigates professional and popular conceptions as a set of narratives drawn from the outside and inside of the trees. It reveals the premises of the investigators, the nature of their inquiry, and the extent of their knowledge, while also revealing the Great Basin bristlecone itself. Illustrations by Valerie Cohen.

From a cartographer who wrote to a writer who mapped, the literary significance of surveying is revealed in this study of human relationships to the landscape. From the very beginning, American literature was closely intertwined with surveying. In Surveying the Interior, Rick Van Noy explores the ways that four American literary cartographers—Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and Wallace Stegner—concerned themselves with what it means to map or survey a place and what it means to write about it. In the process, he helps define the ways by which space enters the human psyche as definable place, as well as the ways by which physical landscape is transmuted into a sense of place as an intimate, personal manifestation of both physical and existential realities.

Fifty miles northwest of Los Angeles, Sespe Creek flows through some of the wildest territory in California. To nature writer and outdoorsman Bradley John Monsma, it is the place ""that teaches me to be fully alive,"" a place that reminds us of what we've lost and inspires us to love what's left. ""The Sespe Wild"" chronicles Monsma's exploration of this fantastic region. His attention ranges from the physical Sespe to its subsurface geology, and he discusses both the Chumash people who first occupied it and the impact of Spanish and American settlers. He also considers the Sespe through the eyes of some of its nonhuman populations - the nearly extinct condors, the vanished grizzlies, the mountain sheep, steelhead trout, and red-legged frogs. He ponders the tension between preservation and management of wilderness and the critical issues that arise wherever wilderness and cities meet. Monsma's informative, nuanced, and witty meditation on one of California's last best places brilliantly combines history with attentive observations on the natural world, the symbolic and spiritual levels of human experience with the land, and the power of the land's ongoing creation and renewal.