Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Inside Passage: A Journey Beyond Borders Book

Drawing a case study from the Pacific Northwest, where he makes his home, noted environmental journalist Richard Manning argues that long-practiced conservation strategies are not enough to protect wild lands, and that little can come from calling for more wilderness preservation when the lands beyond the wilderness are so ill used. "The fundamental problem," he writes, "is in the scale and nature of human development; rethinking our definition of wilderness seems an academic exercise in the face of real pollution, sprawl, mindlessness, and greed." That development, he continues, involves imposing an industrial model on the world's ecosystems, so that, in the case of the Northwest, rivers have been seen as factories that make fish and electricity, forests as factories that make timber, and mountains as factories that make ore. That model is not only incorrect, he says, but also dangerously misguided. In a journalistic tour of the region, Manning makes a convincing argument for removing dams on sensitive waterways; looks into the alarmingly high hidden costs of salmon and shrimp farming; condemns the suburbanization of the mountain West in the face of "white flight" from California; and looks into the lumbering practice called clear-cutting, which, though pioneered in the 1950s (by the U.S. Forest Service), was not put into general practice until the late 1970s. Manning's notions that it is possible to foster an economy of "conservation-based development" and that "wilderness has outlived its usefulness" will doubtless provoke controversy in green circles, while his call to reduce consumption and treat habitats of all kinds with more care won't play well in certain boardrooms--all of which means that, in his role as gadfly, Manning has done his job. --Gregory McNamee Read More

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  • Product Description

    "This book is about an idea that rests at the junction of what we call wilderness and civilization. Simply, it is a call for rethinking, and more importantly, reconstructing, our relationship with nature." -from Inside Passage.

    Protecting land in parks, safe from human encroachment, has been a primary strategy of conservationists for the past century and a half. Yet drawing lines around an area and calling it wilderness does little to solve larger environmental problems. As author Richard Manning puts it in a knowingly provocative way: "Wilderness designation is not a victory, but acknowledgement of defeat.".

    In Inside Passage, Manning takes us on a thought-provoking tour of the lands along the Pacific Northwest's Inside Passage-from southeast Alaska down through Puget Sound, and then on to the northern Oregon coast and the Columbia River system-as he explores the dichotomy between "wilderness" and "civilization" and the often disastrous effects of industrialization.

    Through vivid description and conversations with people in the region, Manning brings new insights to the area's most pressing environmental concerns-the salmon crisis, deforestation, hydroelectric dams, urban sprawl-and examines various innovative ways they are being addressed. He details efforts to restore degraded ecosystems and to integrate economic development with environmental protection, and looks at powerful new tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that are increasingly being used to further conservation efforts.

    Throughout, Manning focuses on the hopeful possibility that we can redesign the human enterprise to a scale more appropriate to the nature that holds it, that rather than drawing borders around nature, we might instead start placing borders on human behavior. Perhaps, he suggests, we can begin to behave in all places as if all places matter to us as much as wilderness, and, in the process, claim all of nature as our own.

    Inside Passageis a wide-ranging and thoughtful exploration by a gifted writer, and an important work for anyone interested in the Pacific Northwest, or concerned about the future of our relationship to the natural world.

  • 1559636556
  • 9781559636551
  • Richard Manning
  • 31 December 2000
  • Island Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 210
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