Product Description: Aldo Leopold and Ed Ricketts are giants in the history of environmental awareness. They were born ten years and only about 200 miles apart and died within weeks of each other in 1948. Yet they never met and they didn't read each other's work...read more

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures. When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.

Product Description: From the beginnings of industrial capitalism to contemporary disputes over evolution, nature has long been part of the public debate over the social good. As such, many natural scientists throughout American history have understood their work as a cultural activity contributing to social stability and their field as a powerful tool for enhancing the quality of American life...read more

Product Description: Colonial America presented a new world of natural curiosities for settlers as well as the London-based scientific community. In American Curiosity, Susan Scott Parrish examines how various peoples in the British colonies understood and represented the natural world around them from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth...read more

Product Description: Recent Thoreau studies have shifted to an emphasis on the "green" Thoreau, on Thoreau the environmentalist, rooted firmly in particular places and interacting with particular objects. In the wake of Buell's Environmental Imagination, the nineteen essayists in this challenging volume address the central questions in Thoreau studies today: how "green", how immersed in a sense of place, was Thoreau really, and how has this sense of place affected the tradition of nature writing in America?The contributors to this stimulating collection address the ways in which Thoreau and his successors attempt to cope with the basic epistemological split between perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature; related discussions involve the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: John Burroughs combined scientific observation with poetic spirit in his nature writing. This collection of essays explores Burrough's life and character, as well as his role as a writer and his relationships with contemporaries including Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and Muir. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Thoreau's World and Ours is a tribute to the man who inspired others to examine the world around them with new intensity.

Product Description: "Charlotte Porter offers vivid details on the physical and professional trials of field naturalists, handicapped by lack of access to libraries and collections and held in deep disdain by the eastern savants, who more and more scorned their publications, rejected their species-splitting taxonomy, excluded them from the review process, and relegated them to the status of hirelings...read more

A study of the Victorian obsession with natural history incorporates portraits of the most popular naturalists--many of them notorious eccentrics--and examines the attempt to inculcate moral principles through natural theology