Thinking Like A Mountain

This book of readings, meditations, rituals and workshop notes prepared on three continents provides a context for ritual identification with the natural environment. As relevant today as when it was originally published in 1988, this classic of the sustainability movement helps us experience our place in the web of life - rather than at the apex of some human-centered pyramid. An important deep ecology educational tool for activist, school and religious groups, it can also be used for personal reflection.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. In this lyrical meditation on America's wildlands, Aldo Leopold considers the different ways humans shape the natural landscape, and describes for the first time the far-reaching phenomenon now known as 'trophic cascades'. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

When initially published more than twenty years ago, Thinking Like a Mountain was the first of a handful of efforts to capture the work and thought of America's most significant environmental thinker, Aldo Leopold. This new edition of Susan Flader's masterful account of Leopold's philosophical journey, including a new preface reviewing recent Leopold scholarship, makes this classic case study available again and brings much-deserved attention to the continuing influence and importance of Leopold today. Thinking Like a Mountain unfolds with Flader's close analysis of Leopold's essay of the same title, which explores issues of predation by studying the interrelationships between deer, wolves, and forests. Flader shows how his approach to wildlife management and species preservation evolved from his experiences restoring the deer population in the Southwestern United States, his study of the German system of forest and wildlife management, and his efforts to combat the overpopulation of deer in Wisconsin. His own intellectual development parallels the formation of the conservation movement, reflecting his struggle to understand the relationship between the land and its human and animal inhabitants. Drawing from the entire corpus of Leopold's works, including published and unpublished writing, correspondence, field notes, and journals, Flader places Leopold in his historical context. In addition, a biographical sketch draws on personal interviews with family, friends, and colleagues to illuminate his many roles as scientist, philosopher, citizen, policy maker, and teacher. Flader's insight and profound appreciation of the issues make Thinking Like a Mountain a standard source for readers interested in Leopold scholarship and the development of ecology and conservation in the twentieth century.

In the West, shortsighted human self-interest has resulted in devastating environmental losses. The fur trade decimated beaver populations, and streams and wetland ecosystems deteriorated. Though most mining ceased by the late 1920s, water running from the Pacific Mine nearly a century later still carried ten times the lead level standard set by the federal Clean Water Act. Where grazing depleted native bunchgrasses, fire-prone cheatgrass grew in its place. Migrating from Idaho streams, salmon once reached the ocean in ten to fourteen days. Now it takes fifty or more. In 2016, a snowstorm blew a flock of snow geese off course. They landed on contaminated water, and about three thousand died. Author Niels S. Nokkentved takes a fresh look at environmental challenges affecting Northwest residents. His essays examine cultural conflicts over resource extraction, threats to watersheds from abandoned mines, wolf recovery in the northern Rocky Mountains, the lingering effects of livestock grazing on western rangelands, and the rapidly disappearing sage grouse. They discuss the importance of forest fires, the value of beavers, the failed promises of salmon hatcheries, the reasons behind the decline of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest, and how unlikely allies learned to set aside their differences in order to resolve long-standing disputes. Nokkentved’s goal is to encourage people to think like a mountain--in other words, to consider the long-term consequences. He shares his connection to each concern as well as his own evidence-based perspective. He believes that it most profits society--collectively and as individuals--when people respect the balance of nature, and he wants to draw others to the same conclusion.

Nature has been Robert Bateman's inspiration ever since he began painting birds from his bedroom window as a young boy. The wildlife he features in his paintings are expressions of his love and respect for the natural world. A passionate environmentalist who has devoted his life to documenting the awesome power of nature, Bateman is deeply worried about the state of our planet and the fate of our natural heritage. Whenever he talks about his paintings, he talks about the environmental messages they convey, and those who have heard him speak have clamoured for a book that encapsulates his philosophy. Thinking Like a Mountain is the result of many years of thinking, talking and writing about the world's growing environmental crisis. Beautifully designed and illustrated with original drawings, it is a gathering of questions, observations and ideas Robert Bateman has drawn from his own life experiences and gleaned from the writings of some of the visionaries who have influenced him. As Einstein said, "We cannot solve the problems of today with the same thinking that gave us the problems in the first place."Only a profound shift in philosophy, Bateman believes, can save our species from extinction. Thinking Like a Mountain is printed on 100 per cent ancient-forest-free paper that is 100 per cent post-consumer recycled and has been processed chlorine free.

First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "full of beauty and vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with a call for changing our understanding of land management.

A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the built environment. Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached “the end of nature,” as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared, what is there left to protect? In Thinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the “environment”—that is, the world that actually surrounds us, which is always a built world, the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls, too, are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains. Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and, in its politics, should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as “nature”) can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment, he contends, may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not “how can we save nature?” but rather “what environment should we inhabit, and what practices should we engage in to help build it?”

"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."—The New York Times Book Review Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods—all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever. “An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after year.” —The Horn Book