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Cargando... Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New Englandpor Diana Muir
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. A really excellent eco-history of New England; I enjoyed it immensely. ( ) Reflections in Bullough's Pond is an entertaining and well-researched environmental history. Muir has two twined stories: the change in New England's landscape from the introduction of agriculture to English settlement to industrialization to suburbanization, and the question of why New England supported a thriving economy when its natural resources were not profitably abundant. Muir's voice is clear throughout the book, whether she is talking about the flood patterns of her neighborhood or applying common sense where historical documentation is lacking ("...succulent as the [swordfish] steaks are, would anyone topple a three-hundred-foot tree and scrape the insides out of its five-foot-wide trunk with a clamshell... if he could spear a moose?" [p.7]). Her research ranges through historical sources, archeology, and scientific publications, and the book includes an astonishing amount of charts, graphs and maps. These are the kinds of stories I grew up hearing - about the submarine plants in CT closing in the later part of the cold war and leaving behind destitution - about the second-growth forest that has barely had a chance to spring back after agriculture and logging denuded the White Mountains. The dramatic changes that New England has seen is fascinating stuff, especially for an area associated in most people's minds only to colonial/revolutionary-era history. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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From the vantage point of a nearby pond in Newton, Massachusetts, Diana Muir reconstructs an intriguing interpretation of New England's natural history and the people who have lived there since pre-Columbian times. Taking a radically new way to illustrate for general readers the vast interrelationships between natural ecology and human economics, Muir weaves together an imaginative and dramatic account of the changes, massive and subtle, that successive generations of humankind and such animals as sheep and beavers have worked on the land. Her compelling narrative takes us to a New England populated by individuals struggling to make a living from a land not generously endowed by nature. Yankee history, she argues, was a string of ecological crises from which the only escape lay in creating radical new solutions to apparently insurmountable problems. Young men and women coming of age in the 1790s faced a bleak future. In a time when farming was virtually the only occupation, a burgeoning population meant that there was not enough land to go around. Worse, such land as there was had been worn out by generations of careless use. With no prospects and no options, young men like Eli Whitney and Thomas Blanchard might have resigned themselves to a life of poverty. Instead, they started an industrial revolution, the power of which astonished the world. Reflections in Bullough's Pond is history on a grand scale. Drawing on scholarship in fields ranging from archaeology to zoology, Muir offers an exhilarating tour of Paleolithic megafauna, the population crisis faced by New England natives in the pre-Columbian period, the introduction of indoor plumbing, and the invention of the shoe-peg. At the end, we understand ourselves and our world a little better. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)330.974Social sciences Economics Economics Economic geography and history North America Northeastern U.S.Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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