Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography

Rating:
Summary: Recommended for environmental studies reading lists
Review: The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography by educator and political history expert John Wennersten is the informed story of the Chesapeake Bay (also called the Crown Jewel of Maryland) and the Mid-Atlantic region. From its ice age origins 20,000 years ago to how its modern-day health reflects directly on the health of waters all over the world, The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography covers all that human science and history have known about this remarkable body of water. Strongly recommended for environmental studies reading lists and reference collections.

Rating:
Summary: The Survival of the Planet Is not a Special Interest
Review: This book confirms Wennersten's place as a premier authority on the Chesapeake Bay region. Like his earlier books, it renders massive, meticulous scholarship in eminently readable form for the general public. Beginning before the arrival of human beings, his story traces the impact of humans on their habitat and its impact on them from the First Native Americans through the tobacco kingdoms of the colonial period and the systematic exploitation of land and water down to the present day, concluding with hopes (dim though they may be) for the future, in the face of the staggering complexity of technological, political and economic forces. With a significance that goes well beyond its regional focus, the book is far from a sentimental plea for the reclamation of lost forests and dying waterways. Instead, Wennersten presents us with a daunting vision of the kind of rethinking that might help us to resist the continued commodification of nature, and to understand the need to reconsider some or our fundamental values. The fabled independence of the waterman, the vaunted creativity of the entrepreneurial spirit, and the generally unchallenged desirability of infinite economic growth all need to be reexamined. This book is an excellent gift for anyone who wants to begin understanding the processes -- natural, economic, cultural and political -- that could very well put human beings themselves on the endangered species list.

Rating:
Summary: The Survival of the Planet Is not a Special Interest
Review: This book confirms Wennersten's place as a premier authority on the Chesapeake Bay region. Like his earlier books, it renders massive, meticulous scholarship in eminently readable form for the general public. Beginning before the arrival of human beings, his story traces the impact of humans on their habitat and its impact on them from the First Native Americans through the tobacco kingdoms of the colonial period and the systematic exploitation of land and water down to the present day, concluding with hopes (dim though they may be) for the future, in the face of the staggering complexity of technological, political and economic forces. With a significance that goes well beyond its regional focus, the book is far from a sentimental plea for the reclamation of lost forests and dying waterways. Instead, Wennersten presents us with a daunting vision of the kind of rethinking that might help us to resist the continued commodification of nature, and to understand the need to reconsider some or our fundamental values. The fabled independence of the waterman, the vaunted creativity of the entrepreneurial spirit, and the generally unchallenged desirability of infinite economic growth all need to be reexamined. This book is an excellent gift for anyone who wants to begin understanding the processes -- natural, economic, cultural and political -- that could very well put human beings themselves on the endangered species list.