Hope's Horizon: Three Visions For Healing The American Land / Edition 1

by Chip Ward

Overview

Environmental activist Ward reports on the activities of a range of environmental organizations across the United States, arguing that the combined picture demonstrates an abandonment of simple defense strategies and an increased engagement with efforts to reconnect humans to the environment, heal entire ecosystems, and completely abandon technologies that are "incompatible with life itself." Reporting on some 20 organizations, he looks at attempts to repopulate coyote and wolf populations in various states, campaigns to drain Lake Powell and restore the Glen Canyon, and nuclear abolition movements, among others. Annotation © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2901559639773
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	05/01/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Chip Ward is the co-founder of HEAL Utah, Families Against Incinerator Risk, and Citizens Against Chlorine Contamination, and is on the board of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. He is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West (Verso, 1999), a critically acclaimed account of grassroots organizing and citizen activism. He is also the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System.

Table of Contents

	Prologue
	Diving into Soup for Fun and Profit: Hubris and Progress in a Pothole	ix
	Reconnection
1.	Keeping Track, Watching Hawks	3
2.	It's a Trickster World--Just Ask Coyote	27
3.	Putting the Wolf at the Door	55
4.	How to Fill Sky Islands with Parrots and Jaguars	69
5.	Making the Map Meaningful	79
6.	ReWilding Earth	93
7.	I Used to Stomp on Grasshoppers, but Oysters Made Me Stop	107
	Restoration
1.	Flash Flood: Driven by Unquenchable Thirst into the Path of Danger	119
2.	Flashback: From Suicidal Fool to Prophetic Hydro-Hero, John Wesley Powell's Strange Trip Downriver	127
3.	Dammed If You Do, Damned If You Don't: Dominy vs. Brower	141
4.	Faux Flood: Diverting Disaster by Inviting Chaos	153
5.	Flash Forward: The Draining Debate over Powell's Dead Body	164
6.	A Ridiculous Idea Whose Time Has Come	173
7.	Fire in the Water: Salmon as Gift or Commodity	189
8.	Following the Money Through Fear and Loathing	201
9.	White Elephants in the Boneyard of Pride	219
	Abolition
1.	First, They Killed John Wayne	233
2.	The Perpetual Peril of the Peaceful Atom	245
3.	How the Evil Yellow Ore Returns	253
4.	Activists vs. Enablers	280
5.	A Glowing Account of Horatio Alger's ABCs	300
6.	Abolition and Precaution	317
	Epilogue	327
	Notes	331
	Acknowledgments	339
	Index	341

Editorial Reviews

Ward (Canaries on the Rim), a longtime environmental activist and successful grassroots organizer in the field, focuses on a refreshingly optimistic future for the earth. However, this hope-filled future is dependent on those with political authority adopting what the author believes are enlightened practices and theories in environmental science. With personal anecdotes and a conversational style, Ward provides the reader with a wealth of knowledge about contemporary environmental gurus and their teachings. He provides well-spun tales about critters like voles, coyotes, wolves, grasshoppers and oysters, and easily informs readers about such esoteric topics as deep ecology and the proposed rewilding of North America. He then delves into the causes and consequences of environmental catastrophes as diverse as the Aswan Dam, in Egypt; Lake Powell, Ariz.; and Chernobyl. However, Ward does not help to make his political case with his casual cheap-shot rhetoric against those he perceives as enemies of the environment. Additionally, he seems a fish out of water when he makes flip comments about geopolitics and the war on terrorism. These minor faults aside, this is an engaging and informative ecology book with a rare positive outlook. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

To learn more about the ways in which the ecological health of American land is being improved, Ward, a Utah environmental activist, studied three different projects: the Wildlands Project, whose mission is to assist the land trust movement in developing interconnected regional conservation plans; the campaign to remove the Glen Canyon Dam from the Colorado River and drain Lake Powell; and the struggle to keep Nevada's Great Basin Desert from becoming the nation's nuclear dumping ground. Here, Ward details the history of these projects, the biographies of the activists involved, his conversations with these activists, and the various political hurdles facing the projects. Throughout, he has trouble staying focused on the topic at hand; too many fillers and irrelevant padding make the book unnecessarily long, tedious, and hard to follow. At one point, for instance, he starts talking about a singer in Utah, then moves on to Anasazi culture and a sleazy engineer from Nebraska. Although it might find a place in environmental collections, this will probably not appeal to general readers. Ilse Heidmann, Washington State Lib., Olympia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Hope's Horizon tells us not to deny those crazy thoughts we have about changing the world. In fact, those thoughts are what change the world—they are the first green sprigs of a flower pushing through the spring soil....This book would make a good gift for someone who is learning about the environmental movement and might be inspired by personal, compelling stories of change."

Bloomsbury Review

"A must-read for all who seek a safe energy future."

Harvey Wasserman

"Chip Ward writes about problems of great import with wit and charm...he is a highly intelligent, morally determined man who knows what he is talking about."

Deseret Morning News

"Hope's Horizon is a lively and often downright poetic acount of an emerging movement for conservation."

David Johns

"Hope's Horizon is an engrossing, even wonderful, secret history of contemporary environmentalism."

Washington Post Book World