Jordan Fisher Smith's Books

Nature Noir

A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

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Nature Noir

A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

Smith chronicles his 14 years as a park ranger on a huge tract of government land in the Sierras, illuminating some startling truths about America's wild lands.

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Page Count

228

Publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published Date

ISBN 10

0618711953

ISBN 13

9780618711956

Engineering Eden

The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

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Engineering Eden

The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is "wild" dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve.

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Page Count

394

Publisher

Crown

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307454266

ISBN 13

9780307454263

Engineering Eden

A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

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Engineering Eden

A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

The award-winning story of the century-and-half-long attempt to control nature in the American wilderness, told through the prism of a tragic death at Yellowstone—now in paperback In the summer of 1972, 25-year-old Harry Eugene Walker hitchhiked away from his family’s northern Alabama dairy farm to see America. Nineteen days later he was killed by an endangered grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. The ensuing civil trial, brought against the US Department of the Interior for alleged mismanagement of the park’s grizzly population, emerged as a referendum on how America’s most beloved wild places should be conserved. Two of the twentieth century’s greatest wildlife biologists testified—on opposite sides. Moving across decades and among Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Sequoia National Parks, author and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith has crafted an epic, emotionally wrenching account of America’s fraught, century-and-a-half-long attempt to remake Eden—in the name of saving it.

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Page Count

422

Publisher

The Experiment

Published Date

ISBN 10

1615195459

ISBN 13

9781615195459

Engineering Eden

A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

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Engineering Eden

A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

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Page Count

422

Publisher

The Experiment

Published Date

ISBN 10

1615195459

ISBN 13

9781615195459

Nature Noir

A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

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Nature Noir

A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra

By: Jordan Fisher Smith

“A nature book unlike any other…peppered with gritty, anti-romantic, all-too-real tales of cops ’n’ bad guys in the great outdoors.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune Jordan Fisher Smith’s startling account of fourteen years as a park ranger thoroughly dispels our idealized visions of life in the great outdoors. Instead of scout troops and placid birdwatchers, Smith's beat—a stretch of land that has been officially condemned to be flooded—brings him into contact with drug users tweaked out to the point of violence, obsessed miners, and other dangerous creatures. In unflinchingly honest prose, he both portrays the breathtaking natural world around him and reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands. “Gloriously unlike anything I’ve ever read before…gives entree into a strange, dark, and mesmerizing outdoor world that's absolutely unforgettable.”—The Boston Globe “By turns funny, poignant and surprising…an intimate memoir of the career of a state-park ranger. Not just any ranger, but one with a wicked pen, patrolling a doomed landscape.”—Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer “Compelling…refreshingly unsentimental.”—Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams “Smith offers a fresh perspective on our threatened environment…Nature Noir reflects the spirit of an era as did Desert Solitaire.”—Charlotte Observer

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Page Count

251

Publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547526490

ISBN 13

9780547526492

Mindful Arts in the Classroom

Stories and Creative Activities for Social and Emotional Learning

By: Andrew Jordan Nance

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Mindful Arts in the Classroom

Stories and Creative Activities for Social and Emotional Learning

By: Andrew Jordan Nance

Written especially for the teacher or camp director who wants to bring mindfulness, social and emotional learning (SEL), and the arts into their busy day through storytelling and fun games, this book offers a complete course that helps kids identify and talk about their feelings, self-regulate and self-soothe when stressed, and learn from easy mindfulness practices. Educator and theater director Andrew Nance is the author of the popular children's book Puppy Mind, which brought a new dimension of cuteness to the practice of mindfulness in the form of a rambunctious, playful puppy. In this book, Nance brings the puppy and a host of other friendly characters into the classroom to animate a 21-lesson curriculum centered around lively stories and easy-to-lead exercises for young students from kindergarten to third grade. Nance offers a teacher's guide to arts-based mindfulness exercises utilizing story-telling, theater games, and drawing to spark students' self-expression, self-awareness, and social and emotional well-being.

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Age

Page Count

408

Publisher

Parallax Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1946764140

ISBN 13

9781946764140

Book's by Jordan Fisher Smith

Nature Noir

Nature Noir

Engineering Eden

Engineering Eden

Engineering Eden

Engineering Eden

Engineering Eden

Engineering Eden

Nature Noir

Nature Noir

Mindful Arts in the Classroom

Mindful Arts in the Classroom

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