This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   A professor assigned my class Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the book credited with launching the modern environmental movement, my senior year of college. I hadn’t heard much about the classic then, but I was intrigued enough by Carson’s concern for the future, and the promise of a good grade. I quickly understood why it is a critical read for conservationists and how it popularized the field ...

This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   Bernard DeVoto spent the greater part of his career, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, writing essays and articles about the West. During that first decade, most of his fierce writings defended the West and its resident Westerners from the greed of Eastern profiteers. In the second decade, however, his pen turned against the Westerners, as he became convinced that they were their own worst ...

  This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   When I think of Desert Solitaire I remember a little riverside camp I scraped out of the grass and brush by the Colorado, not far from Moab, Utah, near the mouth of a canyon that’s since been re-named Grandstaff. I was a year out of college and living on public lands: national forests in South Dakota and Wyoming, national monuments in Arizona, BLM lands in Utah, for seasons at a time. Edward ...

  This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists    In Bloodties, Kerasote brings the reader along with him on three journeys, and each involves hunting but from vastly different viewpoints, motivations and outcomes. His time is spent with natives on the ice edge in Greenland, Westerners in pursuit of rams in Siberia and on a journey home to hunt elk in Wyoming. Each is a story about people and how they interact with one another, the critters ...

This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   Published posthumously in 1949, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is as close to a bible for conservationists as any work can be. In it he discusses things like a “land ethic,” which simply says: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” He reflects on predator control in service of better ...