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from the editor
| THE ESSAYS IN THIS ISSUE cover a wide range of topics and periods. Mark Carey's "The History of Ice" examines one of nature's icons—glaciers—through a variety of scientific and nonscientific discourses over the past several centuries, discourses that have made glaciers into symbols of mortal danger, romantic sublimity, pristine wilderness, and, most recently, global warming. |
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Kevin Armitage's "Bird Day for Kids" looks at Progressive Era efforts to educate children and adults on the importance of avian conservation, an effort that in many ways ran parallel to the better-known Arbor Day celebrations for tree and forest protection. Readers who have a special interest in birds also should pay particular attention to the "Sources" piece by Jerald Dosch. |
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Andrew Jenks's "Model City USA" investigates the long-term impact of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works on the environment around Niagara Falls; his essay reveals a history of nuclear contamination that emerged side by side with the more familiar Love Canal chemical dumpings in the same region. Mark Fiege's "The Atomic Scientists," meanwhile, explores the apparent contradiction between the "sense of wonder" about nature that Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists displayed while working at Los Alamos in the early 1940s and their single-minded devotion to producing a weapon capable of annihilating large parts of the natural world in an instant. |
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In "White Pine in the Northern Forests," Michelle Steen-Adams, Nancy Langston, and David Mladenoff trace the history of Wisconsin's famed white pine forests in light of lumbering policies and forest-management strategies in the Great Lakes area. Blending oral history, agency reports, interviews, geographic information systems, and secondary literature, the authors develop a multicausal argument to explain the removal and recovery of this important species. |
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Every two years the journal publishes the Presidential Address of the outgoing ASEH president. We are pleased to include Stephen J. Pyne's "The End of the World" in this issue. Those of you who heard his speech at the ASEH meeting in Baton Rouge this past March will be happy to know that Steve resisted the urge to alter it substantially. Those of you who did not attend the presidential luncheon will be delighted by its wisdom and eloquence. |
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Finally, Samuel P. Hays has been writing environmental history longer than some members of ASEH and FHS have been alive. Char and I were delighted that he agreed to be interviewed for this issue. |
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MARK CIOC
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