America's Forested Wetlands: From Wasteland to Valued Resource - Paperback

by Jeffrey K. Stine (Author)

From the darkest, most forbidding swamp to the smallest soggy bog at the side of a housing development, wetlands provide invaluable ecological services to life on earth. Yet, prior to the 1930s, few people worried about the mounting loss of these essential landscapes.

America's Forested Wetlands chronicles the history of American attitudes and actions toward the ambiguous transitional areas between dry land and open water. From the clear-cutting of cypress swamps and the wholesale filling and draining of marshes and bottomlands to the growing recognition of how these lands contribute to flood control, water quality, and biological diversity and on to today's energetic political debates over "no net loss" policies designed to protect, enhance, restore, or recreate wetlands, the story involves increasing human understanding and appreciation of an important but limited resource.

America's Forested Wetlands addresses one of the most persistent and contentious issues in natural resources management and offers an essential primer for landowners, teachers, students, journalists, and government decision makers and advisors.

Author Biography

Jeffrey K. Stine is Curator for Environmental History and Chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Prior to joining the Smithsonian in 1989, he served as an American Historical Association Congressional Fellow with the House Committee on Science and Technology, where he assisted on the special Task Force on Science Policy by writing A History of Science Policy in the United States, 1940-1985 (1986). As an independant consultant, he has written policy histories for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Office of History, the National Science Foundation's Office of Policy Reesearch and Analysis, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Directorate for Science and Policy programs, and the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government. He founded and coedited the University of Akron Press book series Technology and the Environment (1993-2001) and has been an editorial advisor to RFF Press since 2003. He has served as president of the American SOciety for Environmental History (1999-2001) and the Public Works Historical Society (2002-2003).

Stine's article "Regulating Wetlands in the 1970s: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Organizations" received the Forest History Society's Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Award for the best article published in the Journal of Forest History in 1983. He has been awarded several other prizes for his scholarship, including the 1992 James Madison Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government, the 1993 G. Wesley Johnson Prize from the National Council on Public History, the 1994 Abel Wolman Award from the Public Works Historical Society, the 1995 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award, and the 1999 Charles Thompson Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government.

His publications include Technology and Choice (coedited with Marcel C. LaFollette; 1991), Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway (1993). Twenty Years of Science in the Public Interest: A History of the Congressional Science and Engineering Fellowship Program (1994), and Going Underground: Tunneling Past, Present, and Future (coedited with Howard Rosen; 1998).