Exploring the ongoing histories of human-centered ecosystem management in the lands and waters that comprise what is now known as North America, this book tracks the diverse ways in which human-environmental relations have been presented across different forms of media.Including literature, film, visual arts, performing arts, park interpretive materials, and more, the book analyzes the many ways in which human-environmental relations have been articulated, experienced, understood, ...

Jada Ach’s scholarship in Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 seeks to reevaluate the Progressive Era’s environmental legacy. Taking an ecocritical approach to turn-of-the-century literature set in the American West, Ach interrogates texts by asking what kinds of environmental, national, and cultural stories the elements have to tell about land and oceanic management. Sand, Water, Salt investigates managerial engagements ...

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and ...