After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California

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Univ of California Press, Feb 25, 2020 - History - 336 pages
Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived.

Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species—the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox—Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century, this book claims, will be to redefine habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
The Land of the Bears
12
A New Movement
42
The Official Landscape
69
The Laws of Nature
96
From Controversy to Consensus
122
Ambassador for the Outback
149
The Flagship Fox
175
Water Politics
198
Epilogue
225
Selected Bibliography
281
Index
301
Copyright

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About the author (2020)

Peter S. Alagona is Associate Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was previously a Bill Lane Fellow at Stanford and Beagle Environmental Fellow at Harvard and has worked as a national park ranger and a consulting ecologist.

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