Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature

When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in 20th-century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses the story of one man's tragic death to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Their testimonies would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first pl

"Great historical accounting of defining moments and often tragic events subsequent to man's intervention in nature!" according to Dionisia. I found this book by Jordan Fisher Smith to be an intriguing historical accounting of the various interactions and interventions of humans in nature, specifically the National Parks and the consequences, both intended and unintended that are left behind. This true tale o. Detailed Insightful Perspectives I was working at Old Faithful when this happened and know many of the details. Grizzlies were in our NPS housing area every night. Special precautions were in place when you left a residence after dark. One night there was a 900-pound grizzly on the front porch of the tr. David Van Cleve said A splendid and insightful book.. Jordan Fisher Smith has written a magnificent book. Obviously, the hook here is the encounter between a grizzly and a human, with an unfortunate but predictable outcome. Mr. Smith, however, takes the reader behind the curtain into the inner workings of the National Park