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Foreword There’s so much history that it has to get written in shorthand—we take up the civil rights movement and invariably end up talking about Martin Luther King Jr. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that it leads us to believe he sprang full-blown on the scene, instead of emerging, invariably, from a tradition. This wonderfully informative biography helps us understand that tradition in the conservation movement, by focusing on the quite marvelous Rosalie Edge. If, in the civil rights tradition, organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin paved the way for the explosion of the sixties, in the conservation movement Edge is one of the people who made Rachel Carson and David Brower possible. We’ve tended to focus on the years either side of WorldWarIIassleepyonesintheAmericanenvironmentalmovement—the excitement of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt gone, the country’s attention focused on expansion and then on the Depression and then on war and then once more on prosperity. But Edge and others—Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold—were building the framework for much that would come. Was there ever anyone better named? Edge had the same patrician access that defined conservation for most of the twentieth century, but thank heaven she didn’t play by the same rules. She wrote new ones, most importantly with her willingness to forego politeness and accommodation when necessary. She spoke and wrote with vehemence and urgency, and hence was a thorn in the side to the more staid environmentalists of her day. These kinds of battles are still under way, of course, and she is an inspiration to those of us who must sometimes fight almost as hard to move the establishment “green groups” that dominate Washington discourse as we do the Congress or the White House. xii ] foreword Her life story suggests some of the necessary resources for this kind of work (though no one can ever really know the sources of the fearlessness that allows one to stand out from the crowd). Above all, I think, she was grounded in place: there was a center to her universe, Hawk Mountain, that let her understand her place in the great world. She paid back that gift, of course, protecting the mountain for the hundreds of thousands who love its unmatched spectacle. It does not surprise me that it took a woman to shame many of the more conservative environmentalists of her day. She came of age in the suffrage movement and hence was used to the idea that she’d need to roar a little to make her voice heard. She reminds me not only of Carson, who stared down the chemical industry and its congressional lackeys, but of other grand women of the present: writers and activists like Terry Tempest Williams or Janisse Ray or Lois Gibbs or Vandana Shiva or Arundhati Roy. For those of us in the trenches, slogging it out each day in the high-stakes fights of our time on questions such as climate change, this is an invaluable piece of history , one that gives guidance and courage in equal measure. Bill McKibben ...

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