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  • Cities and Nature in the American West
  • Lawrence Culver
Cities and Nature in the American West. Edited by Char Miller. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010. 278 pages, $34.95.

The American West is renowned for its spectacular natural scenery—Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Monument Valley draw Americans and international tourists alike. Yet this region of wide-open spaces is also very much a place of cities. Westerners are far more likely to live in a city than not. In a number of western states, the majority of the population can be found in a single urban region—metropolitan Phoenix, Denver and the Front Range, Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, or Las Vegas. Western cities have been engines of economic and demographic growth. But these cities and their suburbs are also intimately connected to nature; they grew due to their proximity to natural resources, and many prospered in recent decades in part because people enjoyed the access to nature they offer. Western cities—like all cities—are located at intersections of nature and culture.

Cities and Nature in the American West, an anthology edited by historian Char Miller, offers an introduction and fourteen essays that explore these intersections of nature and culture, as well as natural and built environments. The essays are grouped into four sections: "Land," "Water," "Campground," and "City." As these titles suggest, the essays look at nature in cities, but also the interactions of urbanites and nature far beyond city limits.

The individual essays range widely, from New Orleans to Hawaii and from central cities to suburbs to the rural fringe and places far removed from cities themselves. In "Land" are essays on sugar production in Hawaii by Jessica Teisch, the battle between sprawl and agriculture in Napa Valley by Kathleen A. Brosnan, and Vera Norwood's analysis of Lady Bird Johnson's efforts to restore Texas wildflowers. In "Water," Matthew Klingle examines salmon in Seattle, while William Lang explores the relationship between Portland and its rivers, and Martin V. Melosi tells the unusual history of San Jose's privately owned water company. The three essays in "Campground" by Marguerite S. Shaffer, Craig E. Colten and Lary M. Dilsaver, and Phoebe S. Kropp Young examine the national parks through the lens of consumer culture, the problem of waste in Yosemite Valley—both the heart of a national park and a small city—and the political and class divides separating vacation camping from homelessness. The largest grouping of essays, and also the greatest variety, is found in the section titled "City." Ari Kelman discusses the levees of New Orleans, Sarah S. Elkind recounts the contentious history of oil drilling in LA, William Philpott analyzes the consumer branding [End Page 330] of Vail and tensions between environmentalism and the ski industry, Andrew G. Kirk connects the Whole Earth Catalog with urban outdoor recreation, and Joel E. Tarr's autobiographical essay tells of his unsuccessful efforts to make a home in western cities, ending up "back east" (255), unlike Hal K. Rothman, a historian who headed west and made Las Vegas and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas his home.

This collection began as an effort to memorialize Rothman, a prolific historian of the US West. Rothman's many works include studies of tourism, environmentalism, and his adopted home of Las Vegas. Rothman died tragically early at forty-eight, from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. His many books examine the modern West, its cities and environment, and the authors contributing to this volume all carry on in his footsteps.

As a historical anthology, the literary content of the volume is limited. Even if writers and residents of the urban West as varied as Rudolfo Anaya, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Chester Himes, Larry McMurtry, Wallace Stegner, Hunter S. Thompson, or many others do not appear in these pages, readers will still find much of value. Those writers were formed by the cities they lived in and observed, from Salt Lake in the 1930s to Albuquerque in the 1950s and Los Angeles in the 1970s. Edward Abbey and other western authors have sometimes enjoyed railing against the cities of the West and the...

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