Losing Eden

Sara Dant has created something seemingly unattainable: a one-volume book-full of incisive analysis, wrapped in unforgettable storytelling-that covers the deep environmental history of the American West from twenty-five thousand years ago to today. She delivers an important cautionary tale about the relationship between people and nature, always asking a simple question: 'At what cost?' I learned something on every page. -Dayton Duncan, author of The National Parks: America's Best Idea Sara Dant's Losing Eden is an environmental masterpiece about the American region she holds near and dear to her heart. Whether Dant tackles the problems of aridity, massive wildfires, or climate change, she hits all the right notes. The chapter on Idaho's Frank Church national parks is remarkable. This is a brilliant book, learned to its core, that will stand the test of time. Environmental history at its absolute finest. Highly recommended! -Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University This is environmental history at its best. Losing Eden offers a masterful narrative that explores broad-ranging themes and the historical connections, tensions, and contradictions that have defined the vibrant and diverse peoples and environments of the American West, as well as their relationship to one another. -Eladio B. Bobadilla, assistant professor of history and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino studies at the University of Kentucky This is history as it should be written, focusing not only on people but also on the natural environment as it changes through time. The result of that complex interaction has been a saga of conflict, hope, failure, conservation, and sustainability. Everyone who lives in the West should know its environmental history, and the rest of the world should know it too because it offers important lessons for humanity. This book is big in scale and rich in detail, yet written with economy and grace, with a scholar's judicious understanding, and with a lover's passion for the place. -Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance In this fresh take on the history of the American West, Sara Dant tells us why 'the West as Eden' has always been a false illusion' and how truth-telling of our past might resolve twenty-first-century issues and even hope for our future. -Rosalyn LaPier, author of Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet Losing Eden is no ordinary book. Dant begins with a simple question: At what environmental cost did Americans develop the largely arid West? In answer, she offers an engaging, provocative interpretation of the region's environmental and Indigenous history, from the primordial past to the present, with an eye toward the future in an era of climate change. -Marsha Weisiger, author of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country