{"product_id":"book-bv48","title":"Engineering Eden","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe fascinating story of the  century-long attempt to control nature in the American wilderness as told  through the prism of a tragic death at Yellowstone\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen twenty-five-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. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have  done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the  trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in  the parks had always been.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe proceedings drew to the witness stand  some of the most important figures in twentieth-century wilderness  management, including the eminent zoologist A. 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. 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  place.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and  Glacier National Parks, \u003ci\u003eEngineering Eden\u003c\/i\u003e shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental  problem-that the idea of what is \"natural\" dissolves as soon as we begin  to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness  should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying  to preserve it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e In the tradition of John McPhee's \u003ci\u003eThe Control of Nature\u003c\/i\u003e and Alan Burdick's \u003ci\u003eOut of Eden\u003c\/i\u003e,  Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and  environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even  now yet to resolve.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blackstone Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":49301219606832,"sku":"BDbv48","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio CD","offer_id":49301219672368,"sku":"ZEbv48","price":34.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio MP3-CD","offer_id":49301219705136,"sku":"ZMbv48","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/bv48-Square-cover.jpg?v=1775805169","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-bv48","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}