Remedies for a New West

Healing Landscapes, Histories, and Cultures

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This wide-ranging collection of essays is intended to provoke both thought and action. The pieces collected here explore a variety of issues facing the American West—disappearing Native American languages, deteriorating air quality, suburban sprawl, species loss, grassland degradation, and many others—and suggest steps toward “healing.” More than “dealing with” or “solving,” according to the editors, healing addresses not just symptoms but their underlying causes, offering not just a temporary cure but a permanent one.

The signs of illness and trauma can seem omnipresent in today’s West: land and soil disrupted from mining, overgrazing, logging, and farming; wildlife habitat reduced and fragmented; native societies disturbed and threatened; open space diminished by cities and suburbs; wilderness destroyed by roads and recreation-seekers. But as these essays suggest, the “treatment program” for healing the West has many healthful side effects. Engaging in the kinds of projects suggested by contributors is therapeutic not only for the environment but for participants as well. Restoration, repair, and recovery can counter symptoms of despair with concentrated doses of promise and possibility.

The more “lesions” the West has, this book suggests, the more opportunities there are for westerners to revive and ultimately cure the ailing patient they have helped to create. The very idea of restoring the West to health, contributors and editors contend, unleashes our imaginations, sharpens our minds, and gives meaning to the ways we choose to live our lives. At the same time, acknowledging the profound difficulties of the work that lies ahead immunizes us against our own arrogance as we set about the task of healing the West.
“Various ideas from Remedies for a New West can, and should, be applied on a national and international scale.” —Voices From the Earth

"This important collection is a gift to all of us who care about the West. It belongs on the shelf of every Westerner who questions the narratives of the past and wants to contribute to those of the future."—Tucson Weekly


“Readers who are more interested in the humanities may well find themselves reading about ecological issues, while scientists interested in the latter may read about the humanities. This book is valuable because it shows that restoration activities in both realms are equally important, and that they inform one another in unexpected ways.”—Peter Friederici, author of Nature's Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation
Remedies for a New West
320 Pages 6 x 9 x 0.8
Published: June 2009Paperback ISBN: 9780816525997
Published: May 2022Ebook ISBN: 9780816549252

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