Rooted at the Edge

Ranching Where the Old West and New West Collide

Donna L. Erickson (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

248 Seiten

2025
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-4043-9 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Rooted at the Edge paints a portrait of a ranching community in a threatened landscape steeped in history, conflict, and beauty. In this narrative nonfiction work, Donna L. Erickson explores the hilly skirt of ground at the northern boundary of Missoula, Montana, separating the town from the wilderness beyond. The North Hills region represents the critical-and often highly personal-issues at play at the edge of many western towns.

The urban-rural fringe is both valuable and vulnerable. Across the West rural lifestyles are increasingly compromised by suburbanization, economic hardship, and family dynamics; a way of life and a way of work are vanishing. Ranchland may be simultaneously cherished by a family for the life its members have made there and coveted by urban neighbors for open space. Community residents may love a place for its scenery and wildlife habitat while others wish it converted to a commercial parking lot. Complex ecological relationships can be bulldozed in a single afternoon. And the threats of climate change and shifting populations compromise the edge even more.

In the tension between love and loss, Erickson wrote this story of a landscape’s soft contours, piney ridges, shady draws, and grassy slopes, and its potential disappearance under an expanding city. Rooted at the Edge conveys, in a way that statistics cannot, what’s at stake when ranches at the urban fringe are threatened.

Donna L. Erickson is a consultant on open-space conservation in the Rocky Mountain West and was an associate professor of landscape architecture and planning at the University of Michigan for sixteen years. Erickson has published extensively in design, planning, and conservation journals and is the author of MetroGreen: Connecting Open Space in North American Cities.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part 1. Three Ranches on the Edge
1. Geology Rocks
2. The Lone Pine
3. Deeded Land: Hold on Tight
4. You Can’t Eat the Scenery
5. Land Rich, Cash Poor
Part 2. Stories from the Edge
6. I Pledge My Head to Clearer Thinking
7. Raised by the Land
8. All Livestock Sold as Is
9. Water Runs Downhill
10. Boxcar Blues
11. A Ranch’s Rusty Jumble
Part 3. Forces of Change at the Edge
12. Force Times Distance
13. Fire Roars Uphill
14. Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up
15. The View from Here
16. Death and Taxes
Part 4. Renewal at the Edge
17. Gravity Wins
18. Bluebird Days
Epilogue

Erscheinungsdatum	19.02.2025
Zusatzinfo	21 photographs, 21 illustrations, 9 maps
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-4962-4043-X / 149624043X
ISBN-13	978-1-4962-4043-9 / 9781496240439
Zustand	Neuware