As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, the author, a writer and activist offers this anthology gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries. "Each advance in environmental practice" in our nation's history, he observes in his introduction, "was preceded by a great book." In this work are the words that made a movement. Classics of the environmental imagination, the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, are set alongside an emerging activist movement, revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Throughout, some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers take a turn toward nature, recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. The anthology includes essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of "nature" join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species, as well as a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history.