Oregon State University Press

For fifty years, Oregon State University Press has been publishing exceptional books about the Pacific Northwest—its people and landscapes, its flora and fauna, its history and cultural heritage. The Press has played a vital role in the region’s literary life, providing readers with a better understanding of what it means to be an Oregonian. Today, Oregon State University Press publishes distinguished books in several academic areas from environmental history and natural resource management to indigenous studies.

Showing 61-80 of 414 items.

On the Run

Finding the Trail Home

Oregon State University Press

OCatherine Doucette is a backcountry skier, horseback rider, and mountaineer—roles that have resulted in adventures where she is often the only woman in a group of men. Starting from a young age, she pushed through the wilderness with her brothers, friends, and partners, gaining the skill and judgement to tackle progressively bigger goals until she became an accomplished outdoorswoman.

For over a decade, Doucette chased winter around the world to ski, from the White Mountains of her native New Hampshire to the slopes of Alaska, British Columbia, California, Argentina, Switzerland, and beyond. But she always kept one eye toward living a more settled life and putting her heart on the line if someone would just ask her to. Like other women who choose or yearn to be in the wilderness, she wrestled to reconcile her outdoor ambitions with society’s expectations of women.

The personal essays collected in On the Run touch on the author’s origins in New Hampshire while focusing on the lure of big mountains in the West. They celebrate the comfort, challenge, and community found in expanses of wilderness while confronting the limitations and sacrifices that come with a transient, outdoor lifestyle. In a voice both searching and deeply grounded, Doucette contends with avalanches and whitewater along with the less dramatic but equally important questions of belonging. Anyone who has searched to define home, who has been called by mountains, or by movement, will feel at home in these pages.

  • Copyright year: 2021
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Bearing Witness

The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change

Oregon State University Press

Fracking, the practice of shattering underground rock to release oil and natural gas, is a major driver of climate change. The 300,000 fracking facilities in the US also directly harm the health and livelihoods of people in front-line communities, who are disproportionately poor and people of color. Impacted citizens have for years protested that their rights have been ignored.

On May 14, 2018, a respected international human-rights court, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, began a week-long hearing on the impacts of fracking and climate change on human and Earth rights. In its advisory opinion, the Tribunal ruled that fracking systematically violates substantive and procedural human rights; that governments are complicit in the rights violations; and that to protect human rights and the climate, the practice of fracking should be banned.

The case makes history. It revokes the social license of extreme-extraction industries by connecting environmental destruction to human-rights violations. It affirms that climate change, and the extraction techniques that fuel it, directly violate deeply and broadly accepted moral norms encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of this landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including searing eye-witness testimony, groundbreaking legal testimony, and the Tribunal’s advisory opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox, Mary Wood, and Anna Grear give context to the controversy. Framing essays by the editors, experts on climate ethics and human rights, demonstrate that a human-rights focus is a powerful, transformative new tool to address the climate crisis.

  • Copyright year: 2021
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Touching This Leviathan

Oregon State University Press

Touching This Leviathan asks how we might come to know the unknowable—in this case, whales, animals so large yet so elusive, revealing just a sliver of back, a glimpse of a fluke, or a split-second breach before diving away.

Whale books often sit within disciplinary silos. Touching This Leviathan starts a conversation among them. Drawing on biology, theology, natural history, literature, and writing studies, Peter Wayne Moe offers a deep dive into the alluring and impalpable mysteries of Earth’s largest mammal.

Entertaining, thought-provoking, and swimming with intelligence and wit, Touching is Leviathan is creative nonfiction that gestures toward science and literary criticism as it invites readers into the belly of the whale.

  • Copyright year: 2021
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This Is Not For You

An Activist's Journey of Resistance and Resilience

Oregon State University Press

This Is Not For You tells the story of activist and photographer Richard Brown, a Black Portlander who has spent decades working to bridge the divide between police and the Black community. His memoir brings readers with him into the streets with fellow activists, into squad cars with the rank-and-file, and to regular meetings with mayors and police chiefs. There are very few people doing the kind of work Richard Brown has done. And that, as he sees it, is a big problem.

The book finds Brown approaching his eightieth birthday and reflecting on his life. As he recalls his childhood in 1940s Harlem, his radicalization in the newly desegregated Air Force, and his decades of activism in one of America’s whitest cities, he questions how much longer he’ll do this work, and he wonders who, if anyone, will take his place.

This is a book about how and why to become an engaged, activist citizen, and how activists can stay grounded, no matter how deeply they immerse themselves in the work. It also offers an intimate, firsthand look at policing: what policing is and could be, how civilians can have a say, and how police can and should be responsive to and inclusive of civilian voices. This Is Not For You speaks on every page about being Black in America: about Black pride; Black history, art, and culture; and the experience of resisting white supremacy. It also stands as a much-needed counternarrative to Portlandia, telling a different story about the city and who has shaped it.

Over fifty percent of royalties earned on this book will be donated to organizations working on behalf of Black Portlanders.


 

  • Copyright year: 2021
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The View From Cascade Head

Lessons for the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2020
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Hops

Historic Photographs of the Oregon Hopscape

Oregon State University Press

The craft brewing renaissance of recent decades has brought a renewed interest in hops. These vigorous vines, with their flavorful flowers, have long played a key role in beer making and in Oregon’s agricultural landscape. This compendium of photographs offers a visual dive into the distinctive physical presence of hops in the state. From pickers and poles to cones and oasts, Kenneth I. Helphand brings the landscape and culture of hops to life.

 

  • Copyright year: 2020
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rough house

a memoir

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2020
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Storm Beat

A Journalist Reports from the Oregon Coast

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2020
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Clifford Gleason

The Promise of Paint

Oregon State University Press

Clifford Gleason: The Promise of Paint serves as both an introduction and a definitive study of an “artist’s artist,” who until now has not received the sustained attention that he and his work are due. It traces his career from the 1930s until the last months of his difficult life—difficult because of alcoholism, near poverty, and homosexuality in a repressive era. In paint, Gleason found the only realm in which he felt competent, confident, and successful; paint offered the promise of accomplishment. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, this richly illustrated monograph examines Gleason’s identity as a modern artist as he responded to the rapid changes in artistic modernism from the late 1930s, when he studied with Louis Bunce at the Salem Federal Art Center, to the 1970s, when he rethought the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in works that are unique to him, visually beautiful and poetically expressive.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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The Environmental Politics and Policy of Western Public Lands

Oregon State University Press

Editors Erika Allen Wolters and Brent Steel have assembled a stellar cast of scholars to consider long-standing issues and topics such as endangered species, land use, and water management while addressing more recent challenges to western public lands like renewable energy siting, fracking, Native American sovereignty, climate change, and land use rebellions.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Never Leaving Laramie

Travels in a Restless World

Oregon State University Press
  • Copyright year: 2020
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A Place for Inquiry, A Place for Wonder

The Andrews Forest

Oregon State University Press

The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest is a slice of classic Oregon: due east of Eugene in the Cascade Mountains, it comprises 15,800 acres of the Lookout Creek watershed. The landscape is steep, with hills and deep valleys and cold, fast-running streams. The densely forested landscape includes cedar, hemlock, and moss-draped Douglas fir trees. One of eighty-one USDA experimental forests, the Andrews is administered cooperatively by the US Forest Service, OSU, and the Willamette National Forest. While many Oregonians may think of the Andrews simply as a good place to hike, research on the forest has been internationally acclaimed, has influenced Forest management, and contributed to our understanding of healthy forests.

In A Place for Inquiry, A Place for Wonder, historian William Robbins turns his attention to the long-overlooked Andrews Forest and argues for its importance to environmental science and policy. From its founding in 1948, the experimental forest has been the site of wide-ranging research. Beginning with postwar studies on the conversion of old-growth timber to fast-growing young stands, research at the Andrews shifted in the next few decades to long-term ecosystem investigations that focus on climate, streamflow, water quality, vegetation succession, biogeochemical cycling, and effects of forest management. The Andrews has thus been at the center of a dramatic shift in federal timber practices from industrial, intensive forest management policies to strategies emphasizing biodiversity and healthy ecosystems.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Struggle on the North Santiam

Power and Community on the Margins of the American West

Oregon State University Press

A history or Oregon's North Santiam Canyon, from interaction between Native and non-Native peoples and railroad development and land fraud in the nineteenth century, to changing fortunes in the timber industry and questions about economic and environmental sustainability into the twenty-first century.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Abalone

The Remarkable History and Uncertain Future of California's Iconic Shellfish

Oregon State University Press

Explores the natural history of the abalone and its imperiled future, focusing on a mix of issues, from the simple and expected (over-harvesting) to the more complex (fundamental scientific misunderstandings).

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Collected Poems of Hazel Hall, The

By Hazel Hall; Edited by John Witte; Afterword by Anita Helle
Oregon State University Press

During the short span of her career, Hazel Hall became one of the West's outstanding literary figures, a poet whose fierce, crystalline verse was frequently compared with that of Emily Dickinson. Confined to a wheelchair since childhood, Hall's writings convey the dark undertones of the lives of working women in the early twentieth century, while bringing into focus her own private, reclusive life—her limited mobility, her isolation and loneliness, and her gifts with needlework and words.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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The Collected Poems of Ada Hastings Hedges

Oregon State University Press

Ada Hastings Hedges was one of Oregon’s foremost poets of the mid-twentieth century. This book brings together her known poems, including a complete annotated reprint of her famous “Desert Poems” of 1930.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Facing the World

Defense Spending and International Trade in the Pacific Northwest Since World War II

Oregon State University Press

An examination of select federal and state-level politicians in the Pacific Northwest in the post-World War II era, "Facing the World" contends that individuals, including Henry Jackson, Tom Foley, Mark Hatfield, and Vic Atiyeh, working with local partners, secured the economic expansion of the Pacific Northwest through greater global outreach and embrace of the federal national security doctrine that took hold during the Cold War.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Remote

Finding Home in the Bitterroots

Oregon State University Press

The story of one woman’s journey into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana to investigate the disappearance of her friend and discover the truth about her family.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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Trees to Know in Oregon and Washington

Oregon State University Press

For 70 years, people have turned to one book to learn about Northwest trees: Trees to Know in Oregon. This new edition, retitled Trees to Know in Oregon and Washington, expands its scope to cover more territory and include more trees.
 
The book was first published in 1950. Charles R. Ross, an Oregon State University Extension forester, wanted to introduce readers to the towering giants in their backyards. Since then, Edward C. Jensen has stewarded the publication through several more editions. This edition features several rare species native to southwest Oregon. It also updates scientific names and adds a new section on how Northwest forests are likely to be affected by changing climates.

Since its initial publication, Trees to Know has become a mainstay for students, gardeners, small woodland owners and visitors to the Pacific Northwest. Along with all the details on native conifers, broadleaves, and more than 50 ornamental trees, readers will find:

  • More than 400 full-color photos and 70 maps depicting habitat, range and forest type.
  • Easy-to-follow identification keys.
  • Handy guides to help distinguish one variety from another.
  • The story of Northwest forests — past, present and future.

  • Copyright year: 2021
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Black Woman in Green

Gloria Brown and the Unmarked Trail to Forest Service Leadership

Oregon State University Press

An urban African American woman rises from secretary to leader in the USDA Forest Service of the twentieth century West. Along the way, she faces personal and agency challenges to become the first black female forest supervisor in the United States.

  • Copyright year: 2020
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