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.
A Hunger for High Country
One Woman’s Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country
Learning to Like Muktuk
An Unlikely Explorer in Territorial Alaska
Living with Thunder
Exploring the Geologic Past, Present, and Future of Pacific Northwest Landscapes
American Dreamers
How Two Oregon Farm Kids Transformed an Industry, a Community, and a University
For the Love of Rivers
A Scientist's Journey
Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands
From Prehistory to the Present
Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands attempts to answer these questions through a series of case studies by leading Japanese and Western historians, geographers, archaeologists, and climatologists. These essays, on diverse topics from all periods of Japanese history and prehistory, are unified by their focus on the key concepts of “resilience” and “risk mitigation.” Taken as a whole, they place Japan’s experience in global context and call into question the commonly presumed division between pre-modern and modern environmental history.
Primarily intended for scholars and students in fields related to Japan or environmental history, these accessibly-written essays will be valuable to anyone wishing to learn about the historical roots of today’s environmental issues or the complex relationship between human society and the natural environment.
Money Trees
The Douglas Fir and American Forestry, 1900-1944
An important contribution to environmental scholarship, Money Trees offers a nuanced vision of forestry’s history and its past relationship to both wilderness activism and scientific ecology. With fresh perspectives on well-known environmental figures such as Bob Marshall and Gifford Pinchot, it will add to the conversation among scholars in environmental history, history of science, and the history of the American West. It will be welcomed as a key resource across the spectrum of environmental studies, and by anyone interested in natural resources, land management, the role of science in environmentalism, and the modern wilderness movement.
Silviculture and Ecology of Western U.S. Forests
State of Giving
Stories of Oregon Nonprofits, Donors, and Volunteers
Toward a Natural Forest
The Forest Service in Transition (A Memoir)
The Forest Service stumbled in responding to a wave of lawsuits from environmental groups in the late 20th Century—a phenomenon best symbolized by the spotted owl controversy that shut down logging on public forests in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. The agency was brought to its knees, pitted between a powerful timber industry that had been having its way with the national forests for decades, and organized environmentalists who believed public lands had been abused and deserved better stewardship. Toward a Natural Forest offers an insider’s view of this tumultuous time in the history of the Forest Service, presenting twin tales of transformation, both within the agency and within the author’s evolving environmental consciousness. Drawing on the author’s personal experience and his broad professional knowledge, Toward a Natural Forest illuminates the potential of the Forest Service to provide strong leadership in global conservation efforts. Those interested in our public lands—environmentalists, natural resource professionals, academics, and historians—will find Jim Furnish’s story deeply informed, thought-provoking, and ultimately inspiring.
Naked in the Woods
My Unexpected Years in a Hippie Commune
Many people, baby boomers and millennials alike, have romantic notions about the 1960s and 70s. Grundstein’s vivid account offers an unflinching, authentic portrait of this iconic and often misreported time in American history. Accompanied by a collection of distinctive photographs she took at the time, Naked in the Woods draws readers into a period of convulsive social change and raises timeless questions: how far must we venture to find the meaning we seek, and is it ever far out enough to escape our ingrained human nature?
A Man for All Seasons
Monroe Sweetland and the Liberal Paradox
At the Hearth of the Crossed Races
A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859
Building a Better Nest
Living Lightly at Home and in the World
What does it mean to build a better nest? Better for whom? Is it better for the individual or family? The planet? Green building and sustainable design are popular buzzwords, but to Hess, sustainable building is not a simple matter of buying and installing the latest recycled flooring products. It is also about cooperative work: working together in employment, in research, in activism, and in life. Hess is concerned with her local watershed, but also with the widening income gap, disappearing species, and peak resources. She actively works to reduce overconsumption and waste. For Hess, these problems are both philosophical and practical.
As Hess and her husband age, the questions of how to live responsibly arise with greater frequency and urgency. With unfailing wit and humor, she looks for answers in such places as neuroscience, Buddhism, and her ancestral legacy. Building a Better Nest will appeal to anyone with an interest in sustainable building, off-grid living, or alternative communities. The questions it asks about the way we live are earnest and important, from an author whose voice is steeped in wisdom and gratitude.
Honey in the Horn
An essential book for all serious readers of Northwest literature, this classic coming-of-age novel has been called the “Huckleberry Finn of the West.” It is the only Oregon book that has ever won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. With a new introduction by Richard W. Etulain, this path-breaking work from one of Oregon’s premier authors is once again available for a new generation to enjoy.
Marie Equi
Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions
Embracing a Western Identity
Jewish Oregonians, 1849-1950
Numbers and Nerves
Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data
Shaping the Public Good
Women Making History in the Pacific Northwest
A School for the People
A Photographic History of Oregon State University
Living Off the Pacific Ocean Floor
Stories of a Commercial Fisherman
Outsiders in a Promised Land
Religious Activists in Pacific Northwest History
The Color of Night
Race, Railroaders, and Murder in the Wartime West
Wild in the Willamette
Exploring the Mid-Valley's Parks, Trails, and Natural Areas
Reporting the Oregon Story
How Activists and Visionaries Transformed a State
Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians
Holy Moli
Albatross and Other Ancestors
Boundary Layer
Exploring the Genius Between Worlds
Ricky's Atlas
Mapping a Land on Fire
A Week in Yellowstone's Thorofare
A Journey Through the Remotest Place
A Naturalist's Guide to the Hidden World of Pacific Northwest Dunes
Rivers of Oregon
Rivers of Oregon captures the beauty and the intrinsic qualities of the state’s irresistible riverscapes like no other book has done. From the underwater view and from the refuge of riparian forests, from the seat of a canoe or raft and from distant mountain summits, readers will gain new perspectives on the extraordinary features that provide us with water, with life, and with scenes whose loss would leave us deeply impoverished.
The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950-2010
Published in Cooperation with the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education
Where the Wind Dreams of Staying
Searching for Purpose and Place in the West
A Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Oregon
Through a Green Lens
Fifty Years of Writing for Nature
Hiking from Portland to the Coast
An Interpretive Guide to 30 Trails
Keeping Oregon Green
Livability, Stewardship, and the Challenges of Growth, 1960–1980
Keeping Oregon Green is a new history of the signature accomplishments of Oregon’s environmental era: the revitalization of the polluted Willamette River, the Beach Bill that preserved public access to the entire coastline, the Bottle Bill that set the national standard for reducing roadside litter, and the nation’s first comprehensive land use zoning law. Drawing on extensive archival research, source materials ranging from poetry to congressional hearings, and firmly rooted in the cultural, economic, and political history of the Pacific Northwest, Keeping Oregon Green argues that the state’s environmental legacy is not just the product of visionary leadership, but rather a complex confluence of events, trends, and personalities that could only have happened when and where it did.