Saved in Time
Saved in Time
The Fight to Establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado
In the summer of 1969, a federal district court in Denver, Colorado, heard arguments in one of the nation's first explicitly environmental cases, in which the Defenders of Florissant, Inc. opposed real estate interests intent on developing lands containing an extraordinary set of ancient fossils. This book, the first account of the fight to preserve the Florissant fossil beds, tells a story of environmental activism that remains little known more than forty years after the coalition's victory. The principal author, Estella Leopold, was a major participant in the process.
A welcome account of an example of how the environmental movement gained legs and used the courts to convert abstract ethics into physical places for us to study and preserve this unique page of earth history.'--Annals of Wyoming
Paleobotanist Estella B. Leopold is professor emerita of biology at the University of Washington.
National Park Service paleontologist Herbert W. Meyer is the author of Fossils of Florissant.
