UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Collecting Nature: The American Environmental Movement and the Conservation Library

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.2307/3092476

Authors

Char Miller · Andrew Glenn Kirk

Reported year

2002

Reported language

en

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:14:14.225721+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:14:14.225721+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

Trinity University

Documentary abstract — original language

One measure of the growing sophistication of environmental historiography is that wilderness is no longer its main field. Significant scholarship has emerged that probes urban ecologies, assesses the interplay between gender and space, and examines geography, race, and social justice. The provocative insights of cultural studies have also impelled historians to track the representation of the natural in culture. Among the exciting explorations of the complexity of such appropriations is Jennifer Price's Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (1999). Add to that list Andrew Glenn Kirk's impressive first book, Collecting Nature. Its focus on the tumultuous history of the little-known Conservation Library in Denver, Colorado, becomes, in Kirk's hands, an imaginative way to speak about the central tensions rippling through the broader environmental movement in the United States. Founded in 1961, the brainchild of Arthur Hawthorne Carhart, who is perhaps best known for his advocacy of wildlands protection, the archive was to become the leading repository of materials relating to the evolution of national environmental concerns. Its manuscripts, primary documents, and secondary sources would narrate this past and its transformations. As Kirk puts it: in this library “ideas and philosophies assumed physical form” and gave literary weight and political strength to those who, like Carhart (by way of Henry David Thoreau), asserted that in wilderness lay the preservation of the American people. They used the library to advance this claim on the public consciousness.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W4298027442

DOI

10.2307/3092476

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.2307/3092476
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W4298027442

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

This identity is not yet included in the Legal Library.