Democratic Spaces: Land Preservation in New England, 18502010 [Paperback]

Winner of the 2024 Forest History Society Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award

A contemporary map of New England, scaled to the township level, brings to light a dense pattern of protected areas ringing almost every town and city in the region. Big and small, rural and urban, these green spaces represent more than a century of preservation efforts on the part of philanthropic foundations, planning professionals, state agencies, and most importantly, community-based conservation organizations. Taken together, they highlight one of the most significant advances in land stewardship in US history.

Democratic Spacesexplains how these protected places came into being and what they represent for New Englanders and the nation at large. While early New Englanders worked to save local fish, timber, and game resources from outside exploitation, no land-stewardship organizations existed before the founding of the Trustees of Public Reservations in Boston in 1891. Across a century of dramatic change, New England preservationists through this and other, smaller community-based land trusts preserved open spaces for an ever-widening circle of citizens.

RICHARD W. JUDDis professor emeritus at the University of Maine and author of numerous books, includingSecond Nature: An Environmental History of New England.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. The Art of Public Improvement: Iconography in Rural New England
2. Awakening the Preservation Spirit: The Trustees of Public Reservations
3. Stewardship Strategies: The Trustees in the Twentieth Century
4.The Land Trust Explosion: Grassroots Preservation in the 1960s and 1970s
5. Reimagining Urban Spaces: Preservation in the City, 1980–2000
6. Middle-Way Preservation in the Era of Ecosystem Management, 1990–2010
Conclusion

Notes
Index

“An excellent addition to the historiographies of US envilƒ,