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Living off the land—hunting, fishing, and farming, along with a range of specialized crafts that provided barter or cash income—was a way of life that persisted well into the twentieth century in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Before this way of life ended with World War II, professional photographer Larry Jene Fisher spent a decade between the 1930s and 1940s photographing Big Thicket people living and working in the old ways. His photographs, the only known collection on this subject, constitute an irreplaceable record of lifeways that first took root in the southeastern woodlands of the colonial United States and eventually spread all across the Southern frontier. Big Thicket People presents Fisher's photographs in suites that document a wide slice of Big Thicket life-people, dogs, camps, deer hunts, farming, syrup mills, rooter hogs and stock raising, railroad tie making, barrel stave making, chimney building, peckerwood sawmills, logging, turpentining, town life, church services and picnics, funerals and golden weddings, and dances and other amusements. Accompanying each suite of images is a cultural essay by Thad Sitton, who also introduces the book with a historical overview of life in the Big Thicket. C. E. Hunt provides an informative biography of Larry Jene Fisher.

Noted traveller and environmentalist Hap Wilson shares accounts of his lifelong involvement with wilderness living within the Canadian Shield. Wilson knows better than most how to live in the woods. As park ranger, canoe guide, outfitter, trail builder, and environmental activist, he learned from firsthand experience that nature can neither be beaten or tamed.This three-book bundle includes: The Cabin: A Search for Personal Sanctuary Noted environmentalist Hap Wilson takes us along a wilderness trail replete with snags and pitfalls, through mishaps, tears, and laughter. Grey Owl and Me: Stories From the Trail and Beyond Hap Wilson is back for another journey. Nurtured by the writings of Grey Owl, Wilson adopted a similar lifestyle to the 1930s conservationist but with his own twists and turns. Wilson recounts the early days of winter camping, takes readers to some of his favourite places, and shares intimate secrets of wilderness living. Trails and Tribulations:Confessions of a Wilderness Pathfinder Noted northern traveller Hap Wilson shares accounts of his lifelong involvement with wilderness living within the Canadian Shield. A park ranger, canoe guide, and environmental activist, Wilson takes the reader on a journey through natural settings ranging from austere to mysterious and breathtaking.

Examining Australia's long and proud history of camping, this meditation follows the story from campfire to gas bottle and from a tarp slung on saplings to polymer tents and aluminum poles, revealing as it does so the ways in which camping connects individuals to the land, to the past, and to one another. Historian Bill Garner recalls that Australia was first settled as a campsite, and that though the Europeans brought tents, they hardly invented the concept of camping—the Aborigines had been camping for millennia prior. He examines how camping has helped nurture some of the most widely held values in Australia: egalitarianism, tolerance, and the premium placed on practicability. As it connects holiday camping to the whole story of Australian settlement and the ancient ways of making a home on that remote continent, this beautifully written and illustrated book encourages readers to examine their own histories of camping and observe how their family stories and the national story are entwined.

Background: Kindergartens can potentially contribute substantially to the daily level of physical activity and development of motor skills and might be an ideal setting for improving these as a public health initiative. We aimed to examine whether children from rural outdoor kindergartens had a lower risk of motor difficulties than children from urban conventional kindergartens. Methods: Motor test results were measured during the first school year by school health nurses using a six-item test of gross- and fine motor skills (jumping, handle a writing tool, cutting with a scissor following a line, one-leg stand on each leg, throwing and grabbing). Register-based information was available on potential confounding factors. Results: We included 901 children from outdoor kindergartens and 993 from conventional kindergartens with a mean (SD) age of 6.5 years (0.4). The children from the two types of kindergarten differed according to demographic information, with outdoor kindergarten children more often being from more affluent families (long maternal education level: 47.5% vs. 31.0%, p < 0.0001) and fewer girls attending the outdoor kindergartens (42.7% vs. 49.5%, p = 0.003). In the adjusted models, we found no evidence of differences in the risk of motor difficulties between children attending either type of kindergarten (OR: 0.95, 95%CI: 0.71; 1.27, p = 0.72). Conclusion: Our results do not support outdoor kindergartens as a potential intervention to improve motor abilities among children. Randomized controlled trials are needed to confirm these findings.

Taking what he calls “a nature-centered worldview,” author Robert Stebbins blends activities, examples, and stories with his perspectives on the importance of dealing objectively yet compassionately with social and environmental problems. Even a quick glance through Connecting With Nature will make you wish you could give your students the joy of a day in the hills with the author. Failing that, you can use his book to instill a love of nature in your students—and rekindle it in yourself.

The first truly global history of sport, covering everything from curling to baseball.

In her sixty-three years on the Gunflint Trail, Justine Kerfoot has chronicled many natural occurrences and human events. Her reflections are presented here month by month.

Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.

In 2001 Steve Edwards won a writing contest. The prize was seven months of \"unparalleled solitude\" as the caretaker of a ninety-two-acre backcountry homestead along the Rogue National Wild and Scenic River in southwestern Oregon. Young, recently divorced, and humbled by the prospect of so much time alone, he left behind his job as a college English teacher in Indiana and headed west for a remote but comfortable cabin in the rugged Klamath Mountains. Well aware of what could go wrong living two hours from town with no electricity and no neighbors, Edwards was surprised by what could go right. In prose that is by turns lyrical, introspective, and funny, Breaking into the Backcountry is the story of what he discovered: that alone, in a wild place, each day is a challenge and a gift. Whether chronicling the pleasures of a day-long fishing trip, his first encounter with a black bear, a lightning storm and the threat of fire, the beauty of a steelhead, the attacks of 9/11, or a silence so profound that a black-tailed deer chewing grass outside his window could wake him from sleep, Edwards's careful evocation of the river canyon and its effect on him testifies to the enduring power of wilderness to transform a life.