Your search for: los AND alamos

The Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico encompasses the Bandelier National Monument and the atomic city of Los Alamos. On Rims and Ridges throws into stark relief what happens when native cultures and Euro-American commercial interests interact in such a remote area with limited resources. The ...

The Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico encompasses the Bandelier National Monument and the atomic city of Los Alamos. On Rims and Ridges throws into stark relief what happens when native cultures and Euro-American commercial interests interact in such a remote area with limited resources. The demands of citizens and institutions have created a form of environmental gridlock more often associated with Manhattan Island than with the semiurban West, writes Hal K. Rothman. Before the coming of the railroad in 1880 the Pajarito Plateau was open, capable of supporting the small-scale agriculture of the Pueblo Indians and seasonal Hispanic pobladores. In the half-century after the arrival of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, the area was gradually claimed by competing special interest groups: the original inhabitants, archaeologists and anthropologists, homesteaders, ranchers, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Rothman describes howthese groups with diverse purposes - economic, cultural, aesthetic, spiritual - staked out every inch of land, often clashing over it. Today all of them maintain a presence on the plateau, and any land management decision elicits a response from each. Too often political clout determines the direction of socioeconomic growth. The long-term effects of federal land policy and technology on expanding population in shrinking space, on the transformation of culture and the environment, are seen clearly in Rothman's study of the Los Alamos area - and the implications for the future of much of the rest of the American West are chilling.

Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history--the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood ...

Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history--the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood control basins, and nearly 500 miles of paved river channels, Southern Californians have discovered that technologically engineered solutions to flooding are just as disaster-prone as natural waterways. Jared Orsi's lively history unravels the strange and often hazardous ways that engineering, politics, and nature have come together in Los Angeles to determine the flow of water. He advances a new paradigm--the urban ecosystem--for understanding the city's complex and unpredictable waterways and other issues that are sure to play a large role in future planning.

As he traces the flow of water from sky to sea, Orsi brings together many disparate and intriguing pieces of the story, including local andnational politics, the little-known San Gabriel Dam fiasco, the phenomenal growth of Los Angeles, and, finally, the influence of environmentalism. Orsi provocatively widens his vision toward other cities for which Los Angeles may offer a lesson--both of things gone wrong and a glimpse of how they might be improved.

"Will be a 'must read' for anyone studying performance art or the art and culture of Southern California. . . . Cheng is a brilliant and original thinker and. . . writes with a lively, engaged and engaging poetic style through which she attempts to enact the very passion and performativity that she ...

"Will be a 'must read' for anyone studying performance art or the art and culture of Southern California. . . . Cheng is a brilliant and original thinker and. . . writes with a lively, engaged and engaging poetic style through which she attempts to enact the very passion and performativity that she explores in her objects of study."--Amelia Jones, author of "Body Art/Performing the Subject "

"Dazzling on many levels, a major contribution not only to performance art scholarship but more generally to contemporary American art, feminist, and cultural studies. . . . "In Other Los Angeleses "is going to transform performance studies because of the richness of Cheng's facts and scholarship and the equal richness of her theoretical frameworks and references."--Moira Roth, author of "Difference Indifference"