Stitching the West Back Together

"Substantial, useful, and accessible, this book gives novel voice to people who have been at the heart of collaborative initiatives, allowing them to tell their stories in a powerful way. It is also one of the rare books that brings together work in forests and rangelands. Compelling."--Robin Reid "Center for Collaborative Conservation, Colorado State University" "This work reviews recent developments regarding attempts to conserve working landscapes in the western United States. Individual chapters (fourteen total) in the five parts . . . are written by authors ranging from graduate students and academics to practitioners and activists. . . . The argument for collaborative conservation, including working landscapes to prevent urbanization and sprawl, sounds like a win-win situation for everyone, except for developers. . . . An intriguing start for those wanting to explore issues related to options for collaborative conservation and land management in the checkerboard landscapes of the West in further detail. . . . Recommended."--B. Blossey, Cornell University "Choice" "The book urges conservationists, government employees, tribal officials, and private landowners to meet at the 'Radical Center, ' where goals are ambitious and, most importantly, shared: building a West that is ecologically, aesthetically and culturally healthy. . . . Each chapter moves deftly from data to 'how-to, ' and offers a bullet-point list of lessons. Readers facing specific challenges can find stories that speak to their needs, but people with more general interests will also find the book as a whole accessible and even inspiring. Both will come away with new ideas for entrepreneurial approaches to conservation. With sections by an impressive range of scholars and practitioners, Stitching embodies its own lesson--that success is achieved by working with a diversity of approaches."--Caroline Tracey "High Country News" "In the magnificent, hard-pressed lands west of the Mississippi, the war to define good stewardship intensifies every year. Stitching the West Back Together offers, instead, a peace process: practical, community-based, and frequently inspiring. Can healthy terrain yield healthy profit? Almost certainly, according to these well-chosen case studies, which argue for a new public policy of interdependence and cooperation, fueled by redoubled respect for the history and ecology of this most difficult, subtle, and underappreciated of US regions."--Anne Matthews "author of Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America's Great Plains" "An excellent resource. . . . While collaborative conservation is not a panacea, Stitching the West Back Together offers additional evidence that it may offer the best hope to shape vibrant economies, livable communities, and healthy landscapes. The case studies and historical narratives presented in this book should inspire, inform, and invigorate similar efforts throughout the American West. The chapters are concise, well written, and appropriately illustrated with maps and other images. The editors are to be commended for this contribution to the theory and practice of collaborative conservation and large landscape conservation."--Matthew J. McKinney, University of Montana "Ecology" "Stitching the West Back Together provides an overview of the amazing variety of social partnerships, coalitions or organizations (termed 'community-based collaborative conservation groups' [CBCCs] in the book), and conservation approaches that aim to save working landscapes of the American West. . . . Despite the breadth of the topic and the variety of local CBCCs and their conservation activities, the book is easy to follow, thanks to an organization that really works."--Szabolcs Lengyel, Hungarian Academy of Sciences "Conservation Biology" "Stitching the West Back Together makes a powerful argument for the importa

Susan Charnley is a research social scientist at the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station. Thomas E. Sheridan is professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and a research anthropologist at the university's Southwest Center, where Gary P. Nabhan is a research scientist.