Daydreams and Nightmares: A Sociological Essay on the American Environment

This provocative investigation draws from diverse sources not usually combined in sociological synthesis (such as Pleistocene geography, literary criticism, biology, and chemistry). The analysis examines the social consequences of man-environment interactions under a variety of conditions and includes such topics as the discovery of the environmental crisis; time, habitat and social structure; vocabularies of nature; rhetorical uses of nature; democracy and conservation; frontiers, abundance, and rationality; and the end of normality.