Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature

The fascinating story of the century-long attempt to control nature in the American wilderness as told through the prism of a tragic death at Yellowstone.When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, Engineering Eden by Jordan Fisher Smith, a nature writer and former park ranger, shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem-- that the idea of what is ''natural'' dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it.