"An East gate book." Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface / Philip West -- Foreword / Cliff Montagne -- Introduction / Karen K. Gaul ... {et al.} -- pt. 1. Northwest voices. Focusing the countryside / Daniel Kemmis. The instability of stability / Jack Ward Thomas -- pt. 2. Historical views. Asian perceptions of and behavior toward the natural environment / Rhoads Murphey. The new concepts in conservation / J. Baird Callicott and Karen G. Mumford. Mountain islands, desert seas: mountains in environmental history / Dan Flores -- pt. 3. Living a landscape: historical and contemporary cases. Idealizing wilderness in medieval Chinese poetry / Xiaoshan Yang. The state remains, but mountains and rivers are destroyed / Allan G. Grapard. Big water, great river: two ways of seeing the Columbia / William L. Lang. The role of government intervention in creating forest landscapes and resource tenure in Indonesia / Nancy Lee Peluso. China's environment: resilient myths and contradictory realities / Vaclav Smil -- pt. 4. Moving beyond boundaries. Dancing with devils: finding a convergence of science and aesthetics in Eastern and Western approaches to nature / Alan Graham McQuillan. Of frogs, old ponds, and the sound of water: building a constituency for environmental literature in the United States and Japan / Scott Slovic.