Robert Leonard Reid

A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada is a collection of writings edited by Robert Leonard Reid in 1982. Reid is a math professor, writer and Sierra Club Member. The book is made up of seven sections including; The Explorers, The Vacationers, The Mountaineers, The Conservationists and several others. Among the authors excerpted in A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada are John Muir, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Charles Fremont, Robert Louis Stevenson and John McPhee. The selections were well chosen. Even though I had read many of the whole books some of these chapters were taken from I would say that reading A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada was well worth the time and effort.

Reid's introduction to the chapter that was an editorial in the 1890 Atlantic, The Carcase of a Horse, could be addressing the recent takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Writing in 1982 Reid said "private interests attempted to wrest public-interest lands away from the Federal Government during the Land Grab of the 1940s and the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1980s. Supporters of the takeovers put forth the specious argument that local people should control local lands, ignoring the fact that this is not an argument at all but a mandate for exploitation. However plodding and impersonal federal management of national interest lands may be, Washington has the interests of the nation at heart, while local managers have only their own. "… (meer)

Every year without fail, caribou from the Yukon and Alaska set off in early April to a small corner of the Arctic Circle to give birth to their young. The journey – an ordeal of mountains and blizzards, ravenous wolves, scant forage, and river crossings with ice chunks the size of pickup trucks – is the longest migration of any land animal on earth. Despite the formidable obstacles, the females find their way to the calving grounds on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, deliver their calves in June, and then begin their long journey home. This is their story, told by an author who travels to the Arctic in his seventh decade with his son to “witness a few
moments of this endless turning circle of birth and rebirth” and to answer the question, “What is the true nature of the North?” Is it the good and generous land of which the Inuit sing, or, in the words of Arctic explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, “Horrible! Horrible!” a dwelling place of darkness and death? Personal and profound, chock-full of adventure, literary references, natural history, and ecological concerns, Mr. Reid's memoir is moving and poignant, evocative and cautionary. Arctic Circle is a book, in short, that every reader concerned with the fate of the Far North should embrace.… (meer)