Philpott, William (Author)
Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking, skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited. Vacationland tells the story of the region's dramatic transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor through the Rockies, Interstate 70. Vacationland is more than just the tale of one tourist region. It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave it blind spots that still plague it today. Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of relating to environment, nature, and place.
...MoreReview Young, Terence (2014) Review of "Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country". Environmental History (pp. 589-590).
Book
Frank, Jerry J.;
(2013)
Making Rocky Mountain National Park: The environmental history of an American treasure
(/isis/citation/CBB001420363/)
Book
Rothman, Hal;
Miller, Char;
(2013)
Death Valley National Park: A History
(/isis/citation/CBB001422339/)
Book
Andrew Denning;
(2015)
Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History
(/isis/citation/CBB064408937/)
Book
Carolyn Finney;
(2014)
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
(/isis/citation/CBB468417469/)
Book
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela;
(2014)
The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing up in America since 1865
(/isis/citation/CBB001422358/)
Book
Hrvoje Petrić;
Ivana Žebec Šilj;
(2017)
Environmentalism in Central and Southeastern Europe: Historical Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB598856291/)
Article
Will Wright;
(October 2017)
Geophysical Agency in the Anthropocene: Engineering a Road and River to Rocky Mountain National Park
(/isis/citation/CBB907621877/)
Book
Stradling, David;
(2010)
The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State
(/isis/citation/CBB001230784/)
Chapter
Sörlin, Sverker;
(2013)
Epilogue: Preservation in the Age of Entanglement: STS and the History of Future Urban Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB001420350/)
Book
Lewis, Michael L.;
(2007)
American Wilderness: A New History
(/isis/citation/CBB000930098/)
Article
Araral, Eduardo;
(2013)
What Makes Socio-Ecological Systems Robust? An Institutional Analysis of the 2,000 Year-Old Ifugao Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001421937/)
Book
Benjamin Wilkie;
(2020)
Gariwerd: An Environmental History of the Grampians
(/isis/citation/CBB747309718/)
Book
Wishart, David J;
(2013)
The Last Days of the Rainbelt
(/isis/citation/CBB001420378/)
Book
PearlAnn Reichwein;
(2014)
Climber's Paradise: Making Canada's Mountain Parks, 1906-1974
(/isis/citation/CBB745618007/)
Book
Foresta, Ronald A.;
(2013)
The Land between the Lakes: A Geography of the Forgotten Future
(/isis/citation/CBB001422365/)
Chapter
Blavascunas, Eunice;
(2013)
Signals in the Forest: Cultural Boundaries of Science in Białowieża, Poland
(/isis/citation/CBB001420344/)
Book
Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton;
(2013)
Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism
(/isis/citation/CBB001420318/)
Article
Benjamin J. Burger;
(2023)
Mystery in Middle Park: Relocating the Site of Colorado’s First Dinosaur Discovery
(/isis/citation/CBB236478422/)
Book
Clements, Kendrick A.;
(2000)
Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life
(/isis/citation/CBB000630372/)
Article
Sherri Sheu;
(October 2019)
“Bring the Lake to Your Living Room”: Video Game Nature and the Meanings of Digital Ecologies
(/isis/citation/CBB081927021/)
Be the first to comment!