Bøker av Michael Frome

As a journalist, advocate, and professor, Michael Frome has spent decades engaged with conservation topics and has taken particular interest in America's national parks. He draws on this experience and knowledge to address what remains to be done in order to truly value and preserve these special places.

What has happened to our national parks? Overcrowding and commercialization are commonplace, and with the increase in visitation has come not only congestion but crime. Yet visitor enjoyment seems to be a higher priority of those who manage the parks than the protection and perpetuation of natural systems. How could this have happened? Michael Frome, one of the most outspoken and highly regarded observers of our national parks, here shows how the original mission of the National Park Service has been undermined by politicization and bureaucratization. "Regreening the National Parks" tells how the Park Service has been transformed from a professional to a political agency and in the process has betrayed its own values by emphasizing recreation and "short-order wilderness served like fast food" rather than the preservation of the nation's natural heritage. Frome has drawn on both official documents and personal interviews to examine the policies--and personalities--behind the scenes at the National Park Service. He cites instances of personnel being forbidden to criticize public policy in which they found a conflict with conservation principles, and contends that, as the Park Service has become more bureaucratic, those for whom the environment deeply matters scarcely rise within its ranks. In considering the environmental abuse rampant today, Frome sees national parks as models of respect for nature and concludes his book with a ten-point program toward realizing that ideal.

For five decades, Michael Frome has crisscrossed America in the cause of conservation. Writer, teacher, advocate, and activist, Frome is a captivating speaker who has inspired young and old in many settings and offended many others by taking a strong, courageous stand in defense of our nation's resources and against political expediency, entrenched bureaucracy, and corporate greed. Greenspeak is a collection of addresses made by Frome from 1963 to 2001--speeches that offer insight into virtually every major conservation issue of the second half of the twentieth century. As exciting as Frome's personal appearances, these talks encapsulate the American environmental movement over its most turbulent and productive era. In speaking out on threats to wildlife and wilderness, abuse and misuse of public parks and forests, and environmental damages caused by chemical poisons, Frome displays incisive knowledge of these issues. Further, he provides revealing closeups of key events and personalities shaping the allocation and use of natural resources in the last half of the twentieth century. In these talks, for which Frome has written context-setting introductions, he also makes a strong case for advocacy journalism, urging his own original profession to move away from passionless "objectivity." Stimulating and thought-provoking, Greenspeak clearly shows that Frome remains a strong, unflinching voice for environmental stewardship and the protection of nature. As Americans risk forgetting the struggles of earlier environmentalists with each succeeding generation, Frome's words bring that past to light and point the way toward promoting tomorrow's environmental causes. The Author: Michael Frome, who began his career as a reporter for the Washington Post, has been a featured columnist in Field & Stream, the Los Angeles Times, and Defenders of Wildlife. He has served as a professor at the universities of Idaho and Vermont, Western Washington University, and Northland College. His books include Conscience of a Conservationist, Promised Land, and Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains, all available from Tennessee.