These essays offer a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study of the ways in which communities of people understand and inhabit their environments. They examine and compare human/environmental interactions in communities across the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Rim, and Asia.

Part I Northwest Voices; Chapter 1 Focusing the Countryside, Daniel Kemmis; Chapter 2 The Instability of Stability, Jack Ward Thomas; Part II Historical Overviews; Chapter 3 Asian Perceptions of and Behavior Toward the Natural Environment, Rhoads Murphey; Chapter 4 The New Concepts in Conservation, J. Baird Callicott, Karen G. Mumford; Chapter 5 Mountain Islands, Desert Seas: Mountains in Environmental History, Dan Flores; Part III Living a Landscape: Historical and Contemporary Cases; Chapter 6 Idealizing Wilderness in Medieval Chinese Poetry, Xiaoshan Yang; Chapter 7 The State Remains, but Mountains and Rivers Are Destroyed, Allan G. Grapard; Chapter 8 Big Water, Great River: Two Ways of Seeing the Columbia, William L. Lang; Chapter 9 The Role of Government Intervention in Creating Forest Landscapes and Resource Tenure in Indonesia, Nancy Lee Peluso; Chapter 10 China's Environment: Resilient Myths and Contradictory Realities, Vaclav Smil; Part IV Moving Beyond Boundaries; Chapter 11 Dancing with Devils: Finding a Convergence of Science and Aesthetics in Eastern and Western Approaches to Nature, Alan Graham McQuillan; Chapter 12 Of Frogs, Old Ponds, and the Sound of Water: Building a Constituency for Environmental Literature in the United States and Japan, Scott Slovic;