The land between the lakes : a geography of the forgotten future /

The land between the lakes : a geography of the forgotten future /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Foresta, Ronald A., 1944-
Edition:First edition.
Imprint:Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, [2013]
Description:336 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Natural resources -- Land Between the Lakes (Ky. and Tenn.) -- Management -- History.
Ecology.
Natural resources -- Management.
Land Between the Lakes (Ky. and Tenn.) -- Environmental conditions.
United States -- Land Between the Lakes.
History.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/9858052
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9781572338630 (hardback)
1572338636 (hardback)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:"Between Barkley and Kentucky Lakes--two great, artificial bodies of water in western Tennessee and western Kentucky--lies a wooded land that looks from above like the flattened thumb of a green giant. Once a land of marginal farms and small settlements, this 240-square-mile peninsula, known as the Land Between the Lakes, has been a national recreation area for the last half-century. Its rolling, wooded hills and open bottomlands give the place charm but little majesty. The place swallows up its few campgrounds and visitors they attracts, creating a vacuous tranquility. In this volume, Foresta explores how this forgotten and bypassed region became a national recreation area. He uses its history to retrieve our old attitudes toward nature, progress, and personal development. He also uses its history to retrieve a vision of the future that rallied idealists, intellectuals, and even public officials to its banner. In the early 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to create a great park for posterity at the Land Between the Lakes. The park was to host the vast stretches of leisure that wealthy, secure, and more equal Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have at their disposal. It would be a place where such Americans could turn that leisure into happiness, psychic well-being, and strength of character. The TVA cleared the land of its inhabitants to create the park, removing people from their homes and severing their roots, thus effacing the history of the place. It then set about reshaping the land in the image of an anticipated future. But when that future never arrived, managers struggled to fit the place to the America that actually came into being. In the end they failed, leaving the Land Between the Lakes enveloped in a haunting sense of emptiness. A deft blend of environmental history, geography, politics, and cultural history, Land Between the Lakes demonstrates both the idealism of mid-twentieth-century planners and how quickly such idealism can fall out of alignment with the flow of history. In so doing it explores a forgotten vision of the future that was in many ways more appealing than the present that came into being in its place"--
"This is the first full-scale look at LBL, which has been managed by the TVA since its beginning. In part environmental history, this book focuses on public policy issues and the successes and failures of New Deal and then Great Society programs and concentrates fairly intensively on public planning"--
Review by Choice Review

The political-environmental story of the Land between the Lakes (LBL) National Recreation Area provides a unique perspective on the creation and management of this semi-isolated region of Kentucky and Tennessee. Foresta (geography, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) examines the formation of LBL within the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and at the same time weaves a narrative about the conservation movement from the early 1900s through the 1970s. Unfortunately, the vision of the LBL creators and the direction of the managers are lost at times in the unknown-that is, changing political, ecological, and economic trends. The author interprets the different plans presented to the federal government to create and manage the recreation area, and how the plans change because of political or economic factors. The high expectations for LBL are lost within the multiple facets of the TVA and disintegrate due to the range of conflicting stakeholders impacted by current factors. Foresta presents a well-documented essay that will assist government environmental planners, at all levels, to learn from the past. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. W. J. Gribb University of Wyoming

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review

The David Lee Reneker Memorial Fund bookplate

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