The images of early west photographer William Henry Jackson capture a Colorado landscape both pristine and already dramatically affected by the onslaught on western civilization. Standing exactly where Jackson stood, and pointing his own camera in precisely the same direction, John Fielder has rephotographed Jackson's Colorado images to capture the often startling change that has occurred over the last century. The result is both breathtaking and stark, hopeful and disquieting. Jackson's and Fielder's photography is accompanied by thoughtful and provocative essays by respected experts in the environmental field: Roderick Nash, America's foremost wilderness historian and author of Wilderness and the American Mind; Ed Marston, journalist and publisher of High Country News; and Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the Colorado Historical Society. John Fielder describes the profound experience of traveling the state and seeing the landscape from Jackson's perspective, and reflects upon changes of the last 130 years.
The contrast between Jackson's and Fielder's photographs not only illuminates Colorado's past but will help us determine the course of land management as we move into the next century. Accompanied by an educational program that includes lectures, a traveling exhibit, newspaper serialization, and television series, this book is aimed at encouraging people to appreciate and reflect on nature, history, and photography as we move into the next century. Colorado: 1870-2000 stands not only as an important document of westward exploration, expansion, and urbanization, but helps define our past and future environmental values.
John Fielder is a nationally renowned nature photographer, publisher, and preservationist. He is the photographer of 30 exhibit form at and guidebooks, most about his home state of Colorado. An original governor-appointed member of the Board of Great Outdoors Colorado, Fielder's photography has influenced people and legislation earning him awards from many conservation groups, including the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award. He teaches photography to adults and children, and speaks to thousands of people each year rallying support for land-use and environmental issues. He lives with his family in Greenwood Village, Colorado.
Ed Marston is the publisher of High Country News, a regional newspaper covering public land and natural resources in the western United States. He holds a B.S. in experimental physics from the State of University of New York at Stony Brook. Prior to publishing High Country News, Ed and his wife Betsy founded the North Fork Country Times (1975) and the Western Colorado Report (1982). Marston has written or edited three books: The Dynamic Environment, Western Water Made Simple, and Reopening the Western Frontier. Marston and his family have lived in Paonia, Colorado since 1974.
Roderick Frazier Nash is a retired Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and lives outside Crested Butte, Colorado. He is a white water river guide, a tugboat captain, and an extreme powder skier. Regarded as a founder of the field of environmental history, he has written books including Wilderness and the American Mind, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, and American Environmentalism, all of which have enjoyed many reprintings, revised editions, and foreign translations.
Eric Paddock, a fifth-generation Coloradoan, is Curator of photography at the Colorado Historical Society, where he works with a collection of 600,000 photographs of Colorado and the West. He teaches art history at the Colorado College, American history at the University of Colorado at Denver, and photography at schools and workshops throughout Colorado. The author of more than two dozen articles and book reviews on photography and Western history, he also is a widely known landscape photographer whose first monograph, Belonging to the West, was published in 1996 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
