Gift guide: The best books for outdoor lovers
Looking for inspiration for some great holiday gifts? PTNY has you covered! We’ve curated a list of some of our top books about the state park system and greenway trails–not to mention some great reads on the history of the Erie Canal (perfect to help get ready to celebrate the bicentennial of the canal in 2025)!
The Greenway Imperative reveals the stories behind a variety of multi-use natural corridors, taking readers to Grand Canyon National Park, suburban North Carolina, the banks of the Miami River, and many other settings. Flink, who was closely involved with each of the projects in this book during his 35-year career, introduces the people who jump started these initiatives and the challenges they overcame in achieving them.
Flink explains why open green spaces are increasingly critical today. “Much more than a path through the woods,” greenways conserve irreplaceable real estate for the environment, serve as essential green infrastructure, shape the way people travel within their communities, reduce impact from flooding and other natural disasters, and boost the economies of cities and towns. Greenways can and should dramatically reshape the landscape of America in the coming years, Flink argues. He provides valuable reflections and guidance on how we can create resilient communities and satisfy the human need for connection with the natural world.
2. From Rails to Trails: The Making of America's Active Transportation Network by Peter Harnik
If, as Wallace Stegner said, the national park is “the best idea we ever had,” the rail-trail is certainly a close runner-up. Part transportation corridor, part park, the rail-trail has revolutionized the way America creates high-quality, car-free pathways for bicyclists, runners, walkers, equestrians, and more.
It was only a few decades after railroad barons had taken over America’s economy and politics that they began to shed nearly one hundred thousand miles of unneeded railroad corridor. At the same time, bicyclists were being pushed off increasingly intimidating roadways. Through political organizing and lawyerly grit, an unlikely, formerly marginalized advocacy arose. Seized on seemingly worthless strips of land, advocates created a resource that is treasured by millions of Americans today for recreation, purposeful travel, tourism, conservation, and historical interpretation. From Rails to Trails is the fascinating tale of the rails-to-trails movement as well as a consideration of what the continued creation of rail-trails means for the future of Americans’ health, nonmotorized transportation networks, and communities across the country.
3. Deciding on Trails: 7 Practices of Healthy Trail Towns by Amy Camp
Deciding on Trails–the book for trail towns–is for every local champion, thought leader, and dreamer who knows that trails can make a difference in their community if only their town would recognize the value of trails. This book is not a “how to” for structuring a Trail Town program. Rather, it is a call to action for trail communities. This book is for those dedicated individuals who want to cultivate a trail culture, embrace Trail Town best practices, and to once and for all “decide on trails.” If you want more for your community and know that trails are part of the solution, this is the book for you.
4. Beyond Greenways: The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes by Robert Searns
In Beyond Greenways: The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes, greenways expert Robert Searns makes a case for walking infrastructure that serves a more diverse array of people. He builds on the legacy of boulevards, parkways, and greenways to introduce a next generation of more accessible pathways–wide enough for two people to stroll together, that stitch together urban and suburban areas. With more trails built near neighborhoods that haven’t had access to them, more people can get around on foot, in town or further out.
Searns lays out practical advice on how to plan and design them, garner community support, and get them built. Drawing inspiration from the US and abroad, he introduces two models–grand loop trails and town walks. Grand loop trails are regional-scale, 20 to 350-mile systems that encircle metro areas, running along the edges where city meets countryside. Town walks are shorter–2 to 6-mile routes in cities. Throughout, Searns presents examples that embody these ideals, from Tucson’s Turquoise Trail, created by just two people with an idea and some left-over blue paint the city had, to a more deluxe 5-mile loop in Denver, to the Maricopa trail in Phoenix, a completed 315 mile grand loop. He also envisions these trails in new places across North America.
5. The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State by David Stradling
David Stradling shows how New York's varied landscape and abundant natural resources have played a fundamental role in shaping the state's culture and economy. Simultaneously, he underscores the extent to which New Yorkers have, through such projects as the excavation of the Erie Canal and the construction of highways and reservoir systems, changed the landscape of their state. Surveying all of New York State since first contact between Europeans and the region's indigenous inhabitants, Stradling finds within its borders an amazing array of environmental features, such as Niagara Falls; human intervention through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization; and symbols, such as Storm King Mountain, that effectively define the New York identity.
Stradling demonstrates that the history of the state can be charted by means of epochs that represent stages in the development and redefinition of our relationship to our natural surroundings and the built environment; New York State has gone through cycles of deforestation and reforestation, habitat destruction and restoration that track shifts in population distribution, public policy, and the economy. Understanding these patterns, their history, and their future prospects is essential to comprehending the Empire State in all its complexity.
6. Long Island State Parks: A History from Jones Beach to Montauk by Kristen Matejka
Each year, tens of millions of people visit Long Island’s state parks. Most visitors are unaware that each one of the state parks has its own fascinating chapter in the region’s storied history. Some were once vast estates of New York’s elite during the turn-of-the-century Gilded Age, such as Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park. Others were “hunting clubs,” where wealthy members banded together to create retreats, including Caleb Smith State Park Preserve. Montauk’s Camp Hero has a multigenerational military history, even inspiring conspiracies that the government experimented with mind control and time travel. Underprivileged children from the bustling boroughs of New York City found fresh air and formative experiences at Camp William Carey in today’s Hallock State Park Preserve. Author Kristen Matejka presents the hidden history of the New York state parks on Long Island.
7. The State Park Movement in America: A Critical Review by Ney Landrum
Essentially a phenomenon of the twentieth century, America’s pioneering state park movement has grown rapidly and innovatively to become one of the most important forces in the preservation of open spaces and the provision of public outdoor recreation in the country. During this time, the movement has been influenced and shaped by many factors–social, cultural, and economic–resulting in a wide variety of expressions. While everyone agrees that the state park movement has been a positive and beneficial force on the whole, there seems to be an increasing divergence of thought as to exactly what direction the movement should take in the future.
In The State Park Movement in America, Ney Landrum, recipient of almost two dozen honors and awards for his service to state and national parks, places the movement for state parks in the context of the movements for urban and local parks on one side and for national parks on the other. He traces the evolution of the state park movement from its imprecise and largely unconnected origins to its present status as an essential and firmly established state government responsibility, nationwide in scope. Because the movement has taken a number of separate, but roughly parallel, paths and produced differing schools of thought concerning its purpose and direction, Landrum also analyzes the circumstances and events that have contributed to these disparate results and offers critical commentary based on his long tenure in the system.
8. Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South by William O’Brien
An outgrowth of earlier park movements, the state park movement in the twentieth century sought to expand public access to scenic places. But under severe Jim Crow restrictions in the South, access for Blacks was routinely and officially denied. The New Deal brought a massive wave of state park expansion, and advocacy groups pressured the National Park Service to design and construct segregated facilities for Blacks. These parks were typically substandard in relation to “white only” areas.
After World War II, the NAACP filed federal lawsuits that demanded park integration, and southern park agencies reacted with attempts to expand access to additional segregated facilities, hoping they could demonstrate that their parks achieved the “separate but equal” standard. But the courts consistently ruled in favor of integration, leading to the end of state park segregation by the mid-1960s. Even though it has largely faded from public awareness, the imprint of segregated state park design remains visible throughout the South.
William E. O’Brien illuminates this untold facet of Jim Crow history in the first-ever study of state park segregation. Emphasizing the historical trajectory of events leading to integration, his book underscores the profound inequality that persisted for decades in the number, size, and quality of state park spaces provided for Black visitors across the Jim Crow South.
In this sweeping social history Dorceta E. Taylor examines the emergence and rise of the multifaceted U.S. conservation movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She shows how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the movement, including the establishment of parks; campaigns to protect wild game, birds, and fish; forest conservation; outdoor recreation; and the movement's links to nineteenth-century ideologies. Initially led by white urban elites–whose early efforts discriminated against the lower class and were often tied up with slavery and the appropriation of Native lands–the movement benefited from contributions to policy making, knowledge about the environment, and activism by the poor and working class, people of color, women, and Native Americans. Far-ranging and nuanced, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement comprehensively documents the movement's competing motivations, conflicts, problematic practices, and achievements in new ways.
10. Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation by Peter Bernstein
In Wedding of the Waters, best-selling author Peter L. Bernstein recounts the canal’s creation within the larger tableau of a youthful America in the first quarter-century of the 1800s. Leaders of the fledgling nation had quickly recognized that the Appalachian mountain range was a formidable obstacle to uniting the Atlantic states with the vast lands of the west. A pathway for commerce as well as travel was critical to the security and expansion of the Revolution’s unprecedented achievement. Gripped by the same fever that had driven explorers such as Hudson and Champlain, a motley assortment of politicians, surveyors, and would-be engineers set out to build a complex structure few of them had ever actually seen, let alone built or operated: a manmade waterway cut through the mountains to traverse the 363 miles between Lake Erie and the Hudson River. By linking the seas to the interior and the interior to the seas, these pioneers ultimately connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Bernstein examines the social ramifications, political squabbles, and economic risks and returns of this mammoth project. He goes on to demonstrate how the canal’s creation helped bind the western settlers in the new lands to their fellow Americans in the original colonies, knitted the sinews of the American industrial revolution, and even influenced profound economic change in Europe.
11. Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire by Gerard Koeppel:
In this elegantly written and far-reaching narrative, acclaimed author Gerard Koeppel tells the astonishing story of the creation of the Erie Canal and the memorable characters who turned a visionary plan into a successful venture. Koeppel’s long years of research fill the pages with new findings about the construction of the canal and its enormous impact, providing a unique perspective on America’s self perception as an empire destined to expand to the Pacific.
12. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 by Carol Sherriff
The story of the Erie Canal is the story of industrial and economic progress between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Artificial River reveals the human dimension of the story of the Erie Canal. Carol Sheriff's extensive, innovative archival research shows the varied responses of ordinary people-farmers, businessmen, government officials, tourists, workers-to this major environmental, social, and cultural transformation in the early life of the Republic.
13. The Raging Erie: Life and Labor Along the Erie Canal by Mark S. Ferrara
The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a monumental achievement. Linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, it transformed New York City into a hub of international trade, drove the rise of industrial cities in once sparsely populated areas, and accelerated the westward expansion of the United States. Yet few of the laborers who toiled along the canal shared in the prosperity it brought.
Mark S. Ferrara tells the stories of the ordinary people who lived, worked, and died along the banks of the canal, emphasizing the forgotten role of the poor and working class in this epochal transformation. The Raging Erie chronicles the fates of the Native Americans whose land was appropriated for the canal, the European immigrants who bored its route through the wilderness, and the orphan children who drove draft animals that pulled boats around the clock. Ferrara also shows how the canal served as a conduit for the movement of new ideas and religions, a corridor for enslaved people seeking freedom via the Underground Railroad, and a spur for social reform movements that emerged in response to the poverty and suffering along its path.
Brimming with vivid characters drawn from the underbelly of antebellum life, The Raging Erie explores the social dislocation and untold hardships at the heart of a major engineering feat, shedding light on the lives of the canallers who toiled on behalf of American expansion.
Looking for something to help plan a trip and explore New York’s unique, historic, and beautiful greenway trails? Then PTNY’s guidebooks are your answer! Packed full of detailed information about what to expect when bicycling the Erie Canalway Trail or the Hudson and Champlain Valley Greenways (the north-south and east-west routes of the Empire State Trail), the guidebooks are an indispensable resource for trips on these world-class trails. PTNY members get an added discount!