Chronicling the West: Thirty Years of Environmental Writing - Softcover

Michael Frome, Ph.D., began his career as a reporter for the "Washington Post" and later served as a successful travel writer before concentrating on conservation and the outdoors. He has been a columnist in "Field & Stream, Los Angeles Times, American Forests" and Defenders of Wildlife. After years as a journalist, he began a new career in education, teaching at University of Idaho, University of Vermont, Western Washington University, and Northland College.\n

If the late Edward Abbey often assembled a crew of cantankerous, monkey-wrenching environmentalists in his novels, Frome's environmental journalism reflects a persona as gentlemanly and intelligent as a Washington diplomat's, which only makes sense. During his mid-60s tenure as conservation columnist for Field & Stream magazine, Frome wrote firsthand of Washington's environmental shell games. Like Abbey and Wallace Stegner and other both established and younger writers, Frome refused to quit pointing fingers and naming names until he felt that important environmental concerns were no longer being sloughed off as second-rate issues. Frome and his editor were fired during a highly publicized editorial shake-up at the magazine. From Field & Stream, Frome moved on to Defenders of Wildlife, where he remained until 1982. He finally left the capital for the quieter environs of Idaho and finally Western Washington University, where he taught until his 1995 retirement. Far from a sentimental look back at better times, this collection offers environmental criticism at its best. It's unfortunate that so much of Frome's work is as germane today as when it first appeared. Such pieces as 1979's "Who's Managing the Managers While They Manage the Wolves?" predate Rick Bass's chronicling of The Ninemile Wolves (1993), but Frome's convictions and curiosities transcend such scrawny ideas as politics and time.

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