Reviews
"Clearly relishing every moment of Edge’s remarkable life, Furmansky vividly enriches environmental history with her inspiring portrait of this indomitable champion of the wild."
—Booklist
Description
Rosalie Edge (1877-1962) was the first American woman to achieve national renown as a conservationist. Dyana Z. Furmansky draws on Edge’s personal papers and on interviews with family members and associates to portray an implacable, indomitable personality whose activism earned her the names “Joan of Arc” and “hellcat.” A progressive New York socialite and veteran suffragist, Edge did not join the conservation movement until her early fifties. Nonetheless, her legacy of achievements—called “widespread and monumental” by the New Yorker—forms a crucial link between the eras defined by John Muir and Rachel Carson. An early voice against the indiscriminate use of toxins and pesticides, Edge reported evidence about the dangers of DDT fourteen years before Carson’s Silent Spring was published.
Today, Edge is most widely remembered for establishing Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the world’s first refuge for birds of prey. Founded in 1934 and located in eastern Pennsylvania, Hawk Mountain was cited in…
Dyana Z. Furmansky (writing as Dyan Zaslowsky) is coauthor of These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands. Her articles on nature and the environment have appeared in the New York Times, American Heritage, Audubon, High Country News, Sierra, Wilderness, and many other publications. In 1986 she was part of the team of High Country News reporters that won a George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting, for the series “Western Water Made Simple.” Furmansky lives in Denver.
