Books
The Orton Family Foundation periodically partners with organizations or authors to publish or support books exploring issues related to our mission and project work. Our past publications have addressed complex land use issues facing the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West and innovative tools for civic engagement and community discovery.
Authored by 2005-2006 Orton Family Foundation Fellow and University of Colorado-Boulder Professor of Geography, William Travis, New Geographies of the American West offers a sweeping diagnosis of land use trends in the West and a prescription for better planning and policy decisions. Travis’s book, New Geographies of the American West: Land Use and the Changing Patterns of Place, is to be published by Island Press in May 2007.
Travis takes a geographer’s approach to analyzing development trajectories in the West, replacing speculation and wishful thinking with a comprehensive assessment of regional land use trends. He zeroes in on the Driving, Enabling and Shaping forces behind current growth patterns and projects development into the future, examining the likely effects of regional "build-out" in a compelling "what if we do nothing?" scenario. Travis tackles potential solutions as well, describing and prescribing a regional smart growth toolkit, along with models of effective and innovative land use planning in the West. Finally, he offers a new strategy for applying planning tools to achieve desired development within a regional framework of sustainable communities and healthy landscapes.
New Geographies of the American West is available through Island Press and at many local bookstores.
Focusing on geographic information systems (GIS) and the global positioning system (GPS), this book is designed to bring teams of teachers and students together with community members to study resources of interest and importance to the community, such as wildlife habitats, rivers, or ski resorts. The guide shows students how to gather and examine existing information, discover new facts through field investigation, map the resource using GIS/GPS tools, and interact with the community by using local experts who participate in the classroom and help with the field studies.
This unique program culminates in students holding a public forum to present their work in a variety of forms, such as oral narratives and hand-drawn and GIS maps, providing a body of research to the community that can be used in community planning. The materials provided have been constructed to provide a solid foundation and flexible framework for original projects created and developed by students, their teachers, and their communities, allowing explorations and investigations of places and problems of interest and concern to them.
Making Community Connections is available through ESRI Press.
In an effort to rejuvenate the community spirit, the Orton Family Foundation developed Community Video Projects to stimulate community dialogue and inspire citizen participation in community issues. A community video project uses the power and excitement of video to encourage residents to convene publicly to discuss the issues and opportunities facing their community and to consider choices regarding their future.
Eddie Gale, Cabot Orton, and Kieth Spiegel's guide to community video projects, Lights, Camera, Community Video will show you how to use video technology to both stimulate and document a community visioning exercise. It will guide you through equipment needs, getting the word out to the community about your video project, scheduling interviews, choosing filming locations, editing, and more. When the video is completed the community can come together for a public screening. This event will serve as a great opportunity to get feedback and to discuss the future of your neighborhood.
This report includes pertinent information and ideas from the authors' own community video projects combined with additional reference sources. Also included is a list of references to help you produce your own video, regardless of prior experience. This report, sponsored by APA's Northern New England Chapter, includes a DVD containing the community videos from Swanton, Vermont, and Fruita, Colorado.
Lights, Camera, Community Video is available through the American Planning Association.
In this award-winning book, funded by the Foundation, historian Jan Albers examines the history of one of America's most cherished landscapes. Albers shows how Vermont has come to stand for the ideal of unspoiled rural community, examining both the basis of the state's pastoral image and the equally real toll taken by the pressure of human hands on the land.
She begins with the relatively light touch of Vermont's Native Americans, then shows how European settlers – armed with a conviction that their claim to the land was a "God-given right" – shaped the landscape both to meet economic needs and to satisfy philosophical beliefs. The often turbulent result: a conflict between practical requirements and romantic ideals that has persisted to this day.
Making lively use of contemporary accounts, advertisements, maps, landscape paintings, and vintage photographs, Albers delves into the stories and personalities behind the development of a succession of Vermont landscapes. She observes the growth of communities from tiny settlements to picturesque villages to bustling cities; traces the development of agriculture, forestry, mining, industry, and the influence of burgeoning technology; and proceeds to the growth of environmental consciousness, aided by both private initiatives and governmental regulation. Albers shows that like any landscape, Vermont is the product of the human decisions that have been made about it – and that the more a community understands how such decisions have been made, the better will be its future decisions. In the end, Albers has woven an important parable: as community strengthens, so does responsible stewardship of the land.
Hands on the Land has won of numerous awards, including:
- Vermont Book Professionals Association Milestone Award 2000
- National Arbor Day Foundation's Year 2001 Media Award
- The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) 2001 Book Award
- Pioneer America Society's 2001 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award
Hands on the Land is available through MIT Press and at many local bookstores.