Historic Takings in Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area: Recreation and Remains

(Hardback)

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Description

The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (DEWA) is among the busiest National Park Service (NPS) units with millions of annual visitors. In this book, David Fazzino uses oral history and archival work to consider the ramifications of government land takings, done half a century ago to uproot families and communities across 70,000 acres in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Fazzino situates these land takings in historical context to explain the ways places have been taken, both physically and ideologically, in the name of progress, development, wilderness, and recreation. The author contrasts legal valuations, measured along utilitarian and material lines, with lived valuations which account for place as experiential, intimate, personal, and relational. Fazzino also considers the ruins of what was and the remains of past lives in the valley to suggest inclusive possibilities of future management regimes in DEWA and federal public lands more broadly.

Reviews

Almost anyone who lives in the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area has some experience with the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, but there are very few, unless they experienced it, who know its tumultuous history. David Fazzino does an excellent job of conveying all of the important parts of the storyfrom precolonial history to historic home ownershipas well as legal explanations of the government's power for legislative taking and the true beauty that abounds the area today. This book would be an excellent educational read for legal or environmental scholars, but also should be available to anyone who avails themselves of recreational opportunities at the Delaware Water Gap.

Rachel S. Marlowe, J. D.

Author Bio

David Fazzino is associate professor of anthropology at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and chair for anthropology, criminal justice, and sociology at Bloomsburg University, Lock Haven University, and Mansfield University.