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Surgery Junkies
Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture
Pitts-Taylor, Victoria
Rutgers University Press, 2007
​Despite the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery, there are still those who identify individuals who opt for bodily modifications as dupes of beauty culture, as being in conflict with feminist ideals, or as having some form of psychological weakness. In this ground-breaking book, Victoria Pitts-Taylor examines why we consider some cosmetic surgeries to be acceptable or even beneficial and others to be unacceptable and possibly harmful. Drawing on years of research, in-depth interviews with surgeons and psychiatrists, analysis of newspaper articles, legal documents, and television shows, and her own personal experience with cosmetic surgery, Pitts-Taylor brings new perspectives to the promotion of "extreme" makeovers on television, the medicalization of "surgery addiction," the moral and political interrogation that many patients face, and feminist debates on the topic. Pitts-Taylor makes a compelling argument that the experience, meanings, and motivations for cosmetic surgery are highly social and, in doing so, provides a much needed "makeover" of our cultural understanding of cosmetic surgery.
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Stored Tissue Samples
Public Policy Implications
Robert F. Weir
University of Iowa Press, 1998

Countless tissue samples are collected each day from patients in doctors' offices, clinics, and hospitals. Thousands of other samples are provided every day for biomedical research. In addition, numerous men and women in prison and in the military provide samples for purposes they hope will never be realized: conviction for crimes or identification of their bodies at death. In each case the blood, cheek cells, sperm and ova, or other type of tissue collected may be banked in biomedical labs for multiple purposes. The essays in this timely, thought-provoking book investigate the ethical, legal, and policy implications of these practices.

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Silicone Survivors
Women's Experiences with Breast Implants
Susan Zimmermann
Temple University Press, 1998
Susan Zimmermann talked with forty women about perhaps one of the most sensitive issues of body image and health - their breasts, the chief attribute of femininity. In the aftermath of the early 1990s controversy over the use of silicone breast implants, how do women decide to undergo surgery o enhance or reconstruct their bodies? How does surgery alter a woman's self-image? How did they face the possibility of debilitating autoimmune disease from rupturing or leaking implants?

Some opted for breast implants after mastectomies, others for cosmetic reasons. Some felt empowered by the surgery: "Being a woman, I just like breasts and felt like I got ripped off. ... I did it for myself." Others were pressured by their husbands: "He used to make fun of parts of my body. .... And, he made me believe that if I was ever to leave him, no one would have anything to do with me because I was this deformed type of person."

After surgery, some women were ecstatic, while others had a sense of inner conflict about what they had done to themselves: were they "faking it"? And a few were angry: "I was really angry inside that I had  had to put plastic bags filled with chemicals in my body in order for me to feel like I could do the Hoochie Koo on Saturday nights. ... I didn't wear tight clothes; I didn't want my children to find out."

Now, having faced years of medical and personal uncertainty, many have coped by reassessing their lives and their relationships, by sharing information and support with other women with implants, outreach that became a means for self-empowerment.
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Spinal Cord Injury and the Family
A New Guide
Michelle J. Alpert M.D.
Harvard University Press, 2008

Spinal cord injury, or SCI, is frequently sudden and unexpected—through accident, disease, or violence, patients temporarily lose control of their bodies and, it seems, their lives. With rehabilitation, they can learn to navigate their world once more, retraining muscles and mind to compensate for paralyzed limbs and diminished strength. But as Dr. Michelle Alpert shows here, there is far more to recapturing full, independent lives than regaining movement. Central to long-term success is mending the family unit.

Combining Dr. Alpert’s clinical experience with patients’ own stories, Spinal Cord Injury and the Family is for individuals and their families who must climb back from injury: for the young quad couple, both quadriplegic, who wish to conceive and raise a child; for the paraplegic dad who wants to teach his daughter to drive; for the couple wondering how they can regain the sexual spark in their relationship.

The authors cover the causes of and prognosis for SCI through case studies, review common courses of rehabilitation, and answer the “what now?” questions—from daily routines to larger issues concerning sex, education and employment, childbearing, and parenting with SCI. Rich in clinical information and practical advice, the book shows how real patients and their families are living full lives after spinal cord injury.

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Sound Sense
Living and Learning with Hearing Loss
Sara Laufer Batinovich
Gallaudet University Press, 2011

One out of every eight people between the ages of 18 and 67 in the United States has a hearing loss, estimated as 12 percent of the working-age population. Sound Sense: Living and Learning with Hearing Loss addresses the acute need of these people to function at the highest level in these income-earning years, the longest phase in their lives. In nine pointed chapters, author Sara Laufer Batinovich, who also has lost her hearing, shares her experience and knowledge in turning every challenge into an opportunity to become one’s best self-advocate.

Batinovich begins in the workplace, advising on winning a job, keeping it, and developing a long-term career, plus how to reduce stress and establish fulfilling professional relationships with colleagues. She offers tips on communication ranging from having sales people face you for easier speechreading to parsing boarding announcements at airports and play-by-play at ballparks. Her practical handbook also provides step-by-step guidance for getting a hearing aid or a cochlear implant and finding one’s way through prickly insurance claim mazes.

Sound Sense features information on finding a service dog, securing legally mandated accommodations for continuing education, tips on exercise and health, and even sensitive suggestions on strengthening personal relationships. Batinovich’s vivacious style and her own anecdotes add an upbeat, genuine sensibility to her book’s value as a positive guide to living with hearing loss.

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Surgical Consent
Bioethics and Cochlear Implantation
Linda Komesaroff
Gallaudet University Press, 2007
With the rate of cochlear implantation reaching 80% to 90% of all deaf children, some as young as five months old, Surgical Consent: Bioethics and Cochlear Implantation arrives at a critical juncture. This comprehensive collection features essays by Priscilla Alderson, Inger Lise Skog Hansen, Hilde Haualand, volume editor Linda Komesaroff, Paddy Ladd, Harlan Lane, Karen Lloyd, Eithne Mills, Paal Richard Peterson, Gunilla Preisler, Kristina Svartholm, and Michael Uniacke. These worldwide renowned ethicists, educators, and Deaf leaders express their diverse perspectives on the bioethics of childhood cochlear implantation according to their discipline and a number of themes of inquiry: human rights, medical and social ethics, psychology, education, globalization, identity, life pathways, democracy, media, law, and biotechnology.

       Drawing on current research, this volume presents the varying reactions around the globe to the high rate of implantation. These views contrast sharply with the medical perspective of deafness overwhelmingly promoted through the media and by the cochlear implantation industry. At the same time, the contributors aim to disrupt the binaries that have long dominated the field of deafness — speech versus sign, instruction through speech and sign systems versus bilingual education, and medical intervention versus cultural membership in the Deaf community.

       Surgical Consent begins and ends with the voices of Deaf people. Their articulate and, at times, raw insights clearly delineate the issues of power, positioning, and minority-majority group relations that are inherent in the dominant hearing culture’s understanding of diversity and globalization.
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Surrogates and Other Mothers
The Debates over Assisted Reproduction
Ruth Macklin
Temple University Press, 1994

Developments in new reproductive technologies have confounded public policy and created legal and ethical quandaries for professionals and ordinary citizens alike. Drawing from the most current medical, psychiatric, legal, and bioethical literature, Ruth Macklin, noted author and philosopher, presents the arguments surrounding these advances through the voices of fictional characters. The episodes she narrates are based on real-life situations, both from her personal experience as a hospital ethicist and from the public arena, where such controversial court cases as that of Baby M have sparked a multitude of disparate opinions on surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and egg and sperm donor program.

Macklin's hypoethical tale centers on Bonnie and Larry, an infertile couple longing for a child. As the couple's quest to become parents begins, they discover that Bonnie is physically incapable of carrying a pregnancy to term. Desperate to explore their options, Bonnie and Larry attempt adoption but are rejected by the agency without explanation. Finally, they contemplate surrogacy as their last chance to have a child. Seeking advice and answers, they consult health professionals, lawyers, pastoral counselors, and a bioethicist. In the course of this complicated and often painful decision-making process, they attend meetings of a government task force on reproduction where they hear both radical and liberal feminist positions.

Their experiences with friends, family members, two surrogates, hospital ethics committees, and special interest groups underscore the difficulty of coming to a consensus on such issues as AIDS, the right to privacy, premenstrual syndrome, the violation of surrogate contracts, and the responsibilities of therapists and physicians to their patients and to the community at large.

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'She said she was in the family way'
Pregnancy and Infancy in Modern Ireland
Edited by Elaine Farrell
University of London Press, 2012
She said she was in the family way' examines the subject of pregnancy and infancy in Ireland from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It draws on exciting and innovative research by early-career and established academics, and consider topics that have been largely ignored by historians in Ireland. The book will make an important contribution to Irish women’s history, family history, childhood history, social history, crime history and medical history, and will provide a reference point for academics interested in themes of sexuality, childbirth, infanthood and parenthood.
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Smoking and Pregnancy
The Politics of Fetal Protection
Oaks, Laury
Rutgers University Press, 2001

The 1966 edition of the leading medical textbook states that pregnant women can safely smoke half a pack of cigarettes a day. Yet today, women who smoke during pregnancy are among the most vilified figures in public health campaigns. Laury Oaks argues this shift is not due solely to medical findings indicating that cigarette smoking may harm the fetus. Also responsible are a variety of social factors that converged more than a decade ago to construct the demonized category of the “pregnant smoker.”

This book charts the emergence of smoking during pregnancy as a public health concern and social problem. Oaks looks at the emphasis public health educators place on individual responsibility, the current legal and social assertion of fetal personhood, the changing expectations of pregnant and prepregnant women, and the advent of antismoking campaigns. She explores how public health educators discuss “the problem” with one another, how they communicate with pregnant smokers, and how these women themselves understand the “risk” of fetal harm. Finally, Oaks discusses the various meanings of “objective” statistics on the effects of smoking on the fetus, exploring the significance of cultural context in assessing the relative importance of those numbers. She argues that rather than bombarding pregnant women with statistics, health educators should consider the daily lives of these women and their socioeconomic status to understand why some women choose to smoke during pregnancy. Without downplaying the seriousness of the health risks that smoking poses to women and their babies, the book supports new efforts that challenge the moral policing of pregnant smokers.

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Special Care
Medical Decisions at the Beginning of Life
Fred M. Frohock
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Intensive care medicine today is as close to the miraculous as most of us are likely to see in our lifetime. Nowhere is this magic more effectively practiced than in neonatal nurseries. Infants who are born prematurely at twenty-four weeks gestation and who weigh less than a pound can now be treated successfully. No other type of medicine has a more dramatic payoff, for the infants who survive can look forward to seventy or more years of life.

But there is a dark underside to the exercise of these skills. A growing number of babies live only to be tethered to life-support systems, unconscious or suffering incessant pain for years and sometimes for the duration of their lives. The ethical issues raised by these children are among the most difficult in our society. Should life be maintained no matter what its quality? Or is there a point at which treatment should be stopped on humane grounds? Who is to make decisions on continuing or ending therapy for damaged children? Is the law a suitable instrument for regulating medical decisions in intensive care nurseries? Should the growing cost of intensive care influence therapy decisions?

Special Care explores the moral and legal issues in neonatal intensive care. Fred M. Frohock spent four months in a special care nursery, observing the daily actions of doctors and nurses and interviewing staff and parents of patients. This engaging, human drama is told through the author's own journal entries interspersed with generous excerpts from taped interviews that display the practical reasoning of staff and parents as they address the moral problems raised by intensive care medicine. Several case studies of infants highlight the often contradictory directions in which medical staffs are pulled and the painful decisions that doctors and parents together are often called upon to make. The result is a book that reconstructs the ordinary life of a neonatal nursery and presents the moral views of those who are most intimately involved in therapy decisions.

This book is an urgently needed entry in the current discussions of treatment for badly damaged babies. Frohock argues that our tradition of rights language, which rests on the premise that we know what a human being is, is inappropriate when dealing with the paradoxes of decision making in neonatal nurseries. Calling for a new moral vocabulary better adapted to the world of medicine, he introduces the notion of harm in place of rights, a concept drawn from medicine's Hippocratic oath that pledges to "do no harm," as a way to begin framing questions and making decisions. Special Care will interest anyone who wants to understand medical decisions at the margins of human life.
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Saving Babies?
The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening
Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder
University of Chicago Press, 2012
It has been close to six decades since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and more than ten years since the human genome was decoded. Today, through the collection and analysis of a small blood sample, every baby born in the United States is screened for more than fifty genetic disorders. Though the early detection of these abnormalities can potentially save lives, the test also has a high percentage of false positives—inaccurate results that can take a brutal emotional toll on parents before they are corrected. Now some doctors are questioning whether the benefits of these screenings outweigh the stress and pain they sometimes produce. In Saving Babies?, Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder evaluate the consequences and benefits of state-mandated newborn screening—and the larger policy questions they raise about the inherent inequalities in American medical care that limit the effectiveness of this potentially lifesaving technology.
 
Drawing on observations and interviews with families, doctors, and policy actors, Timmermans and Buchbinder have given us the first ethnographic study of how parents and geneticists resolve the many uncertainties in screening newborns. Ideal for scholars of medicine, public health, and public policy, this book is destined to become a classic in its field.
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See Sam Run
A Mother's Story of Autism
Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe
University of North Texas Press, 2008

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Special Needs, Special Horses
A Guide to the Benefits of Therapeutic Riding
Naomi Scott
University of North Texas Press, 2005

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Shaping Nursing Science and Improving Health
The Michigan Legacy
Shaké Ketefian, editor
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
Shaping Nursing Science and Improving Health: The Michigan Legacy chronicles the growth and development of nursing research and scholarship, and the outstanding contributions made to the discipline and the profession of nursing in the United States and beyond by the School of Nursing, University of Michigan.

The work covers selectively the development of nursing science over a period of some thirty years which was undertaken by nursing faculty and the School’s PhD Alumni. The account of the strategic development of a program of research across bio-behavioral phenomena, health promotion/risk reduction, women’s health and nursing and health care systems is instructive. Substantive contributions have been made across the selected areas; of note also is the impact of translational science on health outcomes of individuals and communities. The accounts of the purposeful development of health informatics in nursing and leadership as scholarship are also highly developed. The book is a valuable contribution to the literature on how nursing research at Michigan is helping transform the lives of patients, families and communities.
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Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice
Verna Benner Carson
Templeton Press, 2008

Ever since the first edition of Verna Benner Carson's Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice went out of print, second-hand copies have been highly sought after by practitioners in the field and nursing school faculty who appreciated the comprehensive scope of the seminal work on spirituality and health. In this highly anticipated revised edition, Carson and her co-editor, Harold G. Koenig, have thoroughly revised and updated this classic in the field.

The revised edition builds on the foundations laid in the first, providing perspectives on new research in the spiritual dimensions of nursing care, applying nursing theory to spiritual care, and addressing the spiritual needs of both nurses and patients. It also examines ethical issues in nursing and the impact of legal decisions on health care issues. Contributors address issues of spiritual development across the entire lifespan—from the spiritual needs and influences of the very young to the elderly, including those facing chronic illnesses or death. The volume takes a similarly broad approach in addressing spiritual issues from a variety of faith backgrounds—including both theistic and pantheistic religious practices, so that nurses can be prepared to meet the needs of patients from various religious traditions.
 
Second to chaplains, nurses are the major providers of spiritual care, and no other book will serve their needs like Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice.
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A Second Voice
A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio
Carol Poh Miller
Ohio University Press, 2004

Doctors of osteopathy today practice side by side with medical doctors, employing the same diagnostic and curative tools of scientific—with a difference. A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio is the story of that difference. Focusing on the historical experience of a pivotal midwestern state, historian Carol Poh Miller illuminates struggles common to osteopathic medicine nationwide as it fought to secure its place in American health care.

First promulgated by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still in 1874, osteopathy was a reaction against the primitive medical practices of the period. Believing that the body had its own natural curative powers, Still manipulated vertebrae to free circulation and to remove pathology. Early osteopaths endured discrimination, as orthodox medicine and its allies sought to prevent the establishment of Still’s new healing method.

Written in conjunction with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Ohio Osteopathic Association, A Second Voice traces the origins and growth of the profession in Ohio. It recounts the early legal battles, the establishment of separate osteopathic hospitals, and the hard-fought campaigns to win equal practice rights and to build a state college of osteopathic medicine. Finally, it reconsiders the notorious murder trial of Cleveland osteopathic physician Sam Sheppard in the context of his family’s contributions to the osteopathic profession and a prosecution that, evidence has shown, fingered the wrong man.

A Second Voice is a valuable addition to the history of medicine in Ohio and the nation.

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Seed to Civilization
The Story of Food
Charles B. Heiser, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1990

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Seeds of Sustainability
Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution in Agriculture
Edited by Pamela A. Matson
Island Press, 2012
Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people.
 
The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment.
 
Renowned scientist Pamela Matson and colleagues from leading institutions in the U.S. and Mexico spent fifteen years in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico addressing this challenge. Seeds of Sustainability represents the culmination of their research, providing unparalleled information about the causes and consequences of current agricultural methods. Even more importantly, it shows how knowledge can translate into better practices, not just in the Yaqui Valley, but throughout the world.
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States of Nature
Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940
By Stuart George McCook
University of Texas Press, 2002

The process of nation-building in Latin America transformed the relations between the state, the economy, and nature. Between 1760 and 1940, the economies of most countries in the Spanish Caribbean came to depend heavily on the export of plant products, such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar. After the mid-nineteenth century, this model of export-led economic growth also became a central tenet of liberal projects of nation-building. As international competition grew and commodity prices fell over this period, Latin American growers strove to remain competitive by increasing agricultural production. By the turn of the twentieth century, their pursuit of export-led growth had generated severe environmental problems, including soil exhaustion, erosion, and epidemic outbreaks of crop diseases and pests.

This book traces the history of the intersections between nature, economy, and nation in the Spanish Caribbean through a history of the agricultural and botanical sciences. Growers and governments in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, and Costa Rica turned to scientists to help them establish practical and ideological control over nature. They hoped to use science to alleviate the pressing environmental and economic stresses, without having to give up their commitment to export-led growth. Starting from an overview of the relationship among science, nature, and development throughout the export boom of 1760 to 1930, Stuart McCook examines such topics as the relationship between scientific plant surveys and nation-building, the development of a "creole science" to address the problems of tropical agriculture, the ecological rationalization of the sugar industry, and the growth of technocratic ideologies of science and progress. He concludes with a look at how the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the paradigms of economic and political development and the role of science and nature in these paradigms.

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Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope
Place and Agency in the Conservation of Biodiversity
Edited by Virginia D. Nazarea, Robert E. Rhoades, and Jenna E. Andrews-Swann
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Food is more than simple sustenance. It feeds our minds as well as our bodies. It nurtures us emotionally as well as physically. It holds memories. In fact, one of the surprising consequences of globalization and urbanization is the expanding web of emotional attachments to farmland, to food growers, and to place. And there is growing affection, too, for home gardening and its “grow your own food” ethos. Without denying the gravity of the problems of feeding the earth’s population while conserving its natural resources, Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope reminds us that there are many positive movements and developments that demonstrate the power of opposition and optimism.
 
This broad collection brings to the table a bag full of tools from anthropology, sociology, genetics, plant breeding, education, advocacy, and social activism. By design, multiple voices are included. They cross or straddle disciplinary, generational, national, and political borders. Contributors demonstrate the importance of cultural memory in the persistence of traditional or heirloom crops, as well as the agency exhibited by displaced and persecuted peoples in place-making and reconstructing nostalgic landscapes (including gardens from their homelands). Contributions explore local initiatives to save native and older seeds, the use of modern technologies to conserve heirloom plants, the bioconservation efforts of indigenous people, and how genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been successfully combated. Together they explore the conservation of biodiversity at different scales, from different perspectives, and with different theoretical and methodological approaches. Collectively, they demonstrate that there is reason for hope.
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Starved for Science
How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa
Robert PaarlbergForeword by Norman Borlaug and Jimmy Carter
Harvard University Press, 2009

Listen to a short interview with Robert PaarlbergHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.

Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.

In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.

In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.

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Simple Things
Lessons from the Family Farm
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
In this collection of thoughtful essays, Jerry Apps reflects on the “simple things” that made up everyday life on the farm—an old cedar fencepost, Fanny the farm dog, the trusty tools used for farmwork, the kerosene lantern the family gathered around each morning and evening. As he holds each item up to the light for a closer look, he plumbs his memories for the deeper meanings of these objects, sharing the values instilled in him during his rural boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s. He concludes that people who had the opportunity to grow up on family farms gained useful skills, important knowledge, and lifelong values that serve them well throughout their lives. Apps captures and shares those things for people who remember them and those who never had the benefit of living on a small farm.
 
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Stories from the Round Barn
Jacqueline Dougan Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Using stories, anecdotes, history, and even veterinary science, Jacqueline Dougan Jackson recreates life on the Dougan Guernsey Farm Dairy, founded in 1911 by W.J. Dougan near Beloit, Wisconsin. A fascinating mix of biography, oral history, and creative nonfiction, STORIES FROM THE ROUND BARN is a moving tribute to the legacy of generations past. 53 photos and line drawings .
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Seed Testing
Principles and Practices
Sabry G. Elias
Michigan State University Press, 2012

An essential reference for students, seed technologists, researchers, and seed industry personnel, this comprehensive guide outlines the most widely performed modern seed quality tests, explores the principles behind them, the history of seed testing, why seeds are tested and when, and sampling, sub-sampling, seed laboratory management, accreditation, and seed quality assurance programs. The authors describe statistical applications to seed testing and tolerances, and they provide a detailed morphological and structural description of seed formation and development. The book examines the testing of genetic traits and transgenic seeds, including DNA and protein genetic purity tests, and cultivar purity identification for conventional seeds. In addition to the most common seed purity and viability tests, tests for seed and seedling vigor, seed-borne diseases and seed moisture determination are also discussed.

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Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press, 2013

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter—these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains—referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known—or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.

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Sowing Empire
Landscape And Colonization
Jill H. Casid
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Planting and transplanting, seeding and reshaping—landscaping practices that emerged in the eighteenth century—are inextricable from the contested terrain of empire within which they operated. From the plantations of the “nabobs” to the island gardens of narrative fiction, from William Beckford’s estate at Fonthill to Marie Antoinette’s ornamented farm, Sowing Empire considers imperial relandscaping—its patriarchal organization, heterosexual reproduction, and slavery—and how it contributed to the construction of imperial power. At the same time, the book shows how these picturesque landscapes and sugar plantations contained within them the seeds of resistance—how, for instance, slave gardens and the Afro-Caribbean practice of Vodou threatened authority and created new possibilities for once again transforming the landscape.In an ambitious work of wide-ranging literary, visual, and historical allusion, Jill H. Casid examines how landscaping functioned in an imperial mode that defined and remade the “heartlands” of nations as well as the contact zones and colonial peripheries in the West and East Indies. Revealing the colonial landscape as far more than an agricultural system—as a means of regulating national, sexual, and gender identities—Casid also traces how the circulation of plants and hybridity influenced agriculture and landscaping on European soil and how colonial contacts materially shaped what we take as “European.”Utilizing a wide range of both visual and written sources—maps, literature, and travel writing—this book is interdisciplinary in its methodology and in its scope. Sowing Empire explores how postcolonial and queer studies can alter art history and visual studies and, in turn, what close attention to the visual may offer to both postcolonial theorizing and historically and materially based colonial cultural studies.Jill H. Casid is assistant professor of art history and part of the developing transdisciplinary program in visual culture studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Seeds and Sovereignty
Debate Over the Use and Control of Plant Genetic Resources
Jack R. Jr. Kloppenburg, ed.
Duke University Press, 1988
Seeds for economically important crops are big business indeed. As large seed companies continue to improve their product in various ways, they make use of the original gene pools of these plants, often located in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. With increasing recognition that plant germplasm is an important raw material, highly charged international disputes have developed over the exchange and use of this material, adding another point of contention between poor nations and the manufacturing wealthier ones.
Twenty experts from several nations, representing both the natural and social sciences, consider the historical background, the issue of patent rights as applied to plant germplasm, the nature of global genetic interdependence, the internationalization of the seed industry, the implications of biotechnology on genetic resources, the Third World attitude toward the debate, and the viewpoints of the International Agricultural Research Centers.
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Shattering
Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity
Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney
University of Arizona Press, 1990
It was through control of the shattering of wild seeds that humans first domesticated plants. Now control over those very plants threatens to shatter the world's food supply, as loss of genetic diversity sets the stage for widespread hunger.

Large-scale agriculture has come to favor uniformity in food crops. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in American orchards; 6,000 of them are no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogs in 1900 has now disappeared. As the international genetics supply industry absorbs seed companies—with nearly one thousand takeovers since 1970—this trend toward uniformity seems likely to continue; and as third world agriculture is brought in line with international business interests, the gene pools of humanity's most basic foods are threatened.

The consequences are more than culinary. Without the genetic diversity from which farmers traditionally breed for resistance to diseases, crops are more susceptible to the spread of pestilence. Tragedies like the Irish Potato Famine may be thought of today as ancient history; yet the U.S. corn blight of 1970 shows that technologically based agribusiness is a breeding ground for disaster.

Shattering reviews the development of genetic diversity over 10,000 years of human agriculture, then exposes its loss in our lifetime at the hands of political and economic forces. The possibility of crisis is real; this book shows that it may not be too late to avert it.
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Shading Our Cities
A Resource Guide For Urban And Community Forests
Edited by Gary Moll and Sara Ebenreck; Foreword by Dale Robertson; American Forestry Association
Island Press, 1989

Shading Our Cities is a handbook to help neighborhood groups, local officials, and city planners develop urban forestry projects, not only to beautify their cities, but also to reduce energy demand, improve air quality, protect water supplies, and contribute to healthier living conditions.

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Southern Gardens, Southern Gardening
William Lanier Hunt
Duke University Press, 1992
Originally published in 1982, this bestselling collection of gardening writing by William Lanier Hunt--one of the South’s leading gardening writers and horticulturalists--is now available for the first time in paperback. Arranged by months of the year, Southern Gardens, Southern Gardening is filled with useful, commensense instruction, as well as the wisdom and art of gardening.
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Seeds in Soil
Planting a Garden and Finding Your Roots
Susan Apps-Bodilly
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022
Take learning outdoors and empower young readers to plant their own gardens while digging deeper into related science and history lessons in this “soil to supper” book designed for kids and adults to use together. Packed with hands-on activities, fun projects, and fresh recipes, this colorful gardening guide provides opportunities for kids to observe, explore, and ask questions while engaging their
natural curiosity about nature. Seeds in Soil includes all the details to start planting and growing, whether working with a whole yard, a community or school garden, or just a balcony.

Chapters feature advice for selecting the seeds and tools to get started; ideas for planning and being creative in the garden; and tips for harvesting, storing, and cooking with fresh produce. Written by a second-grade teacher, the book includes engaging lessons about the science of climate, soil, and pollinators; and connections to history through the stories of First Nations and immigrant gardeners. Told through the author’s family stories and experience, Seeds in Soil will get kids having fun in the garden while digging, planting, growing, and finding their roots.
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Sound and Scent in the Garden
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Harvard University Press

While we often approach gardens as things to be seen—thus engaging the rational, intellectual part of the human brain—Sound and Scent in the Garden explores the more elusive experiences of sound and smell. These senses are important dimensions of garden design and performance and often have a powerful effect on the human body, yet they may also be ephemeral and difficult to study.

The contributors to the volume explore the sensory experience of gardens specifically as places where people encounter landscape in a staged manner, as a result of intentional design. How do the senses shape the experience of those places? In what ways are plants, gardens, and landscapes produced so as to stimulate the senses? What evidence do we have of historical sensory experiences? What is lost when we forget to acknowledge the sensory environment of the past or simply overlook its traces?

The volume demonstrates a wide variety of approaches to apply to the study of sensory history and illuminates this important dimension of the experience of gardens—past and present, East and West.

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Sites Unseen
Landscape and Vision
Dianne Harris
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
Sites Unseen challenges conventions for viewing and interpreting the landscape, using visual theory to move beyond traditional practices of describing and classifying objects to explore notions of audience and context.  While other fields, such as art history and geography, have engaged poststructuralist theory to consider vision and representation, the application of such inquiry to the natural or built environment has lagged behind.  This book, by treating landscape as a spatial, psychological, and sensory encounter, aims to bridge this gap, opening a new dialogue for discussing the landscape outside the boundaries of current art criticism and theory. 

As the contributors reveal, the landscape is a widely adaptable medium that can be employed literally or metaphorically to convey personal or institutional ideologies. Walls, gates, churchyards, and arches become framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience or to suit a sociopolitical agenda. The optic stimulation of signs, symbols, bodies, and objects combines with physical acts of climbing and walking and sensory acts of touching, smelling, and hearing to evoke an overall “vision” of landscape.

Sites Unseen considers a variety of different perspectives, including ancient Roman visions of landscape, the framing techniques of a Moghul palace, and a contemporary case study of Christo's The Gates, as examples of human attempts to shape our sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences in the landscape.
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The State Park Movement in America
A Critical Review
Ney C. Landrum
University of Missouri Press, 2013
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.
As the first study of its kind, The State Park Movement in America will fill a tremendous void in the literature on parks. Given that there are more than five thousand state parks in the United States, compared with fewer than five hundred national parks and historic sites, this history is long overdue. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with federal, state, or local parks, as well as to land resource managers generally.
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Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks
Edited by William L. Halvorson and Gary E. Davis
University of Arizona Press, 1996
Our national parks are more than mere recreational destinations. They are repositories of the nation's biological diversity and contain some of the last ecosystem remnants needed as standards to set reasonable goals for sustainable development throughout the land. Nevertheless, public pressure for recreation has largely precluded adequate research and resource monitoring in national parks, and ignorance of ecosystem structure and function in parks has led to costly mistakes--such as predator control and fire suppression--that continue to threaten parks today. This volume demonstrates the value of ecological knowledge in protecting parks and shows how modest investments in knowledge of park ecosystems can pay handsome dividends.

Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks presents twelve case studies of long-term research conducted in and around national parks that address major natural resource issues. These cases demonstrate how the use of longer time scales strongly influence our understanding of ecosystems and how interpretations of short-term patterns in nature often change when viewed in the context of long-term data sets. Most importantly, they show conclusively that scientific research significantly reduces uncertainty and improves resource management decisions. Chosen by scientists and senior park managers, the cases offer a broad range of topics, including: air quality at Grand Canyon; interaction between moose and wolf populations on Isle Royale; control of exotic species in Hawaiian parks; simulation of natural fire in the parks of the Sierra Nevada; and the impact of urban expansion on Saguaro National Monument.

Because national parks are increasingly beset with conflicting views of their management, the need for knowledge of park ecosystems becomes even more critical--not only for the parks themselves, but for what they can tell us about survival in the rest of our world. This book demonstrates to policymakers and managers that decisions based on knowledge of ecosystems are more enduring and cost effective than decisions derived from uninformed consensus. It also provides scientists with models for designing research to meet threats to our most precious natural resources. "If we can learn to save the parks," observe Halvorson and Davis, "perhaps we can learn to save the world."
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Science, Conservation, and National Parks
Edited by Steven R. Beissinger, David D. Ackerly, Holly Doremus, and Gary E. Machlis
University of Chicago Press, 2016
As the US National Park Service marks its centennial in 2016, parks and protected areas worldwide are under increasing threat from a variety of factors, including storms and fires of greater severity, plant and animal extinctions, the changing attitudes of a public that has become more urbanized, and the political pressures of narrow special interest groups. In the face of such rapid environmental and cultural changes, Science, Conservation, and National Parks gathers a group of renowned scholars—including Edward O. Wilson, Jane Lubchenco, Thomas Dietz, and Monica Turner, among many otherswho seek to address these problems and, in so doing, to secure a future for protected areas that will push forward the frontiers of biological, physical, and social science in and for parks.

Examining the major challenges of parks and protected areas throughout the world, contributors provide answers to a number of key conservation questions, such as: How should stewardship address climate change, urban encroachment and pollution, and invasive species? How can society, especially youth, become more engaged with nature and parks, and are there models to guide interactions between parks and their neighbors? What are appropriate conservation objectives for parks in the Anthropocene? Charting a course for the parks of the next century, Science, Conservation, and National Parks is certain not only to catalyze the continued evolution of US park conservation policy, but also to be an inspiration for parks, conservation, and management worldwide.
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Safari Nation
A Social History of the Kruger National Park
Jacob S. T. Dlamini
Ohio University Press, 2020

Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author  Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways  in which black people  devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher.

By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park,  and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks—often derided by scholars as colonial impositions—survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the “land question,” democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.

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Strangers in Paradise
Impact And Management Of Nonindigenous Species In Florida
Edited by Daniel Simberloff, Don C. Schmitz, and Tom C. Brown; Foreword by Edward O. Wilson
Island Press, 1997
Invasive nonindigenous species -- plants and animals that have been introduced to an ecosystem from someplace else -- are wreaking havoc around the globe. Because they did not co-evolve with species already in the ecosystem, they can profoundly disturb species interactions and ecosystem function.The state of Florida has one of the most severe exotic species problems in the country; as much as a quarter of many taxa in Florida are nonnative, and millions of acres of land and water are dominated by nonindigenous species. Strangers in Paradise provides an in-depth examination of the Florida experience and of the ongoing efforts to eradicate or manage introduced species. Chapters consider: natural disturbance and the spread of nonindigenous species case studies of insects, freshwater invertebrates, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, birds, marine invertebrates and algae, and mammals methods of managing nonindigenous species including ecological restoration, eradication, "maintenance control," and biological control management on public lands the regulatory framework including the role of the federal government as well as state authorities and responsibilities Strangers in Paradise is the first comprehensive volume to address a large, diverse region and the full range of nonindigenous species, the problems they cause, and the methods and impediments to dealing with them. Throughout, contributors emphasize solutions and relate the situation in Florida to problems faced by other states, making the book an important guide for anyone involved with control and management of invasive species.
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Shadows on the Klamath
A Woman in the Woods
Louise Wagenknecht
Oregon State University Press, 2021
In 1973, Louise Wagenknecht was just another college graduate, but unlike many, she wanted to go home, back to the Klamath Mountains where she was raised. When a job offer from the Klamath National Forest gave her that chance, she jumped at it. She landed in the logging town of Happy Camp, where she’d spent part of her childhood, as chronicled in her previous memoirs, White Poplar, Black Locust and Light on the Devils.

With Shadows on the Klamath, Louise Wagenknecht completes her trilogy about life in remote northwestern California. In this new work, she recounts her years in the Forest Service, starting as a clerical worker on the Klamath National Forest before moving to a field position where she did everything from planting trees to fighting fires.  

Her story is about a Forest Service in transition, as forest management practices began to shift. Not least among these changes was the presence of women in the ranks—a change that many in the Forest Service resisted. Wagenknecht blends the personal and professional to describe land management in the West and the people who do it—their friendships, rivalries, and rural communities.

Anyone with an interest in the Klamath-Siskiyou region, or the history of women in natural resource agencies, or the many issues associated with industrial forestry, should read this book for its valuable firsthand perspective. General readers interested in the rural West and personal memoir will also be richly rewarded.

 
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The Southern Forest
A Chronicle
By Laurence C. Walker
University of Texas Press, 1991

When the first European explorers reached the southern shores of North America in the early seventeenth century, they faced a solid forest that stretched all the way from the Atlantic coast to eastern Texas and Oklahoma. The ways in which they and their descendants used—and abused—the forest over the next nearly four hundred years form the subject of The Southern Forest.

In chapters on the explorers, pioneers, lumbermen, boatbuilders, and foresters, Laurence Walker chronicles the constant demands that people have made on forest resources in the South. He shows how the land's very abundance became its greatest liability, as people overhunted the animals, clearcut the forests, and wore out the soil with unwise farming practices—all in a mistaken belief that the forest's bounty (including new ground to be broken) was inexhaustible.

With the advent of professional forestry in the twentieth century, however, the southern forest has made a comeback. A professional forester himself, Walker speaks from experience of the difficulties that foresters face in balancing competing interests in the forest. How, for example, does one reconcile the country's growing demand for paper products with the insistence of environmental groups that no trees be cut? Should national forests be strictly recreational areas, or can they support some industrial logging? How do foresters avoid using chemical pesticides when the public protests such natural management practices as prescribed burning and tree cutting?

This personal view of the southern forest adds a new dimension to the study of southern history and culture. The primeval southern forest is gone, but, with careful husbandry on the part of all users, the regenerated southern forest may indeed prove to be the inexhaustible resource of which our ancestors dreamed.

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Stepping Back to Look Forward
A History of the Massachusetts Forest
Charles H. W. Foster
Harvard University Press, 1998
This timely collection of essays, written by recognized forestry and environmental specialists, tells the story of the conservation, use, and changes in Massachusetts’ forests over time. It begins with ecology and land-use history through pre-settlement, colonial, and post-Revolutionary periods, and ends with recommendations on how history may inform policy. It documents the origin and growth of state forestry programs and underscores the importance of private and local leadership and Massachusetts’ roles in the emergence of national conservation and forestry efforts. Economic contributions and educational programs are detailed. The book concludes with a call to awaken and reinvigorate the historical connection between citizens and their forests, an initiative of potential significance not only to Massachusetts but to the nation.
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The Social Lives of Forests
Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence
Edited by Susanna B. Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Christine Padoch
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face—including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation—are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests’ past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces—from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems—has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics.

Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, The Social Lives of Forests attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.
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Sustainable Harvest and Marketing of Rain Forest Products
Edited by Mark Plotkin and Lisa Famolare
Island Press, 1992
Based on a Conservation International conference in Panama, Sustainable Harvest and Marketing of Rain Forest Products brings together the world's leading experts on rain forest development and sustainability.
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Silviculture and Ecology of Western U.S. Forests
John D. Bailey
Oregon State University Press, 2015
Silviculture, once regarded solely as reforestation and growing trees for timber, is understood today as also maintaining forest health, reducing fire potential, benefitting wildlife and aesthetics, and ensuring multiple options for the future against the uncertainties of a changing climate.

Silviculture and Ecology of Western U.S. Forests, Second Edition, is a text for students, professional forest managers, and scientists that summarizes both early and contemporary research and principles relevant to the silviculture, ecology, and multi-purpose management of western U. S. forests. Based on its authors’ significant experiences and contributions in the field, as well as nearly 1000 additional references, Silviculture and Ecology remains the only text that focuses on silviculture in western U.S. forests—providing background and basis for current biological, ecological, and managerial practices.

Detailed chapters on fire, tree growth, and management of complex stand structures, as well as shrub ecology and an ecosystem framework, are bolstered in the second edition. A new series of case studies illustrates how silvicultural practices are developed and modified as forests grow and new challenges and opportunities occur. Contemporary silvicultural practices, particularly pertaining to fire use, vegetation management, soil fertility, and fertilization have been updated, and modifications that enhance standard practices are demonstrated throughout the text.

In this comprehensive reference, readers entering the field will come to understand the significance of carefully managing forests by conscious design, and experienced silviculturists will benefit from the edition’s up-to-date information, providing forest users with a greater range of ecosystem services and consumable products alike.
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Simple Things Won't Save the Earth
By J. Robert Hunter
University of Texas Press, 1997

We drive cars with "Save the Whales" bumper stickers, buy aerosol sprays that advertise "no chlorofluorocarbons," and wear T-shirts made from organically grown cotton. All of these "earth friendly" choices and products convince us that we are "thinking globally, acting locally" and saving the planet. But are we really?

In this provocative book, J. Robert Hunter asserts that using catchy slogans and symbols to sell the public on environmental conservation is ineffective, misleading, and even dangerous. Debunking the Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth approach, Hunter shows that there are no simple solutions to major environmental problems such as species extinction, ozone depletion, global warming, pollution, and non-renewable resource consumption.

The use of slogans and symbols, Hunter argues, simply gives the public a false sense that "someone" is solving the environmental crisis—while it remains as serious now as when the environmental movement began. Writing in plain yet passionate prose for general readers, he here opens a national debate on what is really required to preserve the earth as a habitat for the human species.

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Second Growth
The Promise of Tropical Forest Regeneration in an Age of Deforestation
Robin L. Chazdon
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For decades, conservation and research initiatives in tropical forests have focused almost exclusively on old-growth forests because scientists believed that these “pristine” ecosystems housed superior levels of biodiversity. With Second Growth, Robin L. Chazdon reveals those assumptions to be largely false, bringing to the fore the previously overlooked counterpart to old-growth forest: second growth.

Even as human activities result in extensive fragmentation and deforestation, tropical forests demonstrate a great capacity for natural and human-aided regeneration. Although these damaged landscapes can take centuries to regain the characteristics of old growth, Chazdon shows here that regenerating—or second-growth—forests are vital, dynamic reservoirs of biodiversity and environmental services. What is more, they always have been.

With chapters on the roles these forests play in carbon and nutrient cycling, sustaining biodiversity, providing timber and non-timber products, and integrated agriculture, Second Growth not only offers a thorough and wide-ranging overview of successional and restoration pathways, but also underscores the need to conserve, and further study, regenerating tropical forests in an attempt to inspire a new age of local and global stewardship.
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Stealing Shining Rivers
Agrarian Conflict, Market Logic, and Conservation in a Mexican Forest
Molly Doane
University of Arizona Press, 2012
Winner, Best Social Sciences Book (Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section)

What happens to indigenous people when their homelands are declared by well-intentioned outsiders to be precious environmental habitats? In this revelatory book, Molly Doane describes how a rain forest in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca was appropriated and redefined by environmentalists who initially wanted to conserve its biodiversity. Her case study approach shows that good intentions are not always enough to produce results that benefit both a habitat and its many different types of inhabitants.

Doane begins by showing how Chimalapas—translated as “shining rivers”—has been “produced” in various ways over time, from a worthless wasteland to a priceless asset. Focusing on a series of environmental projects that operated between 1990 and 2008, she reveals that environmentalists attempted to recast agrarian disputes—which actually stemmed from government-supported corporate incursions into community lands and from unequal land redistribution—as environmental problems.

Doane focuses in particular on the attempt throughout the 1990s to establish a “Campesino Ecological Reserve” in Chimalapas. Supported by major grants from the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), this effort to foster and merge agrarian and environmental interests was ultimately unsuccessful because it was seen as politically threatening by the state. By 2000, the Mexican government had convinced the WWF to redirect its conservation monies to the state government and its agencies.

The WWF eventually abandoned attempts to establish an “enclosure” nature reserve in the region or to gain community acceptance for conservation. Instead, working from a new market-based model of conservation, the WWF began paying cash to individuals for “environmental services” such as reforestation and environmental monitoring.
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Saving the Tropical Forests
Judith Gradwohl and Russell Greenberg
Island Press, 1988
Saving the Tropical Forests is a source book on the causes and effects of tropical deforestation.
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Smokechasing
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2003
"Painting, architecture, politics, even gardening and golf—all have their critics and commentators," observes Stephen Pyne. "Fire does not." Aside from news reports on fire disasters, most writing about fire appears in government reports and scientific papers—and in journalism that has more in common with the sports page than the editorial page.

Smokechasing presents commentaries by one of America's leading fire scholars, who analyzes fire the way another might an election campaign or a literary work. "Smokechasing" is an American coinage describing the practice of sending firefighters into the wild to track down the source of reported smoke. Now a self-described "friendly fire critic" tracks down more of the history and lore of fire in a collection that focuses on wildland fire and its management. Building on and complementing a previous anthology, World Fire, this new collection features thirty-two original articles and substantial revisions of works that have previously appeared in print. Pyne addresses many issues that have sparked public concern in the wake of disastrous wildfires in the West, such as fire ecology, federal fire management, and questions relating to fire suppression. He observes that the mistake in fire policy has been not that wildfires are suppressed but that controlled fires are no longer ignited; yet the attempted forced reintroduction of fire through prescribed burning has proved difficult, and sometimes damaging. There are, Pyne argues, many fire problems; some have technical solutions, some not. But there is no evading humanity's unique power and responsibility: what we don't do may be as ecologically powerful as what we do.

Throughout the collection, Pyne makes it clear that humans and fire interact at particular places and times to profoundly shape the world, and that understanding the contexts in which fire occurs can tell us much about the world's natural and cultural landscapes. Fire's context gives it its meaning, and Smokechasing not only helps illuminate those contexts but also shows us how to devise new contexts for tomorrow's fires.
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The Southwest
A Fire Survey
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2016
With its scattered mountains and high rims, its dry air and summer lightning, its rising tier of biomes from desert grasses to alpine conifers, and its aggressive exurban sprawl, something in the Southwest is ready to burn each year and some high-value assets seem ever in their path. But the past 20 years have witnessed an uptake in savagery, as routine surface burns have mutated into megafires and overrun nearly a quarter of the region’s forests. What happened, and what does it mean for the rest of the country?

Through a mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, fire expert Stephen J. Pyne provides a lively survey of what makes this region distinctive, moving us beyond the usual conversations of science and policy. Pyne explores the Southwest’s sacred mountains, including the Jemez, Mogollon, Huachucas, and Kaibab; its sky islands, among them the Chiricahuas, Mount Graham, and Tanque Verde; and its famous rims and borders. Together, the essays provide a cross-section of how landscape fire looks in the early years of the 21st century, what is being done to manage it, and how fire connects with other themes of southwestern life and culture.

The Southwest is part of the multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke also cover California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, Florida, and several other critical fire regions. The series serves as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s 50-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”
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Slopovers
Fire Surveys of the Mid-American Oak Woodlands, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska
Stephen J. Pyne
University of Arizona Press, 2019
America is not simply a federation of states but a confederation of regions. Some have always held national attention, some just for a time. Slopovers examines three regions that once dominated the national narrative and may now be returning to prominence.

The Mid-American oak woodlands were the scene of vigorous settlement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus the scene of changing fire practices. The debate over the origin of the prairies—by climate or fire—foreshadowed the more recent debate about fire in oak and hickory hardwoods. In both cases, today’s thinking points to the critical role of fire.

The Pacific Northwest was the great pivot between laissez-faire logging and state-sponsored conservation and the fires that would accompany each. Then fire faded as an environmental issue. But it has returned over the past decade like an avenging angel, forcing the region to again consider the defining dialectic between axe and flame.

And Alaska—Alaska is different, as everyone says. It came late to wildland fire protection, then managed an extraordinary transfiguration into the most successful American region to restore something like the historic fire regime. But Alaska is also a petrostate, and climate change may be making it the vanguard of what the Anthropocene will mean for American fire overall.

Slopovers collates surveys of these three regions into the national narrative. With a unique mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, renowned fire expert Stephen J. Pyne shows how culture and nature, fire from nature and fire from people, interact to shape our world with three case studies in public policy and the challenging questions they pose about the future we will share with fire.
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The Seasons Of Fire
Reflections On Fire In The West
David J. Strohmaier
University of Nevada Press, 2001

Fire is a fearsome constant in the America West. As the author David J. Strohmaier notes, "Whether we have tended a campfire along Oregon's Deschutes River in March, engaged the advancing front of a Great Basin wildfire in the torrid heat of August, or watched fire settle into the subdued, smoldering leaf piles of October, all of our lives, to one degree or another, are bracketed by fire." In The Seasons of Fire, Strohmaier effectively blends nature writing, personal essay, and philosophical analysis as he deliberately crosses disciplinary boundaries. He discusses the "moral" dimensions of fire—not only whether fires are good, bad, or indifferent phenomena, but also how fire, more generally understood, shapes meaning for human life. The consequences of discussing the moral side of fire speak directly to the contours of the human soul, and to our sense of our place on the land. Strohmaier, a long-term firefighter himself, includes accurate and sometimes gut-wrenching descriptions of the firefighter's experience.
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Scorched Earth
How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America
Rocky Barker
Island Press, 2005

In 1988, forest fires raged in Yellowstone National Park, destroying more than a million acres. As the nation watched the land around Old Faithful burn, a longstanding conflict over fire management reached a fever pitch. Should the U.S. Park and Forest Services suppress fires immediately or allow some to run their natural course? When should firefighters be sent to battle the flames and at what cost?

In Scorched Earth, Barker, an environmental reporter who was on the ground and in the smoke during the 1988 fires, shows us that many of today's arguments over fire and the nature of public land began to take shape soon after the Civil War. As Barker explains, how the government responded to early fires in Yellowstone and to private investors in the region led ultimately to the protection of 600 million acres of public lands in the United States. Barker uses his considerable narrative talents to bring to life a fascinating, but often neglected, piece of American history. Scorched Earth lays a new foundation for examining current fire and environmental policies in America and the world.

Our story begins when the West was yet to be won, with a colorful cast of characters: a civil war general and his soldiers, America's first investment banker, railroad men, naturalists, and fire-fighters-all of whom left their mark on Yellowstone. As the truth behind the creation of America's first national park is revealed, we discover the remarkable role the U.S. Army played in protecting Yellowstone and shaping public lands in the West. And we see the developing efforts of conservation's great figures as they struggled to preserve our heritage. With vivid descriptions of the famous fires that have raged in Yellowstone, the heroes who have tried to protect it, and the strategies that evolved as a result, Barker draws us into the very heart of a debate over our attempts to control nature and people.

This entertaining and timely book challenges the traditional views both of those who arrogantly seek full control of nature and those who naively believe we can leave it unaltered. And it demonstrates how much of our broader environmental history was shaped in the lands of Yellowstone.

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Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences
David B. Lindenmayer, Philip J. Burton, and Jerry F. Franklin
Island Press, 2008
Salvage logging—removing trees from a forested area in the wake of a catastrophic event such as a wildfire or hurricane—is highly controversial. Policymakers and those with an economic interest in harvesting trees typically argue that damaged areas should be logged so as to avoid “wasting” resources, while many forest ecologists contend that removing trees following a disturbance is harmful to a variety of forest species and can interfere with the natural process of ecosystem recovery.
 
Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences brings together three leading experts on forest ecology to explore a wide range of issues surrounding the practice of salvage logging. They gather and synthesize the latest research and information about its economic and ecological costs and benefits, and consider the impacts of salvage logging on ecosystem processes and biodiversity. The book examines
 
• what salvage logging is and why it is controversial
• natural and human disturbance regimes in forested ecosystems
• differences between salvage harvesting and traditional timber harvesting
• scientifically documented ecological impacts of salvage operations
• the importance of land management objectives in determining appropriate post-disturbance interventions
 
Brief case studies from around the world highlight a variety of projects, including operations that have followed wildfires, storms, volcanic eruptions, and insect infestations. In the final chapter, the authors discuss policy management implications and offer prescriptions for mitigating the impacts of future salvage harvesting efforts.
  
Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequences is a “must-read” volume for policymakers, students, academics, practitioners, and professionals involved in all aspects of forest management, natural resource planning, and forest conservation.
[more]

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Song of the Forest
Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905–1953
Stephen Brain
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

The Soviets are often viewed as insatiable industrialists who saw nature as a force to be tamed and exploited. Song of the Forest counters this assumption, uncovering significant evidence of Soviet conservation efforts in forestry, particularly under Josef Stalin. In his compelling study, Stephen Brain profiles the leading Soviet-era conservationists, agencies, and administrators, and their efforts to formulate forest policy despite powerful ideological differences.
      By the time of the revolution of 1905, modern Russian forestry science had developed an influential romantic strand, especially prevalent in the work of Georgii Morozov, whose theory of “stand types” asked forest managers to consider native species and local conditions when devising plans for regenerating forests. After their rise to power, the Bolsheviks turned their backs on this tradition and adopted German methods, then considered the most advanced in the world, for clear-cutting and replanting of marketable tree types in “artificial forests.” Later, when Stalin’s Five Year Plan required vast amounts of timber for industrialization, forest radicals proposed “flying management,” an exaggerated version of German forestry where large tracts of virgin forest would be clear-cut. Opponents who still upheld Morozov’s vision favored a conservative regenerating approach, and ultimately triumphed by establishing the world’s largest forest preserve.
      Another radical turn came with the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, implemented in 1948. Narrow “belts” of new forest planted on the vast Russian steppe would block drying winds, provide cool temperatures, trap moisture, and increase crop production. Unfortunately, planters were ordered to follow the misguided methods of the notorious Trofim Lysenko, and the resulting yields were abysmal. But despite Lysenko, agency infighting, and an indifferent peasant workforce, Stalin’s forestry bureaus eventually succeeded in winning many environmental concessions from industrial interests. In addition, the visionary teachings of Morozov found new life, ensuring that the forest’s song did not fall upon deaf ears.

[more]

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Saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang
A Legacy of Local and Federal Cooperation
Reed
University of Nevada Press, 2015
In 1968 the residents of Lovell, Wyoming, began the work of saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang, a breed of horse with a genetic link dating back to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores’ horses. In this moving case study, Christine Reed shows how, through a grassroots campaign, these residents championed the creation of the first federal public wild horse range. Crucial to this provocative analysis of local-federal cooperation is the relationship that grew between the Lovell advocates, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service. Long before there were federal laws passed to protect wild horse herds across the western states, the Pryor Mountain Mustang was preserved through the cooperative efforts of local residents and federal officials.

Saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang explores the unique and ongoing relationship between locals and the federal government, highlighting the Lovell citizens’ philosophy of cooperation instead of the typical mistrust that exists between wild horse advocates and federal agencies. The book provides a rich analysis of how a determined group of people saved an endangered wild horse herd. The book will have wide appeal to wild horse activists, scholars of local and federal governance, and western history enthusiasts.
[more]

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Sheep
Philip Armstrong
Reaktion Books, 2016
The ancient Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, and the Christians associated them with their divine savior. In Sheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural history of both wild and domestic species of ovis, from the Old World mouflon to the corkscrew-horned flocks of the Egyptians, from the Trojan sheep of Homer’s Odyssey to the cannibal sheep of Thomas More’s Utopia, from the vast migratory mobs of Spanish merinos all the way to Dolly—the first animal we have ever cloned—and Haruki Murakami’s sheep-human hybrids.
           
As Armstrong shows, humans have treated sheep with awe, cruelty or disdain for many thousands of years. Our exploitation of them for milk, meat, and wool—but also for artistic and cultural purposes—has shaped both our history and theirs. Despite all that we owe them we have often dismissed sheep as the least witted and least interesting of mammals: to be accused of “sheepishness” or behaving “like a flock of sheep” is to be denigrated for lack of courage, individuality, or will. Yet, as this book demonstrates, sheep actually possess highly sophisticated social skills and emotional intelligence. Above all, Sheep demonstrates that sometimes the most mundane animals turn out to be the most surprising.
[more]

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Shepherd
A Memoir
Richard Gilbert
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Upon moving to Appalachian Ohio with their two small children, Richard Gilbert and his wife are thrilled to learn there still are places in America that haven’t been homogenized. But their excitement over the region’s beauty and quirky character turns to culture shock as they try to put down roots far from their busy professional jobs in town. They struggle to rebuild a farmhouse, and Gilbert gets conned buying equipment and sheep—a ewe with an “outie” belly button turns out to be a neutered male, and mysterious illnesses plague the flock. Haunted by his father’s loss of his boyhood farm, Gilbert likewise struggles to earn money in agriculture. Finally an unlikely teacher shows him how to raise hardy sheep—a remarkable ewe named Freckles whose mothering ability epitomizes her species’ hidden beauty. Discovering as much about himself as he does these gentle animals, Gilbert becomes a seasoned agrarian and a respected livestock breeder. He makes peace with his romantic dream, his father, and himself. Shepherd, a story both personal and emblematic, captures the mythic pull and the practical difficulty of family scale sustainable farming.
[more]

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Secrets of the Snout
The Dog’s Incredible Nose
Frank Rosell
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Dogs and humans have worked side by side for thousands of years, and over the millennia we’ve come to depend upon our pooches as hunters, protectors, and faithful companions. But when it comes to the extraordinary quality of man’s best friend which we rely on most, the winner is clear—by a nose. In Secrets of the Snout, Frank Rosell blends storytelling and science as he sniffs out the myriad ways in which dogs have been trained to employe their incredible olfactory skills, from sussing out cancer and narcotics to locating endangered and invasive species, as well as missing persons (and golf balls).

With 300 million receptors to our mere 5 million, a dog’s nose is estimated to be between 100,000 and 100 million times more sensitive than a human’s. No wonder, then, that our nasally inferior species has sought to unleash the prodigious power of canine shnozzes. Rosell here takes us for a walk with a pack of superhero sniffers including Tutta, a dog with a fine nose for fine wine; the pet-finder pooch AJ; search-and-rescue dog Barry; the hunting dog Balder; the police dogs Rasko and Trixxi; the warfare dog Lisa; the cancer detection dog Jack; Tucker, who scents floating killer whale feces; and even Elvis, who can smell when you’re ovulating. With each dog, Rosell turns his nose to the evolution of the unique olfactory systems involved, which odors dogs detect, and how they do it.

A celebration of how the canine sense for scents works—and works for us—Secrets of the Snout will have dog lovers, trainers, and researchers alike all howling with delight. Exploring this most pointed of canine wonders, Rosell reveals the often surprising ways in which dogs are bettering our world, one nose at a time.
[more]

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Smoky Jack
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
Paul Adams (1901-1985) was a well-known Tennessee naturalist. Anne Bridges and Ken Wise are codirectors of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project. Bridges is associate professor at John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. With Ken Wise and Russell Clement, she wrote Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544-1934. Wise, professor at the John C. Hodges Library, is the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains and coauthor of A National History of Mount Le Conte.
[more]

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Stubborn Gal
The True Story of an Undefeated Sled Dog Racer
Dan O'Neill
University of Alaska Press, 2015
Stubborn Gal is the true story of a 60-mile sled dog race and a young woman determined—if not precisely qualified—to run it. Sarah has never competed in a race before and never run a big team of dogs. But when a race official strongly discourages her from entering, she boldly signs up. To answer the naysayers, she must learn how to control a dog team twice as powerful as any she has ever run. And she has three days to do it. Two practice runs end disastrously. On the third day, Sarah enters the race, and the results surprise everyone.
[more]

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Shifting Baselines
The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries
Edited by Jeremy B.C. Jackson, Karen E. Alexander, and Enric Sala
Island Press, 2011
Shifting Baselines explores the real-world implications of a groundbreaking idea: we must understand the oceans of the past to protect the oceans of the future. In 1995, acclaimed marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term "shifting baselines" to describe a phenomenon of lowered expectations, in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal. This seminal volume expands on Pauly's work, showing how skewed visions of the past have led to disastrous marine policies and why historical perspective is critical to revitalize fisheries and ecosystems.
 
Edited by marine ecologists Jeremy Jackson and Enric Sala, and historian Karen Alexander, the book brings together knowledge from disparate disciplines to paint a more realistic picture of past fisheries. The authors use case studies on the cod fishery and the connection between sardine and anchovy populations, among others, to explain various methods for studying historic trends and the intricate relationships between species. Subsequent chapters offer recommendations about both specific research methods and effective management. This practical information is framed by inspiring essays by Carl Safina and Randy Olson on a personal experience of shifting baselines and the importance of human stories in describing this phenomenon to a broad public.
 
While each contributor brings a different expertise to bear, all agree on the importance of historical perspective for effective fisheries management. Readers, from students to professionals, will benefit enormously from this informed hindsight.
[more]

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Slow Disturbance
Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier
Rafico Ruiz
Duke University Press, 2021
From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.
[more]

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Successful Fisheries Management
Issues, Case Studies, Perspectives
Edited by Stephen Cunningham and Tim Bostock
Eburon Academic Publishers, 2005
More than eighty percent of the world's fish population lives in fisheries. At the same time, nearly three-quarters of the world's most important fish species face extinction due to overfishing and environmental contamination. Successful Fisheries Management explores the possibilities for effective and sustainable fisheries management across the globe. Seven case studies examine both the successes and failures of fisheries from India to Australia to Senegal. Experts in their field, the contributors offer their audience a unique and absolutely essential examination of international fisheries management.
[more]

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Salmon, People, and Place
A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery
Jim Lichatowich
Oregon State University Press, 2013
Each year wild Pacific salmon leave their oceanic feeding grounds and swim hundreds of miles back to their home rivers. The salmon’s annual return is a place-defining event in the Pacific Northwest, with immense ecological, economic, and social significance. However, despite massive spending, efforts to significantly alter the endangered status of salmon have failed.

In Salmon, People, and Place, acclaimed fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich eloquently exposes the misconceptions underlying salmon management and recovery programs that have fueled the catastrophic decline in Northwest salmon populations for more than a century. These programs will continue to fail, he suggests, so long as they regard salmon as products and ignore their essential relationship with their habitat.

But Lichatowich offers hope. In Salmon, People, and Place he presents a concrete plan for salmon recovery, one based on the myriad lessons learned from past mistakes. What is needed to successfully restore salmon, Lichatowich states, is an acute commitment to healing the relationships among salmon, people, and place.

A significant contribution to the literature on Pacific salmon, Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery is an essential read for anyone concerned about the fate of this Pacific Northwest icon.
[more]

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Salmon Without Rivers
A History Of The Pacific Salmon Crisis
Jim Lichatowich
Island Press, 1999

"Fundamentally, the salmon's decline has been the consequence of a vision based on flawed assumptions and unchallenged myths.... We assumed we could control the biological productivity of salmon and 'improve' upon natural processes that we didn't even try to understand. We assumed we could have salmon without rivers." --from the introduction

From a mountain top where an eagle carries a salmon carcass to feed its young to the distant oceanic waters of the California current and the Alaskan Gyre, salmon have penetrated the Northwest to an extent unmatched by any other animal. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the natural productivity of salmon in Oregon, Washington, California, and Idaho has declined by eighty percent. The decline of Pacific salmon to the brink of extinction is a clear sign of serious problems in the region.

In Salmon Without Rivers, fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich offers an eye-opening look at the roots and evolution of the salmon crisis in the Pacific Northwest. He describes the multitude of factors over the past century and a half that have led to the salmon's decline, and examines in depth the abject failure of restoration efforts that have focused almost exclusively on hatcheries to return salmon stocks to healthy levels without addressing the underlying causes of the decline. The book:

  • describes the evolutionary history of the salmon along with the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest over the past 40 million years
  • considers the indigenous cultures of the region, and the emergence of salmon-based economies that survived for thousands of years
  • examines the rapid transformation of the region following the arrival of Europeans
  • presents the history of efforts to protect and restore the salmon
  • offers a critical assessment of why restoration efforts have failed

Throughout, Lichatowich argues that the dominant worldview of our society -- a worldview that denies connections between humans and the natural world -- has created the conflict and controversy that characterize the recent history of salmon; unless that worldview is challenged and changed, there is little hope for recovery. Salmon Without Rivers exposes the myths that have guided recent human-salmon interactions. It clearly explains the difficult choices facing the citizens of the region, and provides unique insight into one of the most tragic chapters in our nation's environmental history.

[more]

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Shellfish for the Celestial Empire
The Rise and Fall of Commercial Abalone Fishing in California
Todd J. Braje
University of Utah Press, 2016

In the 1800s, when California was captivated by gold fever, a small group of Chinese immigrants recognized the fortune to be made from the untapped resources along the state’s coast, particularly from harvesting the black abalone of southern and Baja California. These immigrants, with skills from humble beginnings in a traditional Chinese fishing province, founded California’s commercial abalone industry, and led its growth and expansion for several decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, their successful livelihood was stolen from them through targeted legislation of the U.S. and California governments.

Today, the physical evidence of historical Chinese abalone fishing on the mainland has been erased by development. On California’s Channel Islands, however, remnants of temporary abalone collecting and processing camps lie scattered along the coastlines. These sites hold a treasure trove of information, stories, lifeways, and history. Braje has excavated many of these sites and uses them to explore the history of Chinese abalone fishing, presenting a microcosm of the broader history of Chinese immigrants in America—their struggles, their successes, the institutionalized racism they faced, and the unique ways in which they helped to shape the identity of the United States. 

[more]

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The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected
A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything
Marcelo Gleiser
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
Marcelo Gleiser has had a passion for science and fishing since he was a boy growing up on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Now a world-famous theoretical physicist with hundreds of scientific articles and several books of popular science to his credit, he felt it was time to connect with nature in less theoretical ways. After seeing a fly-fishing class on the Dartmouth College green, he decided to learn to fly-fish, a hobby, he says, that teaches humility. In The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, Gleiser travels the world to scientific conferences, fishing wherever he goes. At each stop, he ponders how in the myriad ways physics informs the act of fishing; how, in its turn, fishing serves as a lens into nature’s inner workings; and how science engages with questions of meaning and spirituality, inspiring a sense of mystery and awe of the not yet known. Personal and engaging, The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected is a scientist’s tribute to nature, an affirmation of humanity’s deep connection with and debt to Earth, and an exploration of the meaning of existence, from atom to trout to cosmos.
[more]

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The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected
A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything
Marcelo Gleiser
Brandeis University Press, 2022
A personal and engaging tribute to nature from a world-famous theoretical physicist. 
 

Marcelo Gleiser has had a passion for science and fishing since he was a boy growing up on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. As a world-famous theoretical physicist with hundreds of scientific articles and several books of popular science to his credit, he felt it was time to once again connect with nature in less theoretical ways. After seeing a fly-fishing class on the Dartmouth College green, he decided to learn to fly-fish, a hobby, he says, that teaches humility. In The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, Gleiser travels the world to scientific conferences, fishing wherever he goes. At each stop, he ponders the myriad ways physics informs the act of fishing; how, in its turn, fishing serves as a lens into nature’s inner workings; and how science engages with questions of meaning and spirituality, inspiring a sense of mystery and awe of the not yet known. Personal and engaging, The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected is a scientist’s tribute to nature, an affirmation of humanity’s deep connection with and debt to Earth, and an exploration of the meaning of existence, from atom to trout to cosmos. 
 
This softcover edition features a new essay by Gleiser on how we need a profound change of worldview if we are to have a vibrant future for our species in this fragile environment. He describes how this book was an incubator for his current thinking.
[more]

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Something Spectacular
My Great Lakes Salmon Story
Howard A. Tanner
Michigan State University Press, 2018
As the new chief of the Michigan Department of Conservation’s Fish Division in 1964, Howard A. Tanner was challenged to “do something . . . spectacular.” He met that challenge by leading the successful introduction of coho salmon into the Michigan waters of the Great Lakes. This volume illustrates how Tanner was able to accomplish this feat: from a detailed account of his personal and professional background that provided a foundation for success; the historical and contemporary context in which the Fish Division undertook this bold step to reorient the state’s fishery from commercial to sport; the challenges, such as resistance from existing government institutions and finding funding, that he and his colleagues faced; the risks they took by introducing a nonnative species; the surprises they experienced in the first season’s catch; to, finally, the success they achieved in establishing a world-renowned, biologically and financially beneficial sport fishery in the Great Lakes. Tanner provides an engaging history of successfully introducing Pacific salmon into the lakes from the perspective of an ultimate insider.
 
[more]

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Striper Wars
An American Fish Story
Dick Russell
Island Press, 2005

When populations of striped bass began plummeting in the early 1980s, author and fisherman Dick Russell was there to lead an Atlantic coast conservation campaign that resulted in one of the most remarkable wildlife comebacks in the history of fisheries. As any avid fisherman will tell you, the striped bass has long been a favorite at the American dinner table; in fact, we've been feasting on the fish from the time of the Pilgrims. By 1980 that feasting had turned to overfishing by commercial fishing interests. Striper Wars is Dick Russell's inspiring account of the people and events responsible for the successful preservation of one of America's favorite fish and of what has happened since.

Striper Wars is a tale replete with heroes--and some villains--as the struggle to save the striper migrated down the coast from Massachusetts to Maryland. Russell introduces us to a postman at arms against a burly trap-net fisherman, a renowned state governor caving to special interests, and a fishing-tackle maker fighting alongside marine biologists. And he describes how champions of this singular fish blocked power plants and New York's Westway Project that would otherwise compromise its habitat. Unfortunately, those who cheered the triumphant ending to the campaign, as the coastal states enacted measures that enabled the striped bass to make its comeback, have found the peace transitory--there is now a new enemy emerging on the front.

In recent years a chronic bacterial disease has struck more than seventy percent of the striped bass population in the primary spawning waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Malnutrition seems to be a significant factor, brought on by the same overfishing that plagued the bass in the first battle--only this time, the overfishing is devastating menhaden, the silvery little fish upon which the bass feed. Lessons learned during the first conservation battle are being applied here, highlighting a need for a whole new ecosystem-based approach to conserving species.

Only with constant vigilance by concerned citizens, Dick Russell reminds us, can environmental victories be sustained. This particular fish story is a personal one for him, and he follows the striper's saga today all the way to California, where the fish was introduced in 1879 and where agribusiness now threatens its future. For his conservation work during the 1980s Russell received a citizen's Chevron Conservation Award.

[more]

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Safe Passages
Highways, Wildlife, and Habitat Connectivity
Edited by Jon P. Beckmann, Anthony P. Clevenger, Marcel P. Huijser, Jodi A. Hilty
Island Press, 2010
Safe Passages brings together in a single volume the latest information on the emerging science of road ecology as it relates to mitigating interactions between roads and wildlife. This practical handbook of tools and examples is designed to assist individuals and organizations thinking about or working toward reducing road-wildlife impacts. The book provides:
  • an overview of the importance of habitat connectivity with regard to roads
  • current planning approaches and technologies for mitigating the impacts of highways on both terrestrial and aquatic species
  • different facets of public participation in highway-wildlife connectivity mitigation projects
  • case studies from partnerships across North America that highlight successful on-the-ground implementation of ecological and engineering solutions
  • recent innovative highway-wildlife mitigation developments
Detailed case studies span a range of scales, from site-specific wildlife crossing structures, to statewide planning for habitat connectivity, to national legislation. Contributors explore the cooperative efforts that are emerging as a result of diverse organizations—including transportation agencies, land and wildlife management agencies, and nongovernmental organizations—finding common ground to tackle important road ecology issues and problems.
 
Safe Passages is an important new resource for local-, state-, and national-level managers and policymakers working on road-wildlife issues, and will appeal to a broad audience including scientists, agency personnel, planners, land managers, transportation consultants, students, conservation organizations, policymakers, and citizens engaged in road-wildlife mitigation projects.
[more]

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Solving Problems in Technical Communication
Edited by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber
University of Chicago Press, 2012

The field of technical communication is rapidly expanding in both the academic world and the private sector, yet a problematic divide remains between theory and practice. Here Stuart A. Selber and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, both respected scholars and teachers of technical communication, effectively bridge that gap.

Solving Problems in Technical Communication collects the latest research and theory in the field and applies it to real-world problems faced by practitioners—problems involving ethics, intercultural communication, new media, and other areas that determine the boundaries of the discipline. The book is structured in four parts, offering an overview of the field, situating it historically and culturally, reviewing various theoretical approaches to technical communication, and examining how the field can be advanced by drawing on diverse perspectives. Timely, informed, and practical, Solving Problems in Technical Communication will be an essential tool for undergraduates and graduate students as they begin the transition from classroom to career.
[more]

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Scientific Style and Format
The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, Eighth Edition
Council of Science Editors
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For more than fifty years, authors, editors, and publishers in the scientific community have turned to Scientific Style and Format for authoritative recommendations on all matters of writing style and citation. Developed by the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the leading professional association in science publishing, this indispensable guide encompasses all areas of the sciences. Now in its eighth edition, it has been fully revised to reflect today’s best practices in scientific publishing.
 
Scientific Style and Format citation style has been comprehensively reorganized, and its style recommendations have been updated to align with the advice of authoritative international bodies. Also new to the eighth edition are guidelines and examples for citing online images and information graphics, podcasts and webcasts, online videos, blogs, social networking sites, and e-books. Style instructions for physics, chemistry, genetics, biological sciences, and astronomy have been adjusted to reflect developments in each field. The coverage of numbers, units, mathematical expressions, and statistics has been revised and now includes more information on managing tables, figures, and indexes. Additionally, a full discussion of plagiarism and other aspects of academic integrity is incorporated, along with a complete treatment of developments in copyright law, including Creative Commons.
 
For the first time in its history, Scientific Style and Format will be available simultaneously in print and online at www.scientificstyleandformat.org. Online subscribers will receive access to full-text searches of the new edition and other online tools, as well as the popular Chicago Manual of Style Online Forum, a community discussion board for editors and authors. Whether online or in print, the eighth edition of Scientific Style and Format remains the essential resource for those writing, editing, and publishing in the scientific community.
[more]

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Systemic Choices
Nonlinear Dynamics and Practical Management
Gregory A. Daneke
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The revolution in social scientific theory and practice known as nonlinear dynamics, chaos, or complexity, derived from recent advances in the physical, biological, and cognitive sciences, is now culminating with the widespread use of tools and concepts such as praxis, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, and parallel processing. By tracing a number of conceptual threads from mathematics, economics, cybernetics, and various other applied systems theoretics, this book offers a historical framework for how these ideas are transforming the social sciences. Daneke goes on to address a variety of persistent philosophical issues surrounding this paradigm shift, ranging from the nature of human rationality to free will. Finally, he describes this shift as a path for revitalizing the social sciences just when they will be most needed to address the human condition in the new millennium.
Systemic Choices describes how praxis and other complex systems tools can be applied to a number of pressing policy and management problems. For example, simulations can be used to grow a number of robust hybrid industrial and/or technological strategies between cooperation and competition. Likewise, elements of international agreements could be tested for sustainability under adaptively evolving institutional designs. Other concrete applications include strategic management, total quality management, and operational analyses.
This exploration of a wide range of technical tools and concepts will interest economists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and those in the management disciplines such as strategy, organizational behavior, finance, and operations.
Gregory A. Daneke is Professor of Technology Management, Arizona State University, and of Human and Organization Development, The Fielding Institute.
[more]

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The Structure of Scientific Articles
Applications to Citation Indexing and Summarization
Simone Teufel
CSLI, 2010
Finding a particular scientific document amidst a sea of thousands of other documents can often seem like an insurmountable task. The Structure of Scientific Articles shows how linguistic theory can provide a solution by analyzing rhetorical structures to make information retrieval easier and faster.
Through the use of an improved citation indexing system, this indispensable volume applies empirical discourse studies to pressing issues of document management, including attribution, the author’s stance towards other work, and problem-solving processes.
[more]

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Skills Development for Engineers
Innovative model for advanced learning in the workplace
Kevin Hoag
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2001
This book presents an innovative model for skills development for engineering professionals. Organizations operate in an increasingly competitive environment, which drives a need for continuous employee skills development. The rapid pace of technological change requires everyone to continue learning throughout life and this book questions the effectiveness of current employee learning in most organizations. Conversely, the new lifelong learning model described in this book has been proven very successful and less costly than existing systems. This highly readable book is amply illustrated with many practical examples and case studies based on the author's experience as a training manager in a large North American engineering company.
[more]

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A Science of Our Own
Exhibitions and the Rise of Australian Public Science
Peter H. Hoffenberg
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

When the Reverend Henry Carmichael opened the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1833, he introduced a bold directive: for Australia to advance on the scale of nations, it needed to develop a science of its own. Prominent scientists in the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria answered this call by participating in popular exhibitions far and near, from London’s Crystal Place in 1851 to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane during the final decades of the nineteenth century. A Science of Our Own explores the influential work of local botanists, chemists, and geologists—William B. Clarke, Joseph Bosisto, Robert Brough Smyth, and Ferdinand Mueller—who contributed to shaping a distinctive public science in Australia during the nineteenth century. It extends beyond the political underpinnings of the development of public science to consider the rich social and cultural context at its core. For the Australian colonies, as Peter H. Hoffenberg argues, these exhibitions not only offered a path to progress by promoting both the knowledge and authority of local scientists and public policies; they also ultimately redefined the relationship between science and society by representing and appealing to the growing popularity of science at home and abroad.
 

[more]

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The Shows of London
Richard D. Altick
Harvard University Press, 1978

A berserk elephant gunned down in the heart of London, a machine for composing Latin hexameters, and the original rock band (1841)—these are but three of the sights that London curiosity–seekers from every walk of life paid to see from the Elizabethan era to the mid–Victorian period. Examining hundreds of the wonderfully varied exhibitions that culminated in the Crystal Palace of 1851, this generously illustrated book sheds light on a vast and colorful expanse of English social history that has thus far remained wholly unsurveyed.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-used information, Mr. Altick traces London exhibitions as they evolved from the display of relics in pre-Reformation churches, through the collections of eighteenth-century virtuosi, to the first science museums and public art galleries. He also narrates for the first time the history of the panorama and diorama as an influential genre of nineteenth-century popular art. At every point, the London shows are linked to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and to trends in public taste.

The material is fresh and fascinating; the range--from freaks to popular science, from the funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey to Madame Tussaud's waxworks--impressive. Like the exhibitions that best served the Victorian ideal of mass culture, The Shows of London is both entertaining and informative.

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Sesqui!
Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World's Fair of 1926
Thomas H. Keels
Temple University Press, 2017

In 1916, Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker launched plans for a Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in 1926. It would be a magnificent world's fair to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The “Sesqui” would also transform sooty, industrial Philadelphia into a beautiful Beaux Arts city.

However, when the Sesqui opened on May 31, 1926, in the remote, muddy swamps of South Philadelphia, the fair was unfinished, with a few shabbily built and mostly empty structures. Crowds stayed away in droves: fewer than five million paying customers attended, costing the city millions of dollars. Philadelphia became a national scandal—a city so corrupt that one political boss could kidnap an entire world’s fair. 

In his fascinating history Sesqui!, noted historian Thomas Keels situates this ill-fated celebration—a personal boondoggle by the all-powerful Congressman William S. Vare—against the transformations taking place in America during the 1920s. Keels provides a comprehensive account of the Sesqui as a meeting ground for cultural changes sweeping the country: women’s and African-American rights, anti-Semitism, eugenics, Prohibition, and technological advances.

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Synthetic
How Life Got Made
Sophia Roosth
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and manufacture: viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools.
 
In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers’ garages across the United States—even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists’ own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing.
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Sensors, Actuators, and Their Interfaces
A multidisciplinary introduction
Nathan Ida
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
Sensors and actuators are used daily in countless applications to ensure more accurate and reliable workflows and safer environments. Many students and young engineers with engineering and science backgrounds often come prepared with circuits and programming skills but have little knowledge of sensors and sensing strategies and their interfacing.
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Sensors, Actuators, and their Interfaces
A multidisciplinary introduction
Nathan Ida
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
As sensors and actuators are normally not (and have not been) treated in academic curricula as a subject in its own right; many students and current professionals often find themselves limited in their knowledge and dealing with topics and issues based on material they may have never encountered. Until now.
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Systems Engineering for Ethical Autonomous Systems
Tony Gillespie
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
The transfer of responsibility for decisions and actions from humans to machines presents difficult problems for all those concerned with new concepts, their development and use. This book gives practical help by discussing the issues in the context of product design, and gives a methodology to solve them.
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Surveying in Early America
The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History
Dan Patterson and Clinton Terry
University of Cincinnati Press, 2020
Living history is one of the most popular, and accessible ways for people of all ages to step back in time. From Colonial Williamsburg, to Mount Vernon, to signs along roadways identifying George Washington stopping points, living history continues to be an accessible way to learn about cultural, historical and political practice in early America.
 
In Surveying Early America: The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History, award-winning photographer Dan Patterson and American historian Clinton Terry vividly and succinctly unpack the profession of surveying during the eighteenth century. Over 100 full color photographs exclusively shot for the book depict authentic and historically accurate reproductions of techniques and tools through the use of American reenactors from the Department of Geographer, which provide an interpretive look at surveying as a primary means to building the American nation.
 
Through the lens of Patterson’s camera and Terry’s narrative, readers see what Washington saw as he learned his trade, explored the vast American wilderness, and occasionally laid personal claim to great expanses of land. Readers are visually and intellectually immersed in the historically accurate details of the surveying practices of George Washington, Virginia’s first surveyor and his team.
 
Step-by-step, readers learn how early America, in particular the east to the Ohio River Valley was initially divided and documented. Terry characterizes both the profession and methods of land measurement and surveying in British colonial North America—techniques that did not substantially change until the invention of GPS technology 200 years later. Along the way Terry details the various tools of the trade early surveyors used.
 
Photographer Dan Patterson, working with the Department of the Geographer, restages Washington’s actual expeditions during his time with the Geographers to the Army, the technical staff department consisting of American and French soldiers, whose work in the field supported the Continental Army. Patterson brilliantly displays the processes and instruments Washington used 260 years ago.

Together Ohio based photographer and author team up to create a single story, expanding the understanding of primary source material for general readers and those with a passion for early American history.
 
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Shooting Polaris
A Personal Survey in the American West
John Hales
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Shooting Polaris is John Hales’s fascinating and far-reaching account of working as a government surveyor in the southern Utah desert. In it, he describes his search for a place in the natural world, beginning with an afternoon spent tracking down a lost crew member who cracked up on the job and concluding with his supervising a group of at-risk teenagers on a backpacking trip in the Escalante wilderness. In between, he depicts a range of experiences in and outside nature, including hostile barroom encounters between surveyors and tourists, weekends spent climbing Navajo Mountain and floating what remains of Glen Canyon, and late-night arguments concerning the meaning and purpose of nature with the eccentric polygamist who ran the town in which the surveyors parked their bunk trailers.
Although this work is autobiographical, Shooting Polaris is so much more. It is a reflection on man’s relationship to nature and work, American history and the movement into the West, the desire to impose order and the contrary impulse for unmediated experience, the idealistic legacy of the sixties, the influence of the Mormon Church, and the often-antagonistic relationship of American capitalism to sound ecological management. Along the way, Hales introduces engaging characters and reveals the art, science, and history of surveying, an endeavor that turns out to be surprisingly profound.
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Selected Topics in Advanced Solid State and Fibre Optic Sensors
S.M. Vaezi-Nejad
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2000
New techniques and technologies for sensors are developing fast and being applied in a wide range of fields for measurement and instrumentation, both for research and commercial purposes. This book aims to provide advanced students and practising engineers with a selective tour of highlights in the topical field of sensors for measurement. The authors provide descriptions of the operation, characteristics and applications of the sensors on which they work, together with recent advances and prospects for the future. The chapters cover both fibre optic and solid state sensing, applied across a wide range of applications.
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Structures in the Stream
Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
By Todd Shallat
University of Texas Press, 1994

As the Mississippi and other midwestern rivers inundated town after town during the summer of 1993, concerned and angry citizens questioned whether the very technologies and structures intended to "tame" the rivers did not, in fact, increase the severity of the floods. Much of the controversy swirled around the apparent culpability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the builder of many of the flood control systems that failed.

In this book, Todd Shallat examines the turbulent first century of the dam and canal building Corps and follows the agency's rise from European antecedents through the boom years of river development after the American Civil War. Combining extensive research with a lively style, Shallat tells the story of monumental construction and engineering fiascoes, public service and public corruption, and the rise of science and the army expert as agents of the state.

More than an institutional history, Structures in the Stream offers significant insights into American society, which has alternately supported the public works projects that are a legacy of our French heritage and opposed them based on the democratic, individualist tradition inherited from Britain. It will be important reading for a wide audience in environmental, military, and scientific history, policy studies, and American cultural history.

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Same River Twice
The Politics of Dam Removal and River Restoration
Peter Brewitt
Oregon State University Press, 2019
Dam removal was not a realistic option in the twentieth century, and people who suggested it were dismissed as radical dreamers. Over the past twenty years, dam removal has become increasingly common, with dozens of removals now taking place each year nationwide.

How did this happen? Same River Twice answers this question by telling the stories of three major Northwestern dam removals – the politics, people, hopes, and fears that shaped three rivers and their communities. Brewitt begins each story with the dam’s construction, shows how its critics gained power, details the conflicts and controversies of removal, and explores the aftermath as the river re-established itself.

Each dam removal offers a unique case study. On the Elwha and Rogue Rivers, dam removal was a multi-decade political brawl; on the Sandy River it was swift and amicable. A key controversy in every case was the loss of the recreational lake created by the dam. Local communities loved their lakes and felt that they were natural, public spaces rather than industrial creations. They fought dam removal with passion and ingenuity. To be successful, dam removal advocates had to learn to weld together mega-coalitions that embraced most interest groups and moved forward together.

While the dams profiled here are all in the Pacific Northwest, dam removal is a national and international phenomenon, and Brewitt’s findings apply everywhere. Written for both a scholarly and a general audience, Same River Twice presents invaluable case studies for scholars of environmental politics, wildlife and public land professionals, environmental activists, and anyone interested in the intersection of politics, public policy, and dam removal.
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Still the Wild River Runs
Congress, the Sierra Club, and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon
Byron E. Pearson
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Between 1963 and 1968, environmentalists were outraged when western water interests sought to construct two dams in Grand Canyon as part of the Central Arizona Project. The Sierra Club led a national campaign opposed to the project, which most environmental historians credit with defeating the dams. In the wake of its victory, the Sierra Club has been lauded as the savior of Grand Canyon. Byron Pearson now takes a closer look at history to show that the Sierra Club's ability to mobilize public opinion did not appreciably influence Congress, where the issue was actually decided. When Arizona congressman Stewart Udall became Interior Secretary in 1960, he promoted a plan to import water from the Pacific Northwest to California in order to placate that state's opposition to the CAP with its proposed dams. When this support dissolved in the face of resistance from Washington senator Henry Jackson, who chaired the Senate Interior Committee, the pragmatic Udall sought passage of a bare-bones CAP bill without the dams before he and Arizona senator Carl Hayden retired. Despite this congressional deal-making, the Sierra Club received credit for blocking the dams and was propelled to the undisputed leadership of the environmental movement. Using the myth that it had saved the Canyon, the club transformed its image of power into real political influence after Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, giving environmental advocates access to the policy-making process for the first time. In revealing how the Sierra Club played a much lesser role in blocking the dams than they would have had the public believe, Pearson contrasts the ways in which the controversy unfolded in the court of public opinion versus the actual political process. He takes readers into congressional chambers and conference rooms, reconstructing the legislative process to convey the full flavor of this political give-and-take. Based on research in archives from all over the country, Still the Wild River Runs will itself be a subject of controversy as it challenges long-standing notions about the power of environmental lobbies. By putting this chain of historical events in clearer perspective, it can give citizens concerned with future causes a better understanding of the political process and what really moves it.
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A Safe and Sustainable World
The Promise Of Ecological Design
Nancy Jack Todd
Island Press, 2005

In the late sixties, as the world was waking to a need for Earth Day, a pioneering group founded a small non-profit research and education organization they called the New Alchemy Institute. Their aim was to explore the ways a safer and more sustainable world could be created. In the ensuing years, along with scientists, agriculturists, and a host of enthusiastic amateurs and friends, they set out to discover new ways that basic human needs--in the form of food, shelter, and energy--could be met. A Safe and Sustainable World is the story of that journey, as it was and as it continues to be.

The dynamics and the resilience of the living world were the Institute's model and the inspiration for their research. Central to their efforts then and now is, along with science, a spiritual quest for a more harmonious human role in our planet's future. The results of this work have now entered mainstream science through the emerging discipline of ecological design.

Nancy Jack Todd not only relates a fascinating journey from lofty ideals through the hard realities encountered in learning how to actually grow food, harness the energy of the sun and wind, and design green architecture. She also introduces us to some of the heroes and mentors who played a vital role in those efforts as well, from Buckminster Fuller to Margaret Mead. The early work of the Institute culminated in the design and building of two bioshelters--large greenhouse-like independent structures called Arks, that provided the setting for much of the research to follow.

Successfully proving through the Institute's designs and investigations that basic land sustainability is achievable, John Todd and the author founded a second non-profit research group, Ocean Arks International. Here they applied the New Alchemy's natural systems thinking to restoring polluted waters with the invention and implementation of biologically based living technologies called Ecomachines and Pond and Lake Restorers. A Safe and Sustainable World demonstrates what has and can be done--it also looks to what must be done to integrate human ingenuity and the four billion or so years of evolutionary intelligence of the natural world into healthy, decentralized, locally dreams hard won--and hope.


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Sick Planet
Corporate Food and Medicine
Stan Cox
Pluto Press, 2008

Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.

Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.

While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.

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The Story of N
A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of Sustainability
Gorman, Hugh S.
Rutgers University Press, 2013

In The Story of N, Hugh S. Gorman analyzes the notion of sustainability from a fresh perspective—the integration of human activities with the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen—and provides a supportive alternative to studying sustainability through the lens of climate change and the cycling of carbon. It is the first book to examine the social processes by which industrial societies learned to bypass a fundamental ecological limit and, later, began addressing the resulting concerns by establishing limits of their own

            The book is organized into three parts. Part I, “The Knowledge of Nature,” explores the emergence of the nitrogen cycle before humans arrived on the scene and the changes that occurred as stationary agricultural societies took root. Part II, “Learning to Bypass an Ecological Limit,” examines the role of science and market capitalism in accelerating the pace of innovation, eventually allowing humans to bypass the activity of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Part III, “Learning to Establish Human-Defined Limits,” covers the twentieth-century response to the nitrogen-related concerns that emerged as more nitrogenous compounds flowed into the environment. A concluding chapter, “The Challenge of Sustainability,” places the entire story in the context of constructing an ecological economy in which innovations that contribute to sustainable practices are rewarded.

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The Sanitary City
Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present
Martin V. Melosi
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008

Immersed in their on-demand, highly consumptive, and disposable lifestyles, most urban Americans take for granted the technologies that provide them with potable water, remove their trash, and process their wastewater. These vital services, however, are the byproduct of many decades of development by engineers, sanitarians, and civic planners. 

In The Sanitary City, Martin V. Melosi assembles a comprehensive, thoroughly researched and referenced history of sanitary services in urban America. He examines the evolution of water supply, sewage systems, and solid waste disposal during three distinct eras: The Age of Miasmas (pre-1880); The Bacteriological Revolution (1880-1945); and The New Ecology (1945 to present-day). 

Originally published in 2000, this abridged edition includes updated text and bibliographic materials. The Sanitary City is an essential resource for those interested in environmental history, environmental engineering, science and technology, urban studies, and public health.

Winner of:
George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History Urban History Association Prize for the best book in North American Urban History
Abel Wolman Prize from the Public Works Historical Society
Sidney Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology

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Soil Erosion in a Coastal River Basin
A Case Study from the Philippines
Random DuBois
University of Chicago Press, 1990

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The Scars of Project 459
The Environmental Story of the Lake of the Ozarks
Traci Angel
University of Arkansas Press, 2014
The Scars of Project 459 tells the environmental story of the Lake of the Ozarks, built by the Union Electric Company in 1931. At 55,000 acres, the lake was the biggest manmade lake in the United States at the time of its completion, and it remains the biggest in the Midwest, with 1,100 miles of shoreline in four different Missouri counties. Though created to generate hydroelectric power, not for development, the "Magic Dragon," as it is popularly known because of its serpentine shape, has become a major recreational area. Located in some of the most spectacular Ozark scenery, the giant lake today attracts three million visitors annually and has more than 70,000 homes along its shoreline. Traci Angel shows how the popularity of the Lake of the Ozarks has resulted in major present-day problems, including poor water quality, loss of habitat, and increasing concerns about aging waste-management systems for the homes surrounding the lake. Many in the area, especially business owners whose incomes depend on tourism, resist acknowledging these problems. The Scars of Project 459 aims to make public the challenges facing this important resource and ensure that its future is not to be loved to death.
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Stormwater
A Resource for Scientists, Engineers, and Policy Makers
William G. Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
As cities grow and climates change, precipitation increases, and with every great storm—from record-breaking Boston blizzards to floods in Houston—come buckets of stormwater and a deluge of problems. In Stormwater, William G. Wilson brings us the first expansive guide to stormwater science and management in urban environments, where rising runoff threatens both human and environmental health.

As Wilson shows, rivers of runoff flowing from manmade surfaces—such as roads, sidewalks, and industrial sites—carry a glut of sediments and pollutants. Unlike soil, pavement does not filter or biodegrade these contaminants. Oil, pesticides, road salts, metals, automobile chemicals, and bacteria all pour into stormwater systems. Often this runoff discharges directly into waterways, uncontrolled and untreated, damaging valuable ecosystems. Detailing the harm that can be caused by this urban runoff, Wilson also outlines methods of control, from restored watersheds to green roofs and rain gardens, and, in so doing, gives hope in the face of an omnipresent threat. Illustrated throughout, Stormwater will be an essential resource for urban planners and scientists, policy makers, citizen activists, and environmental educators in the stormy decades to come.
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Signs Of Danger
Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat
Peter C. Van Wyck
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Questions the literal burying of the nuclear threat and how it relates to expectations for our future

A rising ocean. A falling building. A toxic river. Species extinguished. A nuclear landscape. In a world so configured, the state of contemporary ecological thought and practice is woefully—and perilously—inadequate. Focusing on the government’s nuclear waste burial program in Carlsbad, New Mexico, Signs of Danger begins the urgent work of finding a new way of thinking about ecological threat in our time.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad began receiving shipments in 1999. With a proposed closing date of 2030, this repository for nuclear waste must be secured with a sign, the purpose of which will be to keep people away for three hundred generations. In the official documents uncovered by Peter van Wyck, we encounter a government bureaucracy approaching the issue of nuclear waste as a technical problem only to find itself confronting a host of intractable philosophical issues concerning language, culture, and history. Signs of Danger plumbs these depths as it shows us how the problem raised in the desert of New Mexico is actually the problem of a culture grappling with ecological threats and with questions of the limits of meaning and representation in the deep future. The reflections at the center of this book—on memory, trauma, disaster, representation, and the virtual—are aimed at defining the uniquely modern status of environmental and nuclear threats. They offer invaluable insights into the interface of where culture ends and nature begins, and how such a juncture is closely linked with questions of risk, concepts of history, and the cultural experience of time.Winner of the 2005 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize of the Canadian Communication Association
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Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities
Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph
Island Press, 2003

The topic of streets and street design is of compelling interest today as public officials, developers, and community activists seek to reshape urban patterns to achieve more sustainable forms of growth and development. Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities traces ideas about street design and layout back to the early industrial era in London suburbs and then on through their institutionalization in housing and transportation planning in the United States. It critiques the situation we are in and suggests some ways out that are less rigidly controlled, more flexible, and responsive to local conditions.

Originally published in 1997, this edition includes a new introduction that addresses topics of current interest including revised standards from the Institute of Transportation Engineers; changes in city plans and development standards following New Urbanist, Smart Growth, and sustainability principles; traffic calming; and ecologically oriented street design.


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The Steam and Diesel Era in Wheeling, West Virginia
Photographs by J. J. Young Jr.
Nicholas Fry
West Virginia University Press, 2016

For nearly seventy years, John J. Young Jr. photographed railroads. With unparalleled scope and span, he documented the impact and beauty of railways in American life from 1936 to 2004.

As a child during the Great Depression, J. J. Young Jr. began to photograph railroads in Wheeling, West Virginia. This book collects over one hundred fifty of those images—some unpublished until now—documenting the railroads of Wheeling and the surrounding area from the 1930s until the 1960s.

The photographs within this book highlight the major railroads of Wheeling: the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Wheeling & Lake Erie, the Pittsburgh & West Virginia, the New York Central, and the industrial and interurban rail lines that crisscrossed the region. These images capture the routine activities of trains that carried passengers and freight to and from the city and its industries, as well as more unusual traffic, such as a circus-advertising car, the General Motors Train of Tomorrow, and the 1947 American Freedom Train.

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