front cover of The Double-Crested Cormorant
The Double-Crested Cormorant
Symbol of Ecological Conflict
Dennis Wild
University of Michigan Press, 2012

This is the story of the survival, recovery, astonishing success, and controversial status of the double-crested cormorant. After surviving near extinction driven by DDT and other contaminants from the 1940s through the early 1970s, the cormorant has made an unprecedented comeback from mere dozens to a population in the millions, bringing the bird again into direct conflict with humans. Hated for its colonial nesting behavior; the changes it brings to landscapes;  and especially its competition with commercial and sports fishers, fisheries, and fish farmers throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi Delta regions, the cormorant continues to be persecuted  by various means, including the shotgun.

In The Double-Crested Cormorant, Dennis Wild brings together the biological, social, legal, and international aspects of the cormorant's world to give a complete and balanced view of one of the Great Lakes' and perhaps North America's most misunderstood species. In addition to taking a detailed look at the complex natural history of the cormorant, the book explores the implications of congressional acts and international treaties, the workings and philosophies of state and federal wildlife agencies, the unrelenting efforts of aquaculture and fishing interests to "cull" cormorant numbers to "acceptable" levels, and the reactions and visions of conservation groups. Wild examines both popular preconceptions about cormorants (what kinds of fish they eat and how much) and the effectiveness of ongoing efforts to control the cormorant population. Finally, the book delves into the question of climate and terrain changes, their consequences for cormorants, the new territories to which the birds must adapt, and the conflicts this species is likely to face going forward.

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front cover of La Frontera
La Frontera
Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory
Thomas Miller Klubock
Duke University Press, 2014
In La Frontera, Thomas Miller Klubock offers a pioneering social and environmental history of southern Chile, exploring the origins of today’s forestry "miracle" in Chile. Although Chile's forestry boom is often attributed to the free-market policies of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Frontera shows that forestry development began in the early twentieth century when Chilean governments turned to forestry science and plantations of the North American Monterey pine to establish their governance of the frontier's natural and social worlds. Klubock demonstrates that modern conservationist policies and scientific forestry drove the enclosure of frontier commons occupied by indigenous and non-indigenous peasants who were defined as a threat to both native forests and tree plantations. La Frontera narrates the century-long struggles among peasants, Mapuche indigenous communities, large landowners, and the state over access to forest commons in the frontier territory. It traces the shifting social meanings of environmentalism by showing how, during the 1990s, rural laborers and Mapuches, once vilified by conservationists and foresters, drew on the language of modern environmentalism to critique the social dislocations produced by Chile's much vaunted neoliberal economic model, linking a more just social order to the biodiversity of native forests.
 
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