front cover of Ice, Fire, and Nutcrackers
Ice, Fire, and Nutcrackers
A Rocky Mountain Ecology
George Constantz
University of Utah Press, 2014
Why do quaking aspens grow in prominent clumps rather than randomly scattered across the landscape? Why and how does a rufous hummingbird drop its metabolism to one-hundredth of its normal rate? Why do bull elk grow those enormous antlers? Using his experience as a biologist and ecologist, George Constantz illuminates these remarkable slices of mountain life in plain but engaging language. Whether it sketches conflict or cooperation, surprise or familiarity, each story resolves when interpreted through the theory of evolution by natural selection.
 
These provocative accounts of birds, insects, rodents, predators, trees, and flowers are sure to stir the reader’s curiosity. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a rattlesnake’s ability to hunt in total darkness by detecting the infrared radiation emitted by a mouse? Or how white-tailed ptarmigan thrive in their high, treeless alpine environments -- even through the winter? The narratives, often brought home with a counterintuitive twist, invite readers to make new connections and broaden perspectives of a favorite outdoor place. 
[more]

front cover of Immersion
Immersion
The Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels
Abbie Gascho Landis
Island Press, 2017
"This is nature writing at its best." —E.O. Wilson

"Eloquent treatise...Landis's book is as much call to action as paean to mesmerizing molluscs." —Nature

"Rich, accurate, and moving." —New Scientist

"A lyrical love letter to the imperiled freshwater mussel." —Science

Abbie Gascho Landis first fell for freshwater mussels while submerged in an Alabama creek, her pregnant belly squeezed into a wetsuit. After an hour of fruitless scanning, a mussel materialized from the rocks—a little spectaclecase, herself pregnant, filtering the river water through a delicate body while her gills bulged with offspring. In that moment of connection, Landis became a mussel groupie, obsessed with learning more about the creatures’ hidden lives. She isn’t the only fanatic; the shy mollusks, so vital to the health of rivers around the world, have a way of inspiring unusual devotion.

In Immersion, Landis brings readers to a hotbed of mussel diversity, the American Southeast, to seek mussels where they eat, procreate, and, too often, perish. Accompanied often by her husband, a mussel scientist, and her young children, she learned to see mussels on the creekbed, to tell a spectaclecase from a pigtoe, and to worry what vanishing mussels—70 percent of North American species are imperiled—will mean for humans and wildlife alike. In Immersion, Landis shares this journey, traveling from perilous river surveys to dry streambeds and into laboratories where endangered mussels are raised one precious life at a time.

Mussels have much to teach us about the health of our watersheds if we step into the creek and take a closer look at their lives. In the tradition of writers like Terry Tempest Williams and Sy Montgomery, Landis gracefully chronicles these untold stories with a veterinarian’s careful eye and the curiosity of a naturalist. In turns joyful and sobering, Immersion is an invitation to see rivers from a mussel’s perspective, a celebration of the wild lives visible to those who learn to search.
[more]

front cover of Implementing the Endangered Species Act on the Platte Basin Water Commons
Implementing the Endangered Species Act on the Platte Basin Water Commons
David M. Freeman
University Press of Colorado, 2010
Water users of the Platte River Basin have long struggled to share this scarce commodity in the arid high plains, ultimately organizing collectively owned and managed water systems, allocating water along extensive stream systems, and integrating newer groundwater with existing surface-water uses. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act brought a new challenge: incorporating the habitat needs of four species-the whooping crane, piping plover, least tern, and pallid sturgeon-into its water-management agenda.

Implementing the Endangered Species Act on the Platte Basin Water Commons tells of the negotiations among the U.S. Department of the Interior, the environmental community, and the states of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska that took place from the mid-1970s to 2006. Ambitious talks among rival water users, environmentalists, state authorities, and the Department of the Interior finally resulted in the Platte River Habitat Recovery Program.

Documenting how organizational interests found remedies within the conditions set by the Endangered Species Act, describing how these interests addressed habitat restoration, and advancing sociological propositions under which water providers transcended self-interest and produced an agreement benefiting the environment, this book details the messy process that took place over more than thirty years. Presenting important implications for the future of water management in arid and semi-arid environments, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in water management, as well as academics interested in the social organization of common property.
[more]

front cover of Impressions of the Big Thicket
Impressions of the Big Thicket
Michael Frary
University of Texas Press, 1973

Before the establishment of the Big Thicket Nature Preserve, the Big Thicket of Texas became a symbol of nature's last stand against encroaching civilization. Here, in a mingling of ecological zones, come together plants, animals, and birds—many of them rare—the flora and fauna of north and south, east and west. Northern maples and beeches stand not too great a distance from cypresses and Southern magnolias. American hollies grow large and orchids bloom among Northern ferns. Mesquite and tumbleweed, plants of the Western desert, survive where the annual rainfall averages sixty inches. On a major flyway, the Big Thicket is a stopping place for many birds in passage as well as home to a wide variety. Beavers build their dams there, and an occasional coyote yips in the night.

Because of its great beauty and rich natural resources, use of the Big Thicket was the object of a forty-year struggle involving financiers, politicians, conservationists, and countless Thicket lovers. Each group viewed the Thicket from a different perspective and foresaw its future in different terms.

This book records the impressions of two Thicket lovers. Michael Frary's paintings and drawings of woods and water, of birds in flight and strange plants growing close to the moist earth are pictures of a place, a time, a mood caught today—and not the same if left until tomorrow. The qualities of gentleness and violence are constant, but often hidden—there to be brought out by human need or human greed.

William Owens writes of the people who have lived their lives in the Big Thicket, who have stirred its stillness with whoop and holler across the waters, who have taken in its stillness and explosive beauty until they themselves are made up of gentleness and violence.

Together the impressions show what the Big Thicket was and is. What it will be—that is the chief concern of the book.

[more]

front cover of In Earshot of Water
In Earshot of Water
Notes from the Columbia Plateau
Paul Lindholdt
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Whether the subject is the plants that grow there, the animals that live there, the rivers that run there, or the people he has known there, Paul Lindholdt’s In Earshot of Water illuminates the Pacific Northwest in vivid detail. Lindholdt writes with the precision of a naturalist, the critical eye of an ecologist, the affection of an apologist, and the self-revelation and self-awareness of a personal essayist in the manner of Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Derrick Jensen, John McPhee, Robert Michael Pyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore.
              Exploring both the literal and literary sense of place, with particular emphasis on environmental issues and politics in the far Northwest, Lindholdt weds passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark, the log of Captain James Cook, the novelized memoir of Theodore Winthrop, and Bureau of Reclamation records growing from the paintings that the agency commissioned to publicize its dams in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell ecological and personal histories of the region he knows and loves.
 In Lindholdt’s beautiful prose, America’s environmental legacies—those inherited from his blood relatives as well as those from the influences of mass culture—and illuminations of  the hazards of neglecting nature’s warning signs blur and merge and reemerge in new forms. Themes of fathers and sons layer the book, as well—the narrator as father and as son—interwoven with a call to responsible social activism with appeals to reason and emotion. Like water itself, In Earshot of Water cascades across boundaries and blends genres, at once learned and literary.
[more]

front cover of In Search of Swampland
In Search of Swampland
A Wetland Sourcebook and Field Guide
Ralph W. Tiner
Rutgers University Press, 2005
In the revised and expanded edition of this classic guide, Ralph W. Tiner introduces readers to the ecology and beauty of the wetlands in eastern North America. Topics include their formation and functions, wetland types, causes of loss and degradation, and recent efforts to protect them. The discussion now includes many examples from the Great Lakes region and information on best management practices for working in and around wetlands including vernal pools. A new chapter on classification and assessment further clarifies how the unique characteristics of these important natural resources serve specific functions.In Search of Swampland alsoprovides a field guide to wetland plants, soils, and animals. It includes detailed descriptions and illustrations—many of which are new to this edition—of more than 300 plants and 200 animals. Clear identification keys, information on how to distinguish typical hydric or “wet” soils from dryland soils, and general procedures for identifying wetlands in the field make this book an indispensable resource for readers with little or no training in wetland science, as well as for the scientist or amateur naturalist.
[more]

front cover of In the Spirit of Wetlands
In the Spirit of Wetlands
Reviving Habitat in the Illinois River Watershed
Text by Clare Howard. Photographs by David Zalaznik
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Individuals from all walks of life have devoted their time, energy, and money to restoring the state's lost wetlands. Clare Howard and David Zalaznik take readers into the marshes, bogs, waterways, and swamps brought back to life by these wetland pioneers. Howard’s storytelling introduces grassroots conservators dedicated to learning through trial and error, persistence, and listening to the lessons taught by wetlands. They undertake hard work inspired by ever-increasing floods and nutrient runoff, and they reconnect the Earth’s natural rhythms. Zalaznik's stunning black and white photos illuminate changes in the land and the people themselves. Seeds sprout after lying dormant for one hundred years. Water winds through ancient channels. Animals and native plants return. As the forgiving spirit of a wetland emerges, it nurtures a renewed landscape that alters our view of the environment and the planet.

An inspiring document of passion and advocacy, In the Spirit of Wetlands reveals the transformative power of restoration.

[more]

front cover of Innocents on the Ice
Innocents on the Ice
A Memoir of Antarctic Exploration, 1957
John C. Behrendt
University Press of Colorado, 1998

"Adventures in the Antarctic only happen when someone makes a mistake.”
—From the Preface

In 1956, John C. Behrendt had just earned his master’s degree in geophysics and obtained a position as an assistant seismologist in the International Geophysical Year glaciological program. He sailed from Davisville, Rhode Island to spend eighteen months in Antarctica with the IGY expedition as part of a U.S. Navy-supported scientific expedition to establish Ellsworth Station on the Filchner Ice Shelf. Innocents on the Ice is a memoir based on Behrendt’s handwritten journals, looking back on his daily entries describing his life and activities on the most isolated of the seven U.S. Antarctic stations.
 
Nine civilians and thirty Navy men lived beneath the snow together, and intense personal conflicts arose during the dark Antarctic winter of 1957. Little outside contact was available to ease the tension, with no mail delivery and only occasional radio contact with families back home. The author describes the emotional stress of the living situation, along with details of his parties’ explorations of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf system during the summers of 1957 and 1958. Along the hazardous 1,300-mile traverse in two Sno-Cats, the field party measured ice thickness and snow accumulation as part of an international effort to determine the balance of the Antarctic ice sheet, and made the first geological observations of the spectacular Dufek Massif in the then-unexplored Pensacola Mountains. Behrendt also draws upon his forty years of continual participation in Antarctic research to explain the changes in scientific activities and environmental awareness in Antarctica today.
 
Including photos, maps, and a glossary identifying various forms of ice, Innocents on the Ice is a fascinating combination of the diary of a young graduate student and the reflections of the accomplished scientist he became. 
[more]

front cover of Instream Flow Protection
Instream Flow Protection
Seeking A Balance In Western Water Use
David M. Gillilan and Thomas C. Brown
Island Press, 1997

Instream Flow Protection is a comprehensive overview of Western water use and the issues that surround it. The authors explain instream flow and its historical, political, and legal context; describe current instream flow laws and policies; and present methods of protecting instream flow. They provide numerous examples to illustrate their discussions, with case studies of major river systems including the Bitterroot, Clark's Fork, Colorado, Columbia, Mimbres, Mono Lake, Platte, Snake, and Wind.

Policymakers, land and water managers at local, state, and federal levels, attorneys, students and researchers of water issues, and anyone concerned with instream flow protection will find the book enormously valuable.

[more]

front cover of Iowa's Changing Wildlife
Iowa's Changing Wildlife
Three Decades of Gain and Loss
James J. Dinsmore
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Much has changed with Iowa’s wildlife in the years 1990 to 2020. Some species such as Canada goose, wild turkey, and white-tailed deer that once were rare in Iowa are now common, and others like sandhill crane, river otter, and trumpeter swan are becoming increasingly abundant. Iowa’s Changing Wildlife provides an up-to-date, scientifically based summary of changes in the distribution, status, conservation needs, and future prospects of about sixty species of Iowa’s birds and mammals whose populations have increased or decreased in the past three decades. Readers will learn more about familiar species, become acquainted with the status of less familiar species, and find out how many of the species around them have fared during this era of transformation.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter