In Wayne Aspinall and the Shaping of the American West, Steven C. Schulte details a political career that encompassed some of the most crucial years in the development of the twentieth-century West. As chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee from 1959 to 1973, Aspinall shaped the nation's reclamation, land, wilderness, and natural resource policies. His crusty and dtermined personality was at the enter of some of the key environmental battles of the twentieth century, including the Echo Park Dam fight, the struggle for the Wilderness Act, and the long controversy over the Central Arizona Project.

As long as humans have existed, they’ve worked and competed with plants to shape their surroundings. As cities developed and expanded, their diverse spaces were covered with and colored by weeds. In Weeds, Zachary J. S. Falck presents a comprehensive history of “happenstance plants” in American urban environments. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, he examines the proliferation, perception, and treatment of weeds in metropolitan centers from Boston to Los Angeles.
      In dynamic city ecosystems, population movements and economic cycles establish and transform habitats where vegetation continuously changes. Americans came to associate weeds with infectious diseases and allergies, illegal dumping, vagrants, drug dealers, and decreased property values. Local governments and citizens’ groups attempted to eliminate unwanted plants to better their urban environments and improve the health and safety of inhabitants. Over time, a growing understanding of the natural environment made “happenstance plants” more tolerable and even desirable.
      In the twenty-first century, scientists have warned that the effects of global warming and the heat-trapping properties of cities are producing more robust strains of weeds. Falck shows that nature continues to flourish where humans have struggled: in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in the abandoned homes of the California housing bust, and alongside crumbling infrastructure. Weeds are here to stay.

Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing is a powerful collection of mostly unpublished essays and poetry by both prominent American environmental writers and exciting new voices. The poetry and essays by more than fifty contributors offer the reader glimpses into places as diverse as a forest in West Africa, the moors of Ireland, the canyons of the Sonoran desert mountains, and the fields of New England, and they reflect the varied perspectives of field biologists, hunters, farmers, environmental educators, wilderness guides, academics, writers, and artists.

The collection is an intimate portrait of the natural world drawn through the wisdom, ecological consciousness, and open hearts of these exceptional contributors. The Wildbranch Writing Workshop, cosponsored by Orion magazine and Sterling College, has encouraged thoughtful natural history, outdoor, and environmental writing for more than twenty years. The Wildbranch faculty has included its founder E. Anne Proulx, the essayists Edward Hoagland, Janisse Ray, and Scott Russell Sanders, the poet Alison Hawthorne Deming, and many other notable authors. Many have work included in the anthology.

Winner of the New Mexico Book Association's Southwest Book Design & Production Awards for Excellence in the category Trade Books: Non-illustrated. 

"Our country is lucky to have Jerry Dennis. A conservationist with the soul of a poet whose beat is Wild Michigan, Dennis is a kindred spirit of Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson. The Windward Shore---his newest effort---is a beautifully written and elegiac memoir of outdoor discovery. Highly recommended!"
---Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
 
"Come for a journey; stay for an awakening. Jerry Dennis loves the Great Lakes, the swell of every wave, the curve of every rock. He wants you to love them too before our collective trashing of them wipes out all traces of their original character. Through his eyes, you will treasure the hidden secrets that reveal themselves only to those who linger and long. Elegant and sad at the same time, The Windward Shore is a love song for the Great Lakes and a gentle call to action to save them."
---Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

"In prose as clear as the lines in a Dürer etching, Jerry Dennis maps his home ground, which ranges outward from the back door of his farmhouse to encompass the region of vast inland seas at the heart of our continent. Along the way, inspired by the company of water in all its guises---ice, snow, frost, clouds, rain, shore-lapping waves---he meditates on the ancient questions about mind and matter, time and attention, wildness and wonder. As in the best American nature writing---a tradition that Dennis knows well---here the place and the explorer come together in brilliant conversation."
---Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto

If you have been enchanted by Jerry Dennis’s earlier work on sailing the Great Lakes, canoeing, angling, and the natural wonders of water and sky—or you have not yet been lucky enough to enjoy his engaging prose—you will want to immerse yourself in his powerful and insightful new book on winter in Great Lakes country.

Grounded by a knee injury, Dennis learns to live at a slower pace while staying in houses ranging from a log cabin on Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Peninsula to a $20 million mansion on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. While walking on beaches and exploring nearby woods and villages, he muses on the nature of time, weather, waves, agates, books, words for snow and ice, our complex relationship with nature, and much more.

From the introduction: “I wanted to present a true picture of a complex region, part of my continuing project to learn at least one place on earth reasonably well, and trusted that it would appear gradually and accumulatively—and not as a conventional portrait, but as a mosaic that included the sounds and scents and textures of the place and some of the plants, animals, and its inhabitants. Bolstered by the notion that a book is a journey that author and reader walk together, I would search for promising trails and follow them as far as my reconstructed knee would allow.”