Northern Michigan is undergoing unprecedented changes in land use, climate, resource extraction, and species distributions. For the last hundred years, the University of Michigan Biological Station has monitored these environmental transformations. Stretching 10,000 acres along Burt and Douglas Lakes in the northern Lower Peninsula and 3,200 acres on Sugar Island near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the station has played host to nearly 10,000 students and a steady stream of top scientists in the fields of biology, ecology, geology, archeology, and climatology.

The Changing Environment of Northern Michigan collects essays by some of these scientists, who lead readers on virtual field trips exploring the history of people and science at the station itself, the relations of indigenous people to the land, the geophysical history of the region, characteristics of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, key groups of organisms and their relations to local habitats, and perspectives on critical environmental challenges of today and their effects on the region. Accompanying the chapters are color illustrations and photographs that bring the station's pristine setting to life.

Like the station itself, the book provides a solid background for better appreciating the relationships among living and nonliving parts of northern Michigan, for anyone interested in exploring the region's forests, fields, and wetlands; wading or paddling down its rivers; or swimming or floating across its lakes.

Knute J. Nadelhoffer is Director of the University of Michigan Biological Station and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan.

Alan J. Hogg, Jr., teaches science writing at the University of Michigan as a faculty member of the Sweetland Writing Center. His Ph.D. research explored the effects of ozone and nitrogen oxides on University of Michigan Biological Station forests.

Brian A. Hazlett is Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Michigan.

An engaging, well-illustrated natural and cultural history of the oldest living organism—the bristlecone pine. Since Edmund Schulman discovered in 1958 that individual bristlecones live nearly 5,000 years, the trees have been investigated primarily for the elaborate record their rings contain. The trees have been "read' closely, with major consequences for natural and human history. Historians have read local and global environmental change. Archaeologists have rewritten the history of civilization. Writers have transformed them into figures pertinent to the human dilemmas of time and eternity. A Garden of Bristlecones investigates professional and popular conceptions as a set of narratives drawn from the outside and inside of the trees. It reveals the premises of the investigators, the nature of their inquiry, and the extent of their knowledge, while also revealing the Great Basin bristlecone itself. Illustrations by Valerie Cohen.

This guide is the first comprehensive technical publication providing direction to landowners for sequestering carbon and information for traders and others who will need to verify the sequestration. It will provide invaluable direction to farmers, foresters, land managers, consultants, brokers, investors, regulators, and others interested in creating consistent, credible greenhouse gas offsets as a tradable commodity in the United States.

The guide contains a non-technical section detailing methodologies for scoping of the costs and benefits of a proposed project, quantifying offsets of various sorts under a range of situations and conditions, and verifying and registering the offsets. The technical section provides specific information for quantifying, verifying, and regulating offsets from agricultural and forestry practices.

Visit the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions website for audio from the press conference announcing the book.
Read the press release announcing the book.

In this revised and expanded edition of Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders, author George Constantz, a biologist and naturalist, writes about the beauty and nature of the Appalachian landscape. While the information is scientific in nature, Constantz's accessible descriptions of the adaptation of various organisms to their environment enable the reader to enjoy learning about the Appalachian ecosystem. The book is divided into three sections: "Stage and Theater," "The Players," and "Seasonal Act." Each section sets the scene and describes the events occurring in nature. "Stage and Theatre" is comprised of chapters that describe the origins of the Appalachia region. "The Players" is an interesting and in-depth look into the ecology of animals, such as the mating rituals of different species, and the evolutionary explanation for the adaptation of Appalachian wildlife. The last section, "Seasonal Act," makes note of the changes in Appalachian weather each season and its effect on the inhabitants.

In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious “homelands” under apartheid.

In the late nineteenth century, South Africa’s Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the area beyond the Kei River, known as the Transkei, and began transforming the region into a labor reserve. It simultaneously restructured popular access to local forests, reserving those resources for the benefit of the white settler economy. This placed new constraints on local Africans in accessing resources for agriculture, livestock management, hunting, building materials, fuel, medicine, and ritual practices.

Drawing from a diverse array of oral and written sources, Tropp reveals how bargaining over resources—between and among colonial officials, chiefs and headmen, and local African men and women—was interwoven with major changes in local political authority, gendered economic relations, and cultural practices as well as with intense struggles over the very meaning and scope of colonial rule itself.

Natures of Colonial Change sheds new light on the colonial era in the Transkei by looking at significant yet neglected dimensions of this history: how both “colonizing” and “colonized” groups negotiated environmental access and how such negotiations helped shape the broader making and meaning of life in the new colonial order.

• More than 50 color photos
   
• Learn how to estimate the age of a tree
   
• See the reptiles, birds, and mammals that make their home in ponderosa pine forests
   
• Much more!

Kosek traces the histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation in northern New Mexico, where Hispano residents have forged passionate attachments to place. He describes how their sentiments of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and federal management programs that remade forest landscapes as exclusionary sites of national and racial purity. Fusing fine-grained ethnography with insights gleaned from cultural studies and science studies, Kosek shows how the nationally beloved Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos in the region, while Los Alamos National Laboratory, at once revered and reviled, remade regional ecologies and economies. Understories offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations between nature, justice, and identity.

Wars in the Woods examines the conflicts that have developed over the preservation of forests in America, and how government agencies and advocacy groups have influenced the management of forests and their resources for more than a century. Samuel Hays provides an astute analysis of manipulations of conservation law that have touched off a battle between what he terms “ecological forestry” and “commodity forestry.” Hays also reveals the pervading influence of the wood products industry, and the training of U.S. Forest Service to value tree species marketable as wood products, as the primary forces behind forestry policy since the Forest Management Act of 1897. 

Wars in the Woods gives a comprehensive account of the many grassroots and scientific organizations that have emerged since then to combat the lumber industry and other special interest groups and work to promote legislation to protect forests, parks, and wildlife habitats. It also offers a review of current forestry practices, citing the recent Federal easing of protections as a challenge to the progress made in the last third of the twentieth century.

Hays describes an increased focus on ecological forestry in areas such as biodiversity, wildlife habitat, structural diversity, soil conservation, watershed management, native forests, and old growth. He provides a valuable framework for the critical assessment of forest management policies and the future study and protection of forest resources.

Wild Forests presents a coherent review of the scientific and policy issues surrounding biological diversity in the context of contemporary public forest management. The authors examine past and current practices of forest management and provide a comprehensive overview of known and suspected threats to diversity.

In addition to discussing general ecological principles, the authors evaluate specific approaches to forest management that have been proposed to ameliorate diversity losses. They present one such policy -- the Dominant Use Zoning Model incorporating an integrated network of "Diversity Maintenance Areas" -- and describe their attempts to persuade the U.S. Forest Service to adopt such a policy in Wisconsin.

Drawing on experience in the field, in negotiations, and in court, the authors analyze the ways in which federal agencies are coping with the mandates of conservation biology and suggest reforms that could better address these important issues. Throughout, they argue that wild or unengineered conditions are those that are most likely to foster a return to the species richness that we once enjoyed.